Three Policemen Killed, Six Hurt in Karak Checkpost Attack: What Happened and Why Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Police Are on the Front Line

What happened

By the police account, as carried in the press, events ran as follows.

1. Night, 6 February. A group of armed men opened fire on the checkpost at Bahadurkhel, on a road through the hills of southern Karak.
2. The defence. The officers at the post returned fire. The exchange went on for roughly two hours.
3. The withdrawal. The attackers broke off and escaped in the dark.
4. Reinforcements. A large police force arrived, sealed the area and began a search.
5. The cost. Three officers were dead. Six were wounded, three of them badly enough to be taken on to hospitals in Peshawar.
6. The next day. Funeral prayers were held with official honours at the police lines in Karak town. The inspector general of the provincial police attended and told the families that the sacrifice would not be wasted.

The police statement described the attackers as unidentified. In the language the force uses, the post “foiled” the attack, meaning that it was not overrun.

A checkpost is a few rooms, a sandbag wall and a barrier across a road. The men inside held it for two hours against an enemy who chose the time, the place and the weapons. That is what the word “foiled” covers.

Where it happened

Karak is a hilly district in the south of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, between Kohat to the north and Bannu and Lakki Marwat to the south. Its people are mostly from the Khattak tribe, which has a long tradition of service in the army and police.

Two things make it more important than its size suggests.

• Oil and gas. Karak sits on some of Pakistan’s most productive oil and gas fields. Pipelines, wells and the vehicles that serve them cross the district.
• The road south. The main highway from Peshawar to Dera Ismail Khan and on to Balochistan and Karachi runs through it. Bahadurkhel, known for its salt mines, lies on that route.

For years Karak was calmer than its neighbours. From about 2023 the violence that had taken hold in Bannu, Lakki Marwat and the former tribal areas spread into it.

The wider picture

Violence since 2021

Research institutes that count the dead reported that 2024 was the deadliest year in about a decade, and that 2025 was worse again.

Why the police

The army and the paramilitary Frontier Corps fight in the mountains and along the border. But it is the provincial police who live among the population and stand on the roads.

The single worst attack came in January 2023, when a bomber struck a mosque inside the police headquarters compound in Peshawar during prayers, killing more than eighty people, almost all of them police.

Since then the pattern has been less spectacular and more constant: a post fired on at night, a patrol ambushed, an officer shot on his way home, a team guarding polio vaccinators attacked. The week of the Karak attack, an officer protecting a vaccination team had been killed in another district.

A night at a checkpost

No account was found of what the officers at Bahadurkhel themselves saw. But the general pattern of such attacks has been described many times by police in the southern districts, and it explains why they are so hard to stop.

• The attackers choose the hour. Almost always after dark, often after midnight, when half the post is asleep and the road is empty.
• They come in numbers. Twenty or thirty men against eight or ten.
• They see in the dark. Thermal sights let a marksman pick out a sentry who cannot see him at all.
• They open with heavy weapons. Rocket-propelled grenades at the walls, then rifle and machine-gun fire to keep the defenders’ heads down.
• They block the road. A second group lies in wait for the reinforcements, sometimes with a roadside bomb. This is why help that is twenty minutes away by day may take two hours at night.
• They leave before dawn, carrying their casualties, so that it is seldom known what losses they suffered.

A post that is not overrun in such an attack has, by the standards of this conflict, won. The men inside may have fired every round they had.

Since 2024 a further danger has appeared. Small drones, of the kind sold for filming weddings, have been used to drop explosives on posts and police stations in the southern districts. A sandbag wall is no defence against something that arrives from above.

The police of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

The force that takes these losses is worth describing.

Three features set it apart.

It is local. A constable in Karak is usually from Karak. He knows the roads and the families, which is his strength. His own family lives in the same villages as the men he is fighting, which is his weakness. Officers have been killed at home, at weddings and at funerals.

It was reformed. A decade ago the province rewrote its police law to shield the force from political interference in postings and promotions, and invested in training. For some years its police were held up as a model for the rest of the country.

It was stretched. In 2018 the tribal districts were merged into the province, and the police were told to take over an area the size of a small country where no police had ever operated, absorbing tens of thousands of tribal levies as they went. That task was barely begun when the violence returned.

Its losses over twenty years run into the thousands. Police lines across the province keep memorials to them.

What the police say they need

Officers in the southern districts have been unusually open about their grievances.

• Night-vision and thermal sights. Attackers increasingly have them, some left behind when foreign forces quit Afghanistan in 2021. Many posts do not.
• Armoured vehicles, so that reinforcements are not ambushed on the way.
• Proper fortification of posts.
• More men. Posts built for a dozen are often held by a handful.
• Clear authority. In several districts police have complained that they are blamed for security while others take the decisions.

In 2024 police in Lakki Marwat and neighbouring districts staged sit-ins, with the backing of local elders, demanding that responsibility for security in their area be given to them alone. It was an extraordinary sight: armed officers of the state protesting about how the state was fighting.

The provincial government has since announced purchases of equipment and the recruitment of thousands more officers. How much has reached the roadside posts is another matter.

What families receive

When an officer is killed on duty, the province provides what is known as a martyrs’ package.

The amounts have been raised more than once. Families and police associations still complain of delays, paperwork and unequal treatment between forces. Whether the families of the three officers killed at Bahadurkhel received their entitlement in full was not established for this article.

The argument about what to do

Everyone agrees the violence must be stopped. There is no agreement on how.

Local people are caught between. Many remember being driven from their homes by the operations of a decade ago and do not want that again. Many also see the militants return and wonder why they were allowed to.

In October 2025 the wider conflict boiled over, when Pakistani and Afghan forces fought along the border for several days before a ceasefire was arranged abroad. In the months that followed the quarrel between Islamabad and Peshawar sharpened, and by October 2026 federal ministers were speaking openly of taking direct control of the province.

What ordinary people in the south live with

The effect of all this on daily life in districts like Karak is easy to overlook from a distance.

• Roads empty at dusk. Buses and lorries try to be off the highway before dark. A journey that once took a night now takes two days.
• Business pays twice. Traders, contractors and transporters report demands for money from armed groups. Those who refuse are threatened.
• Schools and clinics lose staff. Teachers and doctors posted from other districts ask for transfers. Vaccination teams need armed guards.
• Projects stop. Gas and oil companies restrict the movement of their staff. Road-building contractors pull out.
• Young men leave, for Karachi, the Gulf or anywhere else.
• Trust thins. People are afraid to be seen talking to the police, and afraid not to.

Local elders in several southern districts have held large public gatherings demanding peace. Their demands are directed at everyone: at the militants to leave, at the state to protect them, and at both to stop fighting over their heads. It is a mark of how tired people are that such meetings draw thousands in places where gathering in public is itself a risk.

Why small attacks deserve attention

A bombing that kills eighty makes headlines around the world. An attack that kills three does not survive the day’s news cycle.

Yet it is the small attacks, repeated several times a week for years, that wear a force down. Each one teaches the men at the next post that help may be two hours away. Each one persuades a family that a son should find other work. Each one shows the people of a village who really holds the road after dark.

It is also in these places that the outcome will be decided. Armies can clear a valley. Only a police force that local people trust, and that can protect itself, can hold a district.

There is a simple test of whether the state is winning. It is not the number of militants reported killed in a month. It is whether a constable at a post like Bahadurkhel believes that if he is attacked tonight, help will come in time, and that if he is killed, his children will be looked after. Where officers believe that, they stand. Where they stop believing it, no amount of firepower elsewhere makes up for it.

Words used in this article

Timeline

For how responsibility is divided between Islamabad and the provinces, read our guide to Pakistan’s politics.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Pakistan Today, “3 cops martyred, 6 injured as attack on Karak checkpost thwarted” — 7 February 2025.
• The News, “Three police personnel martyred in Karak terror attack” — February 2025.
• Pajhwok Afghan News, “3 policemen killed, 6 wounded in KP attack” — 6 February 2025.
• Tribal News Network, “Three policemen martyred, five injured in attack on checkpost in Karak” — February 2025.
• Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Police — for official statements and the record of officers killed on duty.