In the late evening of May 9, a vehicle packed with explosives rammed a police checkpost in Fateh Khel, Bannu in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. Gunmen followed. By the time the firing stopped, as many as 15 policemen had been killed; some of the 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.
It is tempting to read the May 9 bloodshed as an isolated horror. That would be dangerously wrong. Of the 2,330 Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police officers killed since 1970, 1,961 (84 percent) have fallen since 2007. According to Inspector General of Police Zulfiqar Hameed, 159 were killed in 2025 alone, in over 500 attacks.
Of the 437 security personnel killed in terrorist attacks across Pakistan last year, 174 – the largest single contingent – wore the green-and-blue of a provincial police force, not the khaki of the army. Most fell in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Bannu district alone recorded 134 attacks on its police, 27 of them fatal.
These are not faceless statistics; they are men who lead from the front. In January 2023, when terrorists fled Sarband police station, Deputy Superintendent of Police Sardar Hussain chased them on foot and was cut down 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 of his men were killed when an IED tore through their armored personnel carrier in Tank’s Gomal area. In April, when the Domel police station in Bannu was hit by a vehicle-borne suicide bombing, barricades kept every officer inside alive, though five civilians, including four members of one family, were not so lucky.
The list of the dead runs through the districts of Lakki Marwat, Dera Ismail Khan, Karak, Bajaur, and Wana. Senior officers are dying as well; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police officers slain by terrorists include two additional Inspectors General Safwat Ghayur and Ashraf Noor.
The force has also adapted, often without acknowledgement. In 2025 alone Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Police 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 that is quietly more effective than many kinetic operations. In December 2025, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa became the first province in Pakistan to establish a dedicated counter-drone division at the Nowshera Police Training Center, in response to the surge of quadcopter strikes that hit Bannu in 2025.
And yet this is the force that Pakistan’s central government has chosen to underpay, under-resource, and leave exposed. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has the lowest police salaries in Pakistan. A Khyber Pakhtunkhwa constable earns roughly 69,000 rupees a month. A Khyber Pakhtunkhwa deputy superintendent earns 184,867 rupees; a deputy superintendent in Balochistan earns 453,727 rupees, almost two-and-a-half times as much. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Inspector General of Police (IGP) has formally written to the chief minister seeking “hard area” status to close the gap, at an annual cost of around 2.2 billion rupees. The Shuhada package for Khyber Pakhtunkhwa martyrs, the IGP himself has confirmed, is also the lowest in the country.
Pakistan’s most-killed security force is the cheapest force. The arithmetic is indefensible.
At the same time, the prosecutorial pipeline has collapsed. Of every 100 terrorism cases prosecuted in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s anti-terrorism courts, only 17 end in conviction; thousands more 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 only 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 even begun. The man suspected of facilitating that attack from inside the mosque compound was a serving constable of the same force, allegedly paid 200,000 rupees by Jamaat-ul-Ahrar. He was arrested in late 2024. The case file is still in pre-trial.
The reforms required are not exotic. Grant Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the hard-area status its IGP has formally requested. Standardize the Shuhada package nationally at the highest existing rate, disbursed without political condition. Restore and ring-fence the federal vehicles and equipment that were withdrawn from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in October 2025 amid a political dispute the constables of Bannu had no part in. Procure counter-drone systems for every police division on the western border. Build a Forensic Science Laboratory in Peshawar. Tighten the Anti-Terrorism Act so cases that reach a court actually result in convictions.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is not alone in bleeding. On January 30 the Baloch Liberation Army hit around a dozen Balochistan districts simultaneously. In March, the Sindh Counter Terroism Department seized 2,000 kg of explosives outside Karachi. But it is in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa that the ratio of risk to reward is most obscene. The men being buried this week in Bannu were paid less than they should have been for what they did. The least the state owes them, and the colleagues who will replace them tomorrow, is the truth about what their lives cost.
