By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Security forces killed at least eight more militants on Saturday in the second consecutive day of an ongoing offensive in the Darra Adamkhel area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, bringing the operation’s death toll to 13, security sources told the Pakistani newspaper Dawn.
Among the dead were two Afghan nationals — identified as Qari Zeenatullah and Qari Lawangin — who belonged to the Tariq Gidar group, a banned militant organization affiliated with the proscribed Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan. The operation began Friday, when five militants were killed, after security forces received intelligence reports on the presence of an armed group in the area.
The remaining dead were identified by sources as Daud, from the Zorh Kalay locality, and a fighter named Hamza. The identities of four other militants killed Saturday were still being ascertained, sources said. Security forces have cordoned off the surrounding terrain, and the operation was described as ongoing, with authorities vowing to press the offensive until, as sources put it, “the last terrorist was eliminated.”
Darra Adamkhel occupies a strategically fraught stretch of territory south of Peshawar, bordering the Kohat and Peshawar districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Long a corridor for militant movement, the area has endured repeated terrorist attacks on security forces and military convoys, and has been the site of multiple military operations over the years.
The Tariq Gidar group takes its name from Tariq Afridi, a militant commander from Darra Adamkhel who was killed in 2012 — reportedly by members of his own family — in the neighboring Khyber district. The group has remained active in the region in the years since, carrying out attacks and maintaining ties to the broader TTP network, which Pakistan formally designated as a terrorist organization.
Saturday’s operation unfolds against a backdrop of sharply deteriorating security conditions across Pakistan’s northwest. Militant violence has surged since the Afghan Taliban recaptured Kabul in August 2021, an event that emboldened affiliated groups — above all the TTP — and provided them with renewed operational depth across the border.
Pakistan has repeatedly pressed the Taliban administration in Kabul to dismantle militant sanctuaries on Afghan soil, particularly those sheltering TTP fighters who have carried out attacks inside Pakistan. Those appeals, Pakistani officials say, have gone largely unheeded.
The Darra Adamkhel offensive is the latest in a string of recent security operations across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Earlier this month, security forces killed five militants in two separate engagements in the districts of Tank and Dera Ismail Khan. In early April, eight fighters were killed near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in North Waziristan — another district that has served for decades as a focal point of the country’s counterinsurgency struggle.
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