Pakistan’s militants are fighting from the air now

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Pakistan’s militant landscape has shifted in recent months, in both scale and method. Open-source data from the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP) shows that Balochistan overtook Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in July as the country’s most volatile region, recording 176 attacks and 438 deaths against 143 incidents and 244 fatalities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa over the same period. This wave carried something new: weaponized commercial quadcopters. On July 2, security forces shot down a militant quadcopter near the Pishin Scouts’ 134 Wing in Pishin district. Three days later, a commercial drone came down in Kalat district, killing one person and injuring 10. 

The adoption of commercially available unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by militant networks in Pakistan is a tactical evolution, not a strategic shift. It tracks a global pattern in which violent non-state actors turn to commercial drones for surveillance and strike operations. As off-the-shelf technology becomes cheaper, simpler to operate and easier to obtain, militant groups have moved quickly to weaponize it and exploit its asymmetric advantages.

The first cluster of militant drone incidents in Pakistan, six or seven in all, came in 2024 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s North Waziristan district, where the Hafiz Gul Bahadur Group (HGBG) targeted military convoys and checkpoints with improvised explosive-laden bottles. Two years on, the trendlines are clear: militant drone use is no longer an anomaly but a........

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