By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The military said on Thursday that security forces had killed 30 militants in a series of intelligence-led operations across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province this week, the latest in an escalating campaign against a resurgent Pakistani Taliban that has plunged the country’s border regions into renewed violence.
The military’s media wing, the Inter-Services Public Relations, said 23 of the militants, whom it described as belonging to “Fitna al Khawarij,” the state’s preferred term for the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, were killed in two separate operations in Kurram district.
“During the conduct of operation, own troops effectively engaged the khawarij location and after an intense fire exchange, 12 khawarij were sent to hell,” the ISPR statement said of the first Kurram operation. It added that forces, “capitalising on intelligence with respect to the presence of another group of khawarij” in the same general area, killed 11 more in a follow-up operation.
Seven other militants were killed in three earlier operations conducted on Nov. 18 and 19 in Mohmand, Lakki Marwat and Tank districts, the military said. Four were killed in Mohmand, two in Lakki Marwat and one in Tank. “Sanitisation operations are being conducted to eliminate any other Indian sponsored kharji found in the area,” the statement said, vowing that the “relentless counter-terrorism campaign under vision ‘Azm-i-Istehkam’ … will continue at full pace to wipe out the menace of foreign sponsored and supported terrorism from the country.”
The operations come amid a sharp increase in terrorist attacks across Pakistan, particularly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, since the Pakistani Taliban formally ended a ceasefire with the government in November 2022.
A police report cited by officials recorded more than 600 terror incidents in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa alone during the first eight months of 2025, in which at least 79 police officers and 138 civilians were killed.
The violence has not been confined to the border areas. On Nov. 11, a suicide bombing in Islamabad killed 12 people and wounded 36 others, many of them lawyers and petitioners outside a district court.
Pakistan has repeatedly accused the Afghan Taliban authorities of providing sanctuary to TTP leaders and fighters, a charge Kabul denies. Recent Qatari- and Turkish-mediated talks on regional peace collapsed, with Pakistani officials describing the Afghan side’s arguments as “illogical” and “far from reality.”
Islamabad’s position received rare international backing this week when the chair of the United Nations Security Council’s Daesh and Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee told the council that the TTP remained “a serious threat” operating from Afghan soil.
Denmark’s deputy permanent representative, Sandra Jensen Landi, who heads the committee, said in a report to the Security Council that the group was receiving “constant logistical and substantial support” from Afghanistan’s de facto authorities.
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