Inside the History of Pakistan’s Fight Against the Pakistani Taliban

Amid ‘open war’ between Pakistan and Afghanistan over the militant group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the 2015 documentary ‘Taliban Hunters’ offers relevant history on the group and the fight against it by authorities in Pakistan.

In the nearly five years since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan, there’s been a dramatic increase in attacks within neighboring Pakistan by the militant group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, commonly called the Pakistani Taliban or TTP.

Pakistan has accused Taliban-controlled Afghanistan of harboring the group and enabling it to launch cross-border attacks, which the Afghan government denies — and in recent weeks, the fight between the two countries escalated into what Pakistan’s government called “open war.”

Against this volatile backdrop, the archival FRONTLINE documentary Taliban Hunters offers relevant history on TTP and Pakistani security forces’ fight against it. Initially released in 2015, Taliban Hunters is now available on YouTube for the first time as part of an ongoing effort to make FRONTLINE’s archival documentaries widely available for streaming.

From producer and director Mobeen Azhar, the short documentary went inside a Karachi-based counterterrorism police unit dedicated to tracking down Taliban suspects. The unit was informally known as the Taliban Hunters, but its leader, Officer Ijaz Bajwa, told FRONTLINE his men had limited resources to take on TTP.

“They are fighting a full-fledged war, so they are not equipped and they are not trained for it yet,” Ijaz said. “They were trained for traditional policing, but it is not traditional policing. It is — they are fighting terrorism.”

As the documentary reported, TTP first emerged in 2007 and used to have only a small, underground presence in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city. But by the time the documentary aired, the group had been gaining ground in the city of over 20 million people, and carrying out suicide bombings and targeted assassinations there.

Taliban Hunters documented how the unit carried out raids to take suspected TTP members into custody. The film also explored human rights groups’ allegations that Karachi authorities were abusing militants captured in the city’s fight against terrorism.

Amid TTP’s current resurgence, Taliban Hunters is an illuminating snapshot of where the fight against them stood in one large city back in 2015, and how the group operated.