RAWALPINDI: Pakistan’s military said on Sunday that 21 terrorists were killed in a series of engagements across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa between 3 and 5 September, in what security officials described as one of the more concentrated stretches of border fighting in recent weeks.
According to an official statement issued by the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the men killed belonged to what the state designates Fitna al-Khawarij — the official term used in Pakistan for the proscribed Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The military’s media wing described the group as Indian-sponsored, an allegation New Delhi has consistently rejected.
The largest share of the casualties came as a follow-up to an earlier encounter. ISPR said that after a successful engagement on the night of 31 August–1 September along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in North Waziristan District, security forces killed ten more militants who had remained holed up in the same area. That brought the total number of would-be infiltrators neutralised in that single sector to 25, the statement said.
In a separate incident in North Waziristan, troops detected the movement of another group along the border. ISPR said own troops engaged the group and seven militants were killed in what the statement called a precise and skilful engagement.
A further four militants were killed in two separate encounters in Kohat and Dera Ismail Khan districts during joint operations conducted with law enforcement agencies. Weapons and ammunition were recovered from the site of the engagements, the statement added.
The military said sanitisation operations are continuing in the affected areas to clear any remaining fighters. ISPR reiterated that the counter-terrorism campaign is being prosecuted under the national vision Azm-e-Istehkam, approved by the Federal Apex Committee on the National Action Plan, and said the effort would continue “at full pace” until foreign-sponsored terrorism is eliminated from the country.
“The Security Forces of Pakistan remain resolute and unwavering in their commitment to defend the nation’s frontiers,” the statement said.
A significant portion of the ISPR statement was directed not at the militants but at the government in Kabul. The repeated incidents along the border, the military said, had once again vindicated Pakistan’s long-standing position on what it called the “abject failure” of the Afghan Taliban regime to deny the use of Afghan soil to terrorist organisations operating under its patronage. Kabul, the statement added, has consistently failed to ensure effective border management or honour its international counter-terrorism obligations.
The Afghan Taliban administration has repeatedly denied providing sanctuary or support to the TTP.
The engagements come against the backdrop of the most sustained Pakistan-Afghanistan hostilities since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. Cross-border clashes that began in October 2025 produced a Qatar-mediated ceasefire that proved fragile; hostilities resumed in late February 2026 after Pakistani air and ground strikes on targets in Kabul, Kandahar and border areas. Rounds of mediation hosted by Qatar, Türkiye and — most recently — China, where delegations met in Urumqi in April, have yet to produce a durable arrangement. Low-level skirmishing has continued through the year.
The security picture inside Pakistan has deteriorated in parallel. Data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project (ACLED) records a near-fourfold rise in militant attacks nationally, from 658 in 2022 to 2,425 in 2025, with TTP-attributed attacks rising more than sevenfold over the same period, from 118 to 838. The Institute for Economics and Peace ranked the TTP the third-deadliest terrorist organisation globally in its 2026 Global Terrorism Index.
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