Ten police officers and 18 militants are dead after gunmen ambushed a police party returning from an anti-illegal-mining operation in Kohat district, northwestern Pakistan, on Wednesday. Twelve more officers were wounded. That's the toll in a single afternoon, handed down in an official police statement from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The officers were coming back from a mine in the Gumbat area when armed men opened fire. A senior administrative official in Kohat told AFP that militants set two police vehicles on fire. Two other police vehicles and one private vehicle were missing. A spokesman for a local emergency service described a "firing incident involving police personnel," adding that rescue workers were treating a dozen wounded officers.
Who Has the Power
Hours after the shooting stopped, the Pakistani Taliban issued a statement claiming it. The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) said it was responsible for a series of attacks across the country, including the one on the police convoy in Gumbat. Meanwhile, another senior administrative official in the Orakzai area of Kohat said 10 TTP militants were killed in a separate operation in the district, and a large quantity of weapons was recovered.
Two armed organizations, both with chains of command, both claiming the right to the barrel of a gun, traded bodies over a gold mine. Eighteen militants and ten officers. The statements arrived from police headquarters and from the TTP. The people who died on that road didn't write either one.
Who Gets Crushed
The fighting is not confined to one hillside. Security forces say violence in the border province emanates from Afghanistan, an accusation the Taliban government in Kabul rejects. Pakistan has seen a surge in violence in recent years, much of it blamed on the TTP, a group separate from but closely allied with the Afghan Taliban, who returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021, five years ago.
Relations between the two states soured after deadly border clashes in October last year, which led to near-total closure of the border. Clashes subsided after mediation, then flared again in February, when Pakistan declared "an open war" on its neighbour, about nine months ago. Islamabad accuses Kabul of letting militants operate from its soil. Kabul denies it. And the people in between? Hundreds of civilians have been killed in fighting between the two countries since October last year, according to figures from the United Nations mission in Afghanistan.
Earlier this month, militants in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa killed two police officers assigned to protect a polio vaccination team travelling near the Afghan border. Officers guarding health workers. That's what the war looks like from the ground.
What They're Calling "Order"
Last month, the province was placed under emergency rule. Authorities said the move came in reaction to the failure by the provincial government to act against militancy. The emergency measures sidelined the last remaining bastion of power for jailed former prime minister Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party. They also set off a province-wide crackdown on Khan's supporters, with hundreds of detentions.
Read that sequence plainly. A provincial government fails to stop militancy, so the center suspends it, jails hundreds of a rival party's supporters, and the attacks on police keep coming anyway. Emergency rule arrived. The ambush arrived too. A mining operation is one more place where armed institutions fight over who controls what comes out of the ground, while the officers sent in and the civilians nearby absorb the bullets.
No one in this story's official statements, from police, administrators or the TTP, speaks for the 10 officers who didn't make it home or the 12 who are bleeding in a hospital ward.
- pakistan
- khyber pakhtunkhwa
- tehreek-e-taliban pakistan
- illegal gold mining
- kohat
- police attack
- militancy
- afghanistan