By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: The United States will restore full consular operations at its consulates in Karachi and Lahore on July 20, ending a four-month suspension that began after anti-American demonstrations turned deadly outside the Karachi mission in the opening days of the war between Israel, the United States, and Iran.
The State Department confirmed the reopening Wednesday in a statement from the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, which said both posts would resume processing visa applications and handling the needs of American citizens living in or traveling through Pakistan. The embassy also posted a brief video message on social media announcing the move, telling visa applicants to use the embassy’s official website and warning them, as it has in the past, that they do not need to pay agents or middlemen to secure appointments.
The announcement closes out one of the more turbulent chapters in recent U.S.-Pakistan relations, one that began in February when American and Israeli strikes killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and set off a wave of anti-American demonstrations across the Muslim world. In Pakistan, those protests turned lethal within days.
On March 1, protesters clashed with police near the Karachi consulate on Mai Kolachi Road, eventually breaching the compound’s outer perimeter. Officers deployed tear gas and baton charges in an attempt to hold the crowd back, and U.S. Marine Security Guards posted at the consulate opened fire. Pakistani officials said at least 10 protesters were killed in the chaos. Two days of unrest in Islamabad brought further bloodshed, with at least two people killed and more than 30 injured in clashes near the capital’s Diplomatic Enclave.
The violence prompted an immediate scaling-back of the American presence. On March 4, the State Department ordered non-emergency personnel and their families out of the consulates in Karachi and Lahore, part of a broader evacuation that also touched U.S. missions in Saudi Arabia, Cyprus, and Oman as the region braced for Iranian retaliation. Routine consular services — the visa interviews, passport renewals, and notarizations that keep a diplomatic post running day to day — stopped almost entirely.
The suspension left thousands of Pakistani visa applicants and American citizens in the country without a clear path to the services they needed, forcing many to wait or travel to Islamabad for anything beyond the most urgent consular matters. It also arrived at an already difficult moment for the U.S. diplomatic footprint in Pakistan. In May, the State Department announced it would permanently close its consulate in Peshawar, a post that had long served as the closest American diplomatic presence to the Afghan border and a hub for citizens and travelers in the country’s northwest. Officials said the closure, one of several moves to shrink the department’s overseas footprint under the Trump administration, was in motion well before the Iran conflict and was not a response to the unrest. Consular responsibilities for that region shifted instead to the embassy in Islamabad, roughly 114 miles away, and to the remaining posts in Karachi and Lahore.
Wednesday’s announcement did not spell out what had changed on the security front to allow the consulates to reopen, nor did it address the status of the personnel who were evacuated in March. The embassy said only that the Lahore consulate would resume citizen services, while Karachi would handle both citizen services and non-immigrant visa processing, giving applicants across Punjab and Sindh provinces access once again to consular help closer to home rather than a trip to the capital.
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