Terrorist attacks surge Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan in 2022: Report

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces remained under the grip of criminal activities as Pakistan suffered close to 376 terror attacks the previous year, Dailytimes reported citing a report by the Center for Research and Security Studies (CRSS) on Sunday.

The report claimed that the majority of the attacks were carried out by banned terror outfits such as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Daish (Islamic State Khorasan) and Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA).

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province as a whole had an exponential surge in violence, with a corresponding rise in fatalities. Government officials, law enforcement officers, and civilians made up the majority of the victims of violence. According to the study, there were several foreigners among the civilian population.

According to the Center, after November 28 there was an extraordinary uptick in terrorist assaults in KP and Balochistan, with over twenty strikes occurring in only the month of December.

According to the report, this increased the number of fatalities in the province (including ex-FATA) to roughly 64 per cent of all fatalities in the nation. Balochistan was next with 26 per cent of deaths allegedly attributable to terrorism, Dailytimes reported.

During the last year alone, terrorists of Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Gul Bahadur group, the Islamic State-Khurasan, and several others have reportedly conducted at least 165 terrorist attacks in KP province which is a 48 per cent increase from 2020. Out of all these attacks, 115 of these were orchestrated by TTP, according to the Al Arabiya Post report.

The security establishment in Pakistan has also been facing severe issues, Al Arabiya Post reported citing a report shared during a recent meeting of Pakistan's National Security Committee, that there are "capacity gaps" in KP's counterterrorism department (CTD), revealing that CTD spends less than 4 per cent of its budget on operations, with "zero allocation for procurement".

The report stated that in the last year, Punjab faced only five terrorist incidents, while KP witnessed 704 such incidents.