The Pakistan government has concluded its country-wide campaign to verify and update the data of an estimated 1.4 million registered Afghan refugees and to issue them with smart identity cards, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, said Sunday. Following a short pilot, the campaign, supported by UNHCR, began on 15 April 2021 and ended on 31 December 2021. It was the […]

Pakistani counterterrorism police killed six militants from the Islamic State group in an overnight raid at a hideout in the southwestern city of Quetta. A police statement issued Sunday said the raid was carried out in the provincial capital’s Manzoor Shaheed precinct area. It said the raid was based on strong intelligence the militants were preparing to stage an attack […]

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says Pakistan has issued smart identity cards to 700,000 Afghan refugees in that country. Babar Baloch, UNHCR spokesperson in Pakistan, told reporters that the first phase of issuing new electronic documents and reviewing the information of 1.4 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan has been completed. He said that the process in partnership with […]

The Pakistani military has said the fencing project along the Durand Line with Afghanistan will continue despite issues raised in recent weeks. Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Director General Maj Gen Babar Iftikhar said on Wednesday that 94% of the border fence has been completed and that work on the remaining section continues. “We are totally focused, and under the western […]

Reports of the recent period are indicative of tensions between the Taliban forces and the Pakistani military deployed on their border. On December 22, the Afghan Defence Ministry spokesman disclosed that the Taliban forces had stopped the Pakistani military from erecting an “illegal” border fence along the eastern Nangarhar province. A video circulating in the social media showed that Taliban […]

On December 30, six people were killed and 13 were injured in an explosion near the Science College at Jinnah Road in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan. No group claimed responsibility for the attack. On December 29, 2021, two Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) officials, identified as Constable Ashraf and Constable Irfan, were killed in a gun attack in Turbat town […]

Pakistan’s economic meltdown on the verge of 2022 presenting a woeful geopolitical spectacle of South Asia’s second Nuclear Weapons State economically begging on its knees, arising from decades of Pakistan’s imperial pretensions in Afghanistan attempting to have a colonial hold over Kabul regimes. Installing an Afghan Taliban regime in Kabul for the second time in August 2021 is a Pyrrhic […]

Pakistan said Monday it was engaging with Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers through diplomatic channels to resolve “some confusions” stemming from the installation of a security fence on the porous border separating the two countries. Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told a news conference in Islamabad that his country was determined to protect its “interests” and continue unilateral fencing Pakistan’s nearly 2,600-kilometer […]

Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said on Monday Islamabad would continue fencing the border with Afghanistan while hoping that contentious issues would be resolved with the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) authorities through diplomatic channels. Addressing a press conference on Monday, Qureshi said: “We have erected the fence and we will continue to fence the border.” Dawn News reported […]

While addressing a consultative conference on terrorism in Islamabad last month, Pakistan’s Federal Minister for Information and Broadcasting [I&B] Fawad Chaudhary said, “We don’t have any potential threat from India… We face no danger from America… We face no danger from Europe. The biggest danger we face is [extremism] from within.” For a country that has consistently remained in a […]