By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Security forces killed 11 militants in a series of intelligence-based raids across the country’s volatile northwest and southwest on Thursday, the government said, the latest in a string of operations that officials describe as central to an intensifying campaign against insurgent groups along the Afghan border.
State-run Radio Pakistan, citing security sources, reported that the operations unfolded in three separate locations: two militants were killed in Bannu district, in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province; five were killed in the Ladha area of South Waziristan, also in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; and four were killed in the Sasool area of Khuzdar district, in southwestern Balochistan province. Officials said the Balochistan operation relied on a quadcopter drone to help identify and strike the militants. Security forces recovered weapons and ammunition at the scenes, according to the broadcaster.
The government attributed the militants in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to what it calls Fitna al Khawarij, the state’s designation for the outlawed Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, and those in Balochistan to Fitna al Hindustan, a label Pakistani officials use for separatist groups they say receive support from India. Islamabad has increasingly folded language accusing New Delhi of sponsoring unrest in Balochistan into its official statements on counterterrorism operations, a shift that has hardened over the past two years.
President Asif Ali Zardari commended the operations in a statement issued by the Presidency, framing the campaign as a matter of national survival.
“The elimination of terrorist elements active with foreign support is essential for national security and lasting peace,” Zardari said, according to the statement. He added that the country would not relent until Pakistan was “rid of the scourge of terrorism,” and said the nation took pride in the professionalism of its security and law enforcement agencies.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif also weighed in, though his office, in a separate statement, referenced only the Bannu operation and made no mention of the Balochistan raid. “The entire nation stands with the security forces in the war against terrorism,” Sharif said, according to his office. “We are determined to completely eliminate all forms of terrorism from the country.”
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi, in a statement issued by his ministry, credited the security forces with disrupting the militants before they could act. He said timely intelligence work had allowed forces to foil what he called the “nefarious designs” of the groups involved, and said the country stood united behind the men carrying out the operations.
The Bannu, South Waziristan, and Khuzdar raids add to a mounting tally of such operations this summer. On Aug. 21, the military’s media affairs wing reported that security forces had killed 49 militants in a separate round of intelligence-based operations across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan — one of several large-scale actions the military has publicised in recent weeks as it seeks to demonstrate battlefield gains against an insurgency that shows few signs of receding.
That insurgency has, by most measures, been getting worse. The Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies, an Islamabad-based think tank that tracks militant violence, found that July was the deadliest month of 2026, with 205 people killed nationwide, including 112 members of the security forces. The institute’s data show the toll rising most sharply in Balochistan, where deaths climbed 241 percent, from 109 in June to 372 in July. Mainland Khyber Pakhtunkhwa saw a similar, if less dramatic, surge, with deaths rising 105 percent, from 75 in June to 154 in July.
The violence has tracked closely with the deterioration of relations between Islamabad and the Taliban government in Kabul. Pakistani officials have accused Afghanistan of allowing militant groups, chiefly the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, to operate from havens on Afghan soil. The dispute has spilt into open conflict at times, with the two countries trading deadly border clashes in recent months that have disrupted trade routes and the movement of people across the frontier.
Pakistani forces carry out thousands of intelligence-based operations each year in the border regions, a tempo that reflects both the scale of the threat and the government’s reliance on such raids as its primary public messaging tool in the counterinsurgency fight.
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