The Leverage Of War: Why The Taliban Refuse To Lose The TTP Card
In Khost province, where the Taliban’s checkpoints often feel more symbolic than functional, Ikramullah Mehsud moves with a kind of impunity that borders on ceremony.
In Khost province, where the Taliban’s checkpoints often feel more symbolic than functional, Ikramullah Mehsud moves with a kind of impunity that borders on ceremony.
When he steps inside the Taliban’s security compound, a beige, low-slung building ringed with sandbags and lethargic guards, no one stops him, and no one asks why he’s there. Police commanders and intelligence officers glance up from their desks, exchange faint, knowing smiles, and offer the same greeting each time: “The killer of Benazir Bhutto has arrived.” His car, a battered Toyota with its paint scoured by years of travel along the eastern frontier, never pulls into a filling station. The Taliban, in an unspoken gesture of hospitality or debt, keep its tank perpetually full.
Nearly two decades earlier, on 27 December 2007, Ikramullah had been sent to Liaquat Bagh in Rawalpindi with another young militant, Bilal, under orders from Baitullah Mehsud, then the head of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto, the former Prime Minister and leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party, was addressing a throng of supporters, an audience so dense that its collective heat shimmered above the park. Bilal, wearing dark glasses, approached the left side of Bhutto’s armoured vehicle. He drew a pistol, fired three shots in quick, almost dispassionate sequence, and then detonated his explosive vest. The blast tore through the crowd. For an instant, observers recalled, Bhutto’s white scarf seemed to lift in the air before falling, crimson, inside the vehicle. Ikramullah, assigned as part of the same operation but positioned away from the main detonation point, shed his own vest and pistol in a nearby mosque and disappeared into the panicked surge that followed.
In 2014, as Pakistan launched Operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan, Ikramullah fled with other TTP fighters into the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. He travelled alongside Shahryar Mehsud, a commander from Hakimullah Mehsud’s faction who had been killed months earlier. At the time, Ikramullah insisted, quietly, almost wearily, that he had played no role in Bhutto’s death.
For years, he moved in the shadows: the forests of Kunar, the ridges of Nangarhar, the valleys of Khost and Paktika. He seldom slept in the same place for more than a night. The TTP’s commanders shifted constantly, slipping along mountain paths, sheltering in half-abandoned compounds, travelling with the air of men who understood that drones were patient creatures. Ikramullah lived with the kind of jittery discretion common to fugitives whose names appear on government lists that grow longer every year.
Then, in August 2021, Kabul fell. The Taliban’s return to power redrew the hierarchy of fear and safety across Afghanistan’s east. Borders became porous in new ways; old alliances resurfaced from the dust. Ikramullah no longer hid. He moved openly, meeting commanders in daylight, his past a subject no longer avoided but offered up almost casually. He now acknowledges his role in Bhutto’s assassination and speaks of Liaquat Bagh as a place visited with purpose, not accident.
Afghanistan International’s research suggests that his freedom of movement is not unusual. Senior Pakistani Taliban leaders, Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, Azmatullah Mehsud, Akhtar Mohammad Khalil, Mufti Sadiq Noor Dawar, appear to drift regularly between Kabul and the border provinces of Kunar, Khost, Paktia, and Paktika, before slipping into Pakistan’s tribal belt. Their presence forms a kind of shadow geography across the region: a map drawn not on paper but in rumour, encounter, and the quiet accommodations of power.
Gul Bahadur, Rarely Seen, Much Like Hibatullah
Gul Bahadur does not appear in public often. In this, he resembles Hibatullah Akhundzada: a leader whose authority grows in direct proportion to his invisibility. In eastern Afghanistan, his absence has become its own kind of presence, an unspoken fact that shapes the behaviour of commanders, local tribes, and even the rhythm of travel along the frontier.
South of Khost city, the road climbs toward Spera district, a region where the Zadran tribe’s villages are strung along the slopes like scattered stones. The largest of them, Ghbargey, feels suspended between two systems. Beyond its outskirts, moving toward Paktika’s Giyan district, the terrain gives way to the Madakhel Wazir region, separated from Pakistan’s Waziristan by a stretch of barbed wire marking the Durand Line. The Madakhel, who inhabit both sides of the border, occupy a liminal zone.
Hafiz Gul Bahadur, the influential commander who leads the United Mujahideen Council or Tehreek-Taliban Gul Bahadur, is a son of the Madakhel tribe. His tribe’s bi-national geography grants him an unchallenged authority. In parts of eastern Afghanistan, that influence is visible in unexpected details. Afghanistan drives on the right, but once a traveller enters Ghbargey from the direction of Tanai district, the traffic veers left. It is less a nod to road rules than to the habits of Pakistani Taliban fighters living in the area, who insist on driving as they would in North Waziristan.
In April 2022, after Pakistani airstrikes struck Afghan Dubai, a cluster of settlements in Spera district, and neighbouring villages, Gul Bahadur quietly relocated to Paktika’s Barmal district. His lieutenants dispersed: some toward Shamal district, others to safe houses tucked deep into the ridgelines. Yet the infrastructure of his influence, madrassas, safe compounds, and the networks that bind fighters together, remained intact in Spera.
The following summer, weeks after a severe earthquake hit the region, Taliban Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani arrived to inspect the devastation. In the months after the airstrikes, Deputy Defence Minister Mali Khan Sadiq visited as well. Photographs later circulated of the two men seated with Pakistani Taliban commanders, including Akhtar Mohammad Khalil and Commander Aftab Dawar.
A tribal elder from the Madakhel, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of Taliban reprisal, recalled that during Haqqani’s visit he had offered a promise: the creation of a new administrative district, to be named Kani, carved out for the tribe. The proposal stalled almost immediately. Pakistan, wary that any such district could harden into a second Waziristan, pressed for delay. The Taliban responded by establishing a checkpoint at Kani, less a concession than a reminder that they alone would determine the region’s future.
Under the previous government, Khost’s then-governor, Abdul Qayum Rohani, had opened an outpost in Afghan Dubai while units of the Khost Protection Force (KPF), the 10th Battalion in Spera and the 5th Battalion in Tanai, fell under the influence of Gul Bahadur’s commanders. A former security officer in Khost told Afghanistan International that fighters loyal to one of Bahadur’s deputies, Said Anaar, known colloquially as Commander Talwar, had been living in the two battalions’ compounds since the fall of the Afghan Republic.
According to the same source, the battalions’ weapons stockpiles were seized during the collapse by Commander Aftab Yasar Dawar, a prominent figure in the Sadiq Noor faction of the Pakistani Taliban. Aftab, who at times travelled by air between Kabul and Kandahar, was later killed in an attack in Kandahar. Gul Bahadur’s group blamed Pakistani intelligence for the killing. In militant circles, rumours spread that Aftab had been selling advanced American weapons to Baloch militants.
In late 2021, the Taliban dispatched military officers to Spera and Tanai to instruct residents to halt the traditional firing of heavy weapons at weddings and to stop collecting donations for armed groups. The directives were largely ignored. Many of the foreign fighters in the region had fought alongside the Taliban on earlier frontlines; they did not see themselves as guests, and they did not consider the new authorities their superiors.
Two local elders told Afghanistan International that although the area’s security was nominally overseen by tribal arbakai forces, real authority remained in the hands of Gul Bahadur’s network. That influence did not diminish even as tensions mounted. In late June 2025, amid rumours of another round of Pakistani airstrikes, Gul Bahadur and his senior deputy, Mawlawi Sadiq Noor Dawar, abandoned their positions in Barmal and Shamal for an undisclosed location.
By early July, two well-placed local sources reported that Gul Bahadur and two of his commanders including Qari Ismail and Akhtar Mohammad Khalil had briefly returned to Barmal before disappearing again five days later. Sadiq Noor Dawar and two subordinate commanders, Mawlawi Sadiqullah and Said Anaar, were seen moving intermittently between Shamal district and the frontier, but after a suicide attack on Pakistani soldiers in Mir Ali, North Waziristan, on 28 June, an attack that killed at least thirteen soldiers, they too vanished. Their destination, like their strategy, remained opaque.
Pakistan’s army responded by claiming to have killed fourteen militants in clearance operations. Army Chief Asim Munir vowed retribution, promising to “track down the perpetrators and expose the real source of terrorism in the region.” Islamabad, in a familiar gesture, blamed an Indian proxy group; New Delhi rejected the accusation. The United Mujahideen Council, Gul Bahadur’s faction, claimed responsibility, emphasising its long-standing focus on North Waziristan.
A tribal elder in Khost, who has participated in negotiations involving the Pakistani Taliban, said that Bahadur’s behaviour had changed in recent weeks. “He stopped attending gatherings,” the elder said. “He received word that he might be targeted, so he left.” According to the same source, Bahadur warned the Waziristan tribal jirga not to visit him anymore, suspecting that the Pakistani military had been using jirga delegations to triangulate his location.
Another tribal elder from North Waziristan, involved for years in talks between the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial government and Pakistani Taliban factions, said that in late June the Pakistan Army delivered an ultimatum to the Utmanzai Wazir tribe, closely linked to Bahadur. The message was stark: negotiate with the militants and halt attacks, or prepare for operations.
Within Gul Bahadur’s network, several battalions, Jaish Umari, Fursan Muhammad, Ghazian Caravan, Shumla War Caravan, Sufyan Caravan, and Jaish Ansar al-Mahdi, continue to operate across the frontier, conducting suicide attacks, bombings, and targeted killings. On 31 July 2024, Pakistan formally added the group and its leader to its list of proscribed organisations. The designation marked yet another turn in a long, uneasy relationship; in 2006, the group had signed an agreement with Islamabad and was once considered among the “good Taliban”, a faction seen as pragmatic, even cooperative. But after Operation Zarb-e-Azb in 2014, Bahadur’s fighters retreated to the Afghan side of the Durand Line, where they regrouped and launched increasingly lethal operations against Pakistani forces.
Like Hibatullah Akhundzada, the Taliban leader, Gul Bahadur seldom appears in public. No verified photograph or video of him exists.
The Multi-Sided Agreement of Mir Ali
Before Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021, an unusual gathering took place in Mir Ali, a town in North Waziristan long associated with shifting alliances and contested sovereignties. There, representatives of the Afghan Taliban met with commanders from the Pakistani Taliban and several foreign militant groups. The exact date of the meeting remains uncertain, but its implications have rippled far beyond the frontier.
According to a source close to Gul Bahadur’s network, who spoke to Afghanistan International Pashto on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, the agreement contained signatures of some of the most consequential figures in the region: Sirajuddin Haqqani, then the Taliban’s deputy leader and head of the Haqqani Network; senior Pakistani Taliban leaders; al-Qaeda commanders; Hafiz Gul Bahadur; Mawlawi Sadiq Noor Dawar; and several other Taliban officials. The document, the source said, outlined a pact: once the “Islamic Emirate” regained power in Kabul, it would support allied groups under the banner of jihad and assist in establishing a Sharia-based order in Pakistan.
The existence of such an agreement became more than theoretical after Pakistani airstrikes targeted Spera district in Khost province in April 2022. Islamabad intensified its pressure on the Taliban government, demanding that it rein in TTP operations inside Pakistan. In response, Taliban’s Defence Minister, Mullah Yaqoob Mujahid, summoned TTP leaders and Gul Bahadur, who at the time was living quietly in Kabul’s Shakardara district, and urged them to halt their attacks.
But Gul Bahadur, the source said, came prepared. He presented Yaqoob with the Mir Ali document, effectively reminding him of the promise the Taliban had made before retaking Kabul: that the group would stand by foreign fighters who had supported its war against the former Afghan government, NATO, and US forces. In return, these militants would continue their struggle under the protection of the new Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan.
Another source told Afghanistan International that the dynamics shifted sharply after a US drone strike killed al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul in July 2022. In the aftermath, Sirajuddin Haqqani and Mullah Yaqoob reportedly concluded that the capital was no longer safe for senior al-Qaeda and TTP figures. They quietly advised them to move to the border provinces and remote districts where surveillance, both domestic and international, was more easily evaded.
According to the source, Gul Bahadur left Shakardara and relocated to the rugged fringes of Paktika’s Barmal district. Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud, who had been living discreetly in Kabul’s Khairkhana neighbourhood, an area where his presence drew little attention, shifted to Kunar province but continued travelling to Kabul when needed.
In October 2025, merely three days before Pakistani strikes hit parts of Kabul, Noor Wali was seen visiting Hewad Shifa Hospital in Qala-e-Cha on the Kabul–Logar highway, checking on wounded TTP fighters. After the strikes, the hospital abruptly cancelled its treatment arrangements for the group. When contacted by Afghanistan International, hospital officials denied having ever treated militants, insisting they only dealt with traffic accident victims, a claim at odds with accounts provided by multiple sources.
The fallout from Zawahiri’s killing extended deep into the Taliban’s leadership. On 1 June 2023, the UN Security Council reported that the strike had created fissures within the group. Some Taliban leaders felt misled about Zawahiri’s presence in Kabul; others suspected that someone within the group had deliberately revealed the location. The incident rattled senior officials like Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who had repeatedly assured foreign governments that the Taliban would not give sanctuary to international militants. According to the UN report, Baradar confronted Sirajuddin Haqqani, saying that he had been made to look like a liar in front of the international community. Haqqani was reported to despond that the safe house had been approved by the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada
Sources connected to the Pakistani Taliban told Afghanistan International that around this time the Taliban government asked Mufti Noor Wali to avoid public appearances. He dismissed the suggestion with a Pashto proverb: “The sun cannot be hidden with two fingers.” Yet pressure continued to mount. The Taliban leadership eventually instructed TTP and other foreign militant figures not to give media interviews or reside openly in major cities. Since then, their public visibility has all but disappeared. They no longer grant interviews, and they remain absent from community gatherings, moving instead along a discreet network of safe houses, border trails, and remote settlements.
The Process of Relocation
By mid-2022, as pressure from Islamabad intensified, the Taliban government in Kabul began pushing for a solution that might appease Pakistan without openly confronting its own ideological kin. The proposal was simple in theory, impossible in practice: the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan would be relocated away from the borderlands, away from the geography that sustained their identity, their operations, and their mythologies, and resettled in northern Afghanistan, or in the central provinces of Logar and Ghazni.
From the outset, TTP leaders rejected the idea. Northern provinces, they argued, were too far from the Durand Line, too far from Waziristan, too far from the tribal networks that gave their movement its lifeblood. A relocation of this scale would sever them from their communities, disrupt their finances, and undermine their ability to wage what they saw as a necessary jihad.
The Taliban’s Interior Minister attempted reassurance. Roads would be constructed; houses built; access to central regions guaranteed. But the promises carried an unintended echo. A century earlier, in the 1920s, Waziristani families had been uprooted under pressure from British India and resettled in similar regions, Baghlan, Kunduz, Ghazni, Maidan Wardak, and north of Kabul. Removed from their homelands, many had turned to farming and land development, their militant traditions dulled by distance. The memory of that historical displacement lingered, and TTP leaders had no intention of repeating it.
Yet by early 2025, following renewed Pakistani airstrikes and sustained diplomatic pressure, TTP commanders conditionally agreed to allow the relocation of some families. In the final week of January, under the cover of secrecy, the Taliban moved dozens of households from Khost’s Gulan Camp, neighbouring villages, Ismailkhel district, and Paktika’s border belt to newly prepared refugee camps in Ghazni.
A source involved in the process told Afghanistan International that the families accepted the move only after the Taliban pledged strict privacy protections. “They agreed on the condition that no one would take their photos, no biometric data would be collected, and that they would receive financial assistance,” the source said. The Taliban ministries of refugees, interior, tribal affairs, and the intelligence directorate coordinated the operation.
Each family member, according to the agreement, would receive forty dollars a month, five hundred dollars for relocation expenses, and additional funds for rent and basic household items. Family heads were registered under pseudonyms; official identification was replaced with TTP-issued cards, which served as the only valid documents for stipends.
The Taliban constructed three camp-like settlements for the families of Waziristani and other foreign fighters: one in Malak Din, in Nawa district; another in the Attarbagh desert of Qarabagh district; and a third in Dasht-e-Kabuli in Waghaz district. Designed to accommodate between five hundred and a thousand families each, the sites consisted of single-storey concrete houses, clustered around madrassas, small schools, rudimentary health units, and a basic water infrastructure. For months, the compounds remained encircled with barbed wire, not to keep residents in, but because many initially refused to move inside.
The long-term plan envisioned the relocation of families linked to Hafiz Gul Bahadur and to TTP fighters living in Afghan Dubai, Patse Mela, Khra Wra, Sur Kando, and Kani in Khost, as well as Laman, Margha, Mela, Mangriti, and Zargai in Paktika’s Barmal district. In practice, only limited numbers, mostly Mehsud and Dawar families, agreed to relocate to the Qarabagh camp. Recent field visits by Afghanistan International indicated that some had already begun returning to Khost and Paktika, unable or unwilling to adjust to life in Ghazni.
Under the arrangement, TTP itself would oversee camp security, maintain its own guard force, and manage internal administration. A Kabul-based source described the entire process as symbolic. “This had no impact on security along the tribal belt,” he said. “The families were moved because Sirajuddin Haqqani pressed for it. It was like putting mud on one’s nose, something done only for appearance.”
Security analysts drew parallels with 2014, when families of the Haqqani Network left North Waziristan for Kurram, Peshawar, and Islamabad, while the group’s operational core remained fully functional in Wana, Miranshah, Tall, and Teri Mangal. Likewise, Mufti Noor Wali and other TTP leaders continue to maintain offices, arms depots, and safe houses in Paktika, Khost, and Paktia, while the relocated families in Ghazni serve more as political optics than operational deterrence.
Sources noted that the relocation effort has begun only in Kandahar, Khost, and Paktika, not yet in Kunar or Nangarhar, where TTP and other foreign militants also maintain strong footholds. Analysts point out that Pakistan is particularly sensitive about militant presence in Khost and Paktika, where cross-border tribal ties are so deep that any attempt at separation risks collapse.
In Kandahar, TTP-linked families have been settled along the Kandahar–Uruzgan highway, roughly 137 kilometres from the Durand Line, in villages such as Krizgi, Kata Sang, Tanawcha, Qasim Kali, and Surkh Bed in Shawali Kot district. Ordinary residents are barred from entering these areas, but convoys of trucks routinely arrive, unloading bricks, cement, and cinder blocks for ongoing construction.
Reporters from Afghanistan International Pashto spoke with locals from Kata Sang and Tanawcha. One elderly orchard owner, speaking anonymously among his fig trees, described the settlers with quiet unease. “They have been here a long time,” he said. “They do not mix with the people. They do not greet us. Their appearance is different, they all have long hair, and they speak in dialects we do not understand.”
The only images Afghanistan International journalists managed to capture were distant shots of the settlements, taken hurriedly from the roadside.
Pakistani Fighters in Kandahar and Their Strategic Relocation
Not all Pakistani militants have found a natural home in Kandahar. Those who fought alongside the Haqqani Network in the old battlefields of Greater Paktia, Khost, Paktia, and Paktika, still consider those border provinces their true sanctuary. Kandahar, by contrast, has absorbed only a limited number of Taliban fighters from Pakistan, mostly those whose wartime experience tied them to the region’s southern front lines.
Khalid Pashtun, a former member of parliament from Kandahar, told Afghanistan International Pashto that Pakistani Taliban commanders had quietly settled not only in Shawali Kot district but also in Nish, a district north of Kandahar city known for its isolation and difficult terrain. These relocations, he said, were carried out under pressure from Islamabad, with the Afghan Taliban moving Pakistani militants and their families away from the Durand Line to remote, controlled areas.
“This region is ideal for living and hiding,” Pashtun said. “The Pakistani Taliban are stationed here to keep their families safe. But their young fighters still return to the Durand Line, equipped, supported, and guided by the Afghan Taliban, to fight.”
Within the Afghan Taliban, debates over where to settle these fighters have exposed internal factional lines. The Haqqani network, according to Afghanistan International’s findings, initially pushed to relocate Pakistani Taliban families to the north, particularly near the Qoshtepe Canal, a vast new agricultural corridor. The idea was to distribute canal lands to them and distance the fighters from the Pakistani border. But local resistance and TTP’s firm refusal derailed the plan.
The Taliban pivoted toward southern Afghanistan. Shawali Kot district, with its central position in the south, became a designated resettlement zone for some TTP families. From Shawali Kot, roads radiate into multiple provinces, Zabul, Uruzgan, Helmand, Daikundi, Ghazni, and into the deeper interior of Kandahar. Its geography, both strategic and secluded, offered the right kind of obscurity.
The district itself is bordered by Zabul’s Jaldak to the east; Khakrez and Arghandab to the west; Uruzgan and Kandahar’s Mianshin to the north; and Daman and Arghandab to the south. For years, the area has been a labyrinth of safe houses, training compounds, and anonymous mud-walled enclosures.
Until recently, Pakistan did not consider Kandahar a significant staging ground for the TTP. But as attacks spread into Balochistan, and Baloch insurgents appeared with more advanced weaponry, Islamabad’s attention drifted south. By late December 2024, Pakistan’s former special envoy for Afghanistan acknowledged publicly, for the first time, that TTP hideouts existed in Kandahar as well.
In Kandahar’s tribal tapestry, these relationships are not new. Decades of war forged bonds of faith, kinship, and mutual dependence. Pashtun, himself a son of Kandahar, said that in recent months bodies of Afghan Taliban fighters killed in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had been brought back not only to Kandahar but as far north as Farah and Badghis for burial.
“Even during the Republic, Shawali Kot was never secure,” Pashtun said. “It was home to strong Taliban bases and heavy fighting.”
General Sami Sadat, former commander of the Afghan army’s 215 Maiwand Corps, spent years facing Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other foreign militants in Helmand. Speaking from exile, Sadat told Afghanistan International that the Afghan Taliban continue to provide material support to the TTP, including equipment, funding, and training.
“The Afghan Taliban assist the Pakistani Taliban financially,” he said. “They provide weapons and training. Some Afghan Taliban even join TTP units. A number of them have been killed in battles.”
Recent reports confirm his claim. In the northern districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. North and South Waziristan, Bannu, Tank, Lakki Marwat, Mohmand, and Bajaur, Afghan Taliban fighters have been killed alongside TTP militants while fighting Pakistani forces. It is a mirror image of an earlier era: before 2021, Pakistani militants fought in Afghanistan with support from Pakistan’s army and intelligence agencies. Now, the dynamic has reversed.
TTP Gains Access to Advanced Weapons
In August 2024, a decree quietly issued from Kandahar signalled a shift in the Taliban’s internal calculus. The order, attributed to the Taliban’s supreme leader, restricted the withdrawal and distribution of all weapons and military ammunition to his own authority. Neither the defence minister nor the interior minister nor even the powerful intelligence chief could access the armouries without approval from the top. In the weeks that followed, the Taliban began registering weapons across the country. Large quantities, especially American-made M4 rifles, were gathered and transported to Kandahar, where they were placed under the control of Hibatullah Akhundzada’s special forces.
But the decree did little to stem the flow of arms into the black market.
Alongside the relocation of TTP fighters into Afghanistan, an expanding ecosystem of arms dealers, transporters, and smugglers spread across Khost, Paktia, Paktika, Kunar, Nangarhar, Helmand, and Nimroz. As violence intensified in Pakistan, the trade revived: war, once again, was good business.
In the first chaotic months after Kabul’s fall in August 2021, American weapons, M16 and M4 rifles in particular, were plentiful. Soldiers from the collapsed Afghan army sold them for quick cash; Taliban fighters, flush with battlefield capture, traded them with equal ease. Prices hovered between one and two thousand dollars. But as supply dwindled and demand surged, the market recalibrated.
Haji Matiullah, a veteran arms dealer who once operated out of Azam Warsak in South Waziristan and Miranshah in the north, has moved his trade to Khost and Paktika provinces in Afghanistan. Speaking to Afghanistan International, he offered a matter-of-fact inventory: a new American M4 now sells for $4,285; an M16 for $1,428. Chinese-made M4s cost roughly a third of the American model, similar in price to an M16 but with a shorter life span.
Pakistani Taliban fighters, he said, are the primary buyers. They use the rifles not only for their precision but because they can be fitted with laser-assisted night-vision scopes, an increasingly common feature of nighttime raids across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
For long-range strikes on airfields and military installations, the fighters favour BM-1 rockets, priced at $424 each. For convoy attacks, the old Soviet RPG-7 remains ubiquitous, though it is gradually being replaced by the 82mm recoilless gun, a weapon valued for its ability to break through reinforced concrete, terrain where RPG-7 rounds often fall short.
Recently, TTP bomb-makers have begun modifying 82mm shells for use in RPG-7 launchers, machining the bodies and fitting them with RPG boosters. The innovation is crude but effective.
A former arms dealer from Mir Ali, North Waziristan, identified only as Dawar, told Afghanistan International that demand for the shoulder-fired 82mm gun has “skyrocketed.” “These guns are devastating against Pakistani army posts,” he said. “The concrete and stone-cement walls cannot withstand them. The RPG-7 cannot achieve the same effect.” Prices have risen accordingly: an 82mm gun now costs $1,784, with each shell selling for $71.
Among militants, older Russian models retain their place in the hierarchy of weapons. The PK machine gun, L-shaped, belt-fed, and once synonymous with Taliban commanders, sells for about $1,710. A belt of ten rounds costs $3.40.
Even the black market has its own pattern of inflation. In the trading corridor between Paktika and Waziristan, hand grenades sell for $12 to $14, while a locally assembled Russian AK-47 costs between $1,370 and $1,540.
Before 2002, the AK-47 had been the unrivalled weapon of every foot soldier, and the PK the mark of every commander in Afghanistan. But a generational shift is underway. The romanticism attached to Russian weaponry is fading; younger militants prefer the lighter weight, modularity, and accessory compatibility of American M16s and M4s. Their value rests not only in durability but in a new culture of combat, one shaped by night-vision devices, suppressors, and optics.
Ammunition reflects this shift. Ten cartridges for an M4 or M16 cost $5.43, about a dollar more than the price for an equivalent pack of AK-47 rounds. Scopes, when available, are Russian or Chinese; American optics remain rare and, in most cases, kept by senior commanders or sold to the highest bidder.
TTP’s Use of Advanced Weapons and Explosives
Over the past year, Afghanistan International has tracked the evolution of Pakistani Taliban attacks across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, South and North Waziristan, Bajaur, Mohmand, Tank, Lakki Marwat, and Bannu. Patterns have emerged. In most operations, whether sweeping assaults on military bases or targeted strikes, TTP fighters begin by disabling Pakistani army surveillance cameras using laser-equipped rifles, usually American-made M4s and M16s fitted with high-precision scopes. For these initial shots, they rely heavily on experienced Afghan Taliban marksmen capable of hitting small, elevated targets in darkness.
Abidullah Mehsud (a pseudonym), who leads a small TTP cell in South Waziristan’s Ladha and Makeen regions, described the shift in simple arithmetic. “These scopes and lasers have reduced fighters’ costs threefold,” he said. “Before, an attack meant spending heavily on weapons. Now the bullets land exactly where they should. There is no waste.”
The technological shift extends beyond rifles. Abidullah noted that older Russian grenade launchers, crude and effective only at shorter ranges, are being replaced. “The American launchers hit targets at fifteen hundred meters and fit perfectly on M4 and M16 rifles,” he said. One launcher costs $727; each round, resembling a miniature artillery shell, sells for $364.
According to arms dealer Haji Matiullah, the buyers of these weapons now include al-Qaeda, Pakistani Taliban factions, Baloch separatist groups, Iran-opposed Jaish al-Adl, and Pakistani arms traders. “In the early years,” he said, “Pakistani traders, especially from the tribal areas, bought large quantities because al-Qaeda was paying off old debts after the Taliban’s return. They had money, enough to buy entire stocks.”
Explosive-making materials follow a similar, if more intricate, path. The TTP’s explosive stockpile depends on ammonium phosphate, ammonium nitrate, and potassium nitrate, chemicals smuggled into tribal areas through porous border routes. Pakistan has tightened restrictions on these imports, even adding insurance requirements at Gwadar port. But militants have adapted, sourcing materials from Iran and other neighbouring countries.
Matiullah said TTP had once relied on Chinese detonators and primacord, an explosive rope used for simultaneous blasts. But in recent years, more advanced detonators and high-grade primacord smuggled from Iran have begun arriving in significant quantities.
Primacord, a plastic-sheathed cord capable of transmitting a detonation wave at extreme speed, is critical for synchronised explosions in mining, and in sabotage. One source familiar with TTP operations put it plainly: “The group uses Iranian explosive cord in mine blasts and car bombs. Its detonation speed is around seven to eight thousand meters per second.”
The technique mirrors methods used by the Afghan Taliban during the insurgency: coordinated, simultaneous explosions triggered by precisely cut lengths of primacord. TTP fighters now employ the same method against military patrols, fortified checkpoints, and heavy gates.
An arms smuggler in Khost, speaking anonymously, traced the origin of one particular supply line. “In autumn 2022,” he said, “TTP accessed original ammonium nitrate produced in the UAE. It’s grey, meant for agriculture, and smuggled from Iran into Afghanistan. Militants buy it through farmers and move it through Paktika and Nangarhar.”
Initially, the nitrate was converted into explosives in Afghanistan before being transported to tribal areas. But the mixture degraded quickly, its potency declining after two months, forcing militants to abandon local manufacturing. Instead, they now transport ammonium nitrate in its raw form through mountain routes to Khyber and Datta Khel in North Waziristan, where small, mobile workshops transform it into explosives on demand.
A TTP bomb-maker explained the process: “You heat the ammonium nitrate until it liquefies, then mix five litres of diesel with fifteen kilograms of nitrate to solidify it again. That is when it becomes explosive.”
Potassium nitrate (KNO₃) enters the picture through another network. Smugglers in Helmand, who import it from Iran, sell it packaged deceptively in paper bags labelled as powdered milk. Waziristani arms dealers buy it for TTP bomb-makers. Potassium’s advantage lies in its longevity; once mixed with diesel, it remains potent for up to a year, ideal for long-term storage or delayed operations.
A source familiar with the explosives trade described the destructive capacity: “Twenty kilos of ammonium nitrate can destroy a tank. Seven kilos of potassium can shatter even heavy armour. After heating and mixing, the compound is poured into barrels, buckets, or thermoses, and detonators are inserted to stay embedded.”
Earlier, Afghan Taliban fighters in Waziristan used Chinese and Pakistani detonators, which often failed. Now, Iranian detonators have replaced them almost entirely. “They work instantly,” the source said.
The primacord arrives in bundles of two to three hundred meters, often delivered through Helmand and Nimroz provinces by smugglers who specialise in cross-border transport. According to one source, “In autumn 2022, all stored Iranian explosives, primacord, and plates in Helmand were bought up by Noor Wali Mehsud’s faction.”
Modern Weapons Have Changed the Traditional Nature of War
In January 2025, during a military exercise in Balochistan, Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff, General Asim Munir, announced that the armed forces were entering a new phase of modernization “in accordance with the country’s needs.” The goal, he said, was not simply to keep pace with adversaries but to anticipate and neutralize the “emerging threats” confronting Pakistan.
Those threats are not hypothetical. They are already reshaping the battlefield.
The spread of advanced weaponry, much of it American-made and left behind in Afghanistan, has fundamentally altered the nature of Pakistan’s war with the TTP and with Baloch insurgents. Among the most vulnerable are border forces and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police. Ill-equipped and trained largely for civilian policing, they face militants carrying laser-fitted rifles, American grenade launchers, night-vision optics, and modified explosives. In many districts along the frontier, officers now hesitate to leave their posts after dusk; one wrong move could expose them to a sniper scope glowing red in the dark.
Pakistan has raised alarms internationally about American weapons abandoned after the fall of Kabul in 2021, urging Washington and Western capitals to retrieve the arms or pressure the Taliban to control their circulation. But the flow has continued, quietly, efficiently, and with deadly effect.
Islamabad has begun modernizing its own forces. The Frontier Corps has been partially equipped with new rifles, surveillance drones, and sniper systems. Pakistani Taliban sources claim that in recent months Pakistan has deployed small Chinese quadcopters, fitted to carry 85mm mortar shells, along parts of the Durand Line.
Abidullah Mehsud, the TTP commander operating in South Waziristan, described an evolving cat-and-mouse game. “The army is trying to find countermeasures,” he said. “They use small Chinese drones now. They work in daylight, but not at night. When Taliban approach a post, soldiers immediately launch these drones.”
But drones no longer belong exclusively to state militaries.
Both TTP and Hafiz Gul Bahadur’s faction have been studying the tactical potential of small commercial quadcopters. Over the past six months, according to multiple sources, TTP-linked intermediaries searched Kabul for importers of Chinese drones, hoping to purchase units that could be modified for reconnaissance and bombing missions. The goal, a source who met the buyers said, was clear: “They want drones that can observe, and then strike, a machine that can deliver a bomb at least ten kilometers away.”
Such modifications require specialists. The militants have been seeking engineers, university students, and technicians capable of upgrading batteries, cameras, stabilizers, and flight-control systems.
The first TTP drone attack, sources said, was conducted by Gul Bahadur’s group in Mir Ali, North Waziristan. The most recent attempt came on 19 July in Bannu district’s Miryan security zone, where Pakistani forces intercepted a drone carrying a mortar shell. Officials displayed the shell as evidence.
Before that failed attack, militants tested the drone in Paktika’s Laman region near the Durand Line. For now, their devices are rudimentary, functional only in daylight and capable of striking stationary targets. Attempts to deploy them more widely were blocked by the Afghan Taliban, who feared Pakistani retaliation.
Nevertheless, both TTP and Gul Bahadur’s faction have acquired several quadcopters. They refrain from using them regularly because the systems are basic and easily jammed or shot down. What they want are drones with thermal and night-vision capabilities, extended range, and higher payload capacity.
TTP fighters have also begun purchasing large numbers of Honda motorcycle batteries, valued for their longevity and reliability. The batteries power roadside IEDs and extend drone flight time. Previously, militants wired together six small batteries for remote-controlled mines, but these drained quickly, forcing bomb planters to risk their lives returning to replace them. The new method, using a single motorcycle battery, keeps mines active for a week at a time and can be triggered remotely via ICOM radios.
Why the Pakistani Taliban Want Drones
In the past four years, the combination of advanced American weapons and TTP’s evolving tactics has been devastating for Pakistan’s forces. Islamabad has responded by increasing its reliance on unmanned aerial vehicles, both domestically produced and Chinese-supplied.
In late April 2025, Pakistan announced it had killed fifty-four militants crossing the Durand Line into Datta Khel. Video footage later leaked from the operation showed a cluster of bodies felled simultaneously, tall trees uprooted around them. Analysts concluded it was a drone strike, one of many in recent months.
Most UAVs used by Pakistan are medium-altitude, indigenous drones developed after the country successfully tested its first armed drone, the Burraq, in 2015. All three branches of the military, army, air force, and navy, now deploy drones for surveillance, reconnaissance, and precision targeting. Their effectiveness during recent clashes with India further cemented their role in national defence strategy.
These same drones are now employed routinely against TTP positions inside Afghanistan.
Walking the Tightrope
The Afghan Taliban now occupy a precarious position, caught between their ideological allies, the Pakistani Taliban, and the demands of Pakistan and the broader international community. It is a delicate balance shaped by decades of shared wars, sanctuary, and dependency.
TTP, once a battlefield partner to the Afghan Taliban, renewed its allegiance to Hibatullah Akhundzada after the Taliban seized Kabul in August 2021. Today, it seeks something far greater than fraternal ties. It wants the Taliban’s blessing, and support, for its own vision of an Islamic Emirate in Pakistan.
On the other side of the equation is Pakistan, the Taliban’s longest-standing patron. For years, Pakistan provided sanctuary, medical care, education, and training grounds for the Afghan Taliban. Mullah Omar, Akhtar Mansour, Mullah Dadullah, and Hibatullah himself all spent formative years inside Pakistan.
Now, Islamabad demands something in return: rein in the TTP.
The Taliban cannot ignore Pakistan. Nor can they risk alienating an ally that sheltered them for decades. Meanwhile, the United States and international community watch closely, urging the Taliban to honour the Doha Agreement, which obliges them not to allow Afghan soil to be used against neighbouring countries.
But the reality on the ground is more complicated.
Along stretches of the Durand Line, TTP has built a parallel ecosystem, networks of local Taliban allies, sympathetic religious leaders, and thriving arms markets. These nodes of support create a disconnect between Kabul’s official posture and the loyalties of fighters embedded in border districts.
Formally, the Taliban insist they do not harbor armed groups. Practically, they tolerate TTP movement, weapons markets, and safe houses. Some Taliban commanders see the TTP as a strategic asset, a potential lever over Islamabad and other regional actors. It is a dangerous calculus, one with historic echoes.
TTP activity now alarm regional powers. China fears for its flagship Belt and Road investments, especially the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which insurgent attacks have repeatedly threatened. Iran and Russia want the Taliban to maintain stability to prevent any pretext for US re-engagement in the region. The Taliban, haunted by the memory of 2001, know the consequences of miscalculation.
They can neither fully embrace the TTP nor decisively break from it. A crackdown risks armed confrontation and internal fractures. Leniency risks regional backlash.
General Sami Sadat, the former Afghan army commander who fought the Taliban in Helmand, warned that history is circling back. “Because of the Taliban’s misguided policies,” he said, “there is a real fear of massive Afghan casualties. Supporting TTP, al-Qaeda, and ISIS could once again invite foreign intervention.”
Note to Readers
This report is based on extensive field research, interviews with TTP members, Afghan Taliban affiliates, tribal elders, security analysts, arms dealers, smugglers, and local collaborators, as well as independently verified information. Some names are pseudonyms for security reasons.
