"hard area" status, Inspector General of Police Zulfiqar Hameed wrote to the chief minister — a single phrase that captures a wider, costly mismatch between threat and reward on Pakistan’s western frontier.
May 9 attack in Fateh Khel, Bannu
Late on May 9 a vehicle packed with explosives rammed a police checkpost in Fateh Khel, Bannu, then gunmen followed. By the time the firing stopped, as many as 15 policemen had been killed. Named victims included Constables Rehmat Ayaz and Sanaullah and drivers Niaz Ali and Saadullah Jan. The attack was claimed by Ittehad-ul-Mujahideen Pakistan. By the next morning the news cycle had moved on; the graves remained.
The human toll: long-term and recent statistics
These deaths sit inside a much larger pattern. Of the 2,330 Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police officers killed since 1970, 1,961 — 84 percent — have fallen since 2007. According to IGP Zulfiqar Hameed, 159 officers were killed in 2025 alone, in over 500 attacks. More broadly, of the 437 security personnel killed in terrorist attacks across Pakistan last year, 174 — the largest single contingent — were provincial police, not army, and most fell in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Bannu district itself recorded 134 attacks on its police in that period, 27 of them fatal.
Stories of frontline sacrifice
These are not abstract figures. The source recounts multiple incidents where officers led from the front: in January 2023 Deputy Superintendent Sardar Hussain chased fleeing attackers and was killed by sniper fire alongside Constables Irshad and Jehanzeb; in August 2025 Constable Rooh Niaz Khan and three colleagues held off an assault by 40 to 50 attackers at a Bannu checkpost; in January this year Station House Officer Ishaq Khan and six men were killed when an IED detonated their armored personnel carrier in Tank’s Gomal area. In April a vehicle-borne suicide bombing at Domel police station in Bannu left all officers inside alive because of barricades, though five civilians — including four members of one family — were killed.
Operational adaptations — and limits
Despite the pressure, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Police have adapted. In 2025 the force conducted 3,277 intelligence-based operations, arrested 1,300 terrorists, and defused 110 improvised explosive devices and 385 grenades. Its Dispute Resolution Councils resolved more than 6,300 community disputes, a counter-radicalization tool the source describes as quietly effective. In December 2025 the province established a dedicated counter-drone division at the Nowshera Police Training Center in response to a surge of quadcopter strikes in Bannu that year. Yet these operational gains sit alongside systemic shortfalls that blunt their effect.
Pay, equipment withdrawals, and the formal request for "hard area" status
Financial and material gaps are stark. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has the lowest police salaries in Pakistan: a constable earns roughly 69,000 rupees a month, and a deputy superintendent earns 184,867 rupees. By comparison, a deputy superintendent in Balochistan earns 453,727 rupees. The IGP has formally requested “hard area” status to close that gap at an annual cost of around 2.2 billion rupees. The IGP has also confirmed that the Shuhada package for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa martyrs is the lowest in the country. Compounding the problem, federal vehicles and equipment were withdrawn from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in October 2025 amid a political dispute — a move the article ties directly to an erosion of protective capacity on the ground.
Judicial bottlenecks and witness protection
The prosecutorial pipeline is fraying. Of every 100 terrorism cases prosecuted in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s anti‑terrorism courts, only 17 end in conviction. Thousands more cases remain under investigation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa alone, while the national Anti‑Terrorism Court backlog exceeds 2,200 cases. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Witness Protection Act, passed in 2021 — eight years after Sindh’s version — remains barely operational, with active caseloads a fraction of Punjab’s. Three years after 84 worshippers were killed in Peshawar’s Police Lines mosque, the trial has not started. A man suspected of facilitating that attack from inside the mosque compound — allegedly a serving constable paid 200,000 rupees by Jamaat‑ul‑Ahrar — was arrested in late 2024; his case file remains in pre‑trial.
What this means for the provincial government, the police, and Bannu residents
- Provincial government: faces a concrete fiscal choice — grant the IGP’s requested hard‑area status (an estimated 2.2 billion rupees annually), standardize a higher Shuhada package nationally, and negotiate the return or replacement of withdrawn federal equipment to restore capacity on the western border.
- Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police: will need sustained pay parity, protective equipment (including counter‑drone systems for each western border division), and a functioning forensic laboratory and legal pipeline if operations and arrests are to translate into convictions rather than recurrent exposure.
- Bannu residents and civilian families: remain caught between escalating attack techniques (vehicle‑borne bombs, quadcopter strikes) and gaps in protection; recent incidents show barricades can save officers but not always civilians.
The arithmetic is stark: Pakistan’s most‑killed security force is also among its cheapest. As the source notes, the men being buried this week in Bannu “were paid less than they should have been for what they did.” The piece concludes that the least the state owes them — and the colleagues who will replace them tomorrow — is “the truth about what their lives cost.”
