‘One eye on the barrel, the other on the sky’: How police in Bannu are dealing with evolving militant tactics

For nearly five months since June, police in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s southern Bannu district have battled not just militants on the ground, but have also had to fend off enemy attacks from the sky.

“One eye on the barrel of the gun and another on the sky,” a senior police officer in Bannu remarked.

For months, militants from the adjoining tribal areas launched multiple armed quadcopter sorties to try to attack police posts and police stations.

“Fifty attempts in one week,” Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Inspector General of Police (IG) Zulfiqar Hameed recalled.

Police in Bannu said they faced more than two hundred attacks, which employed commercially available, low-cost drones weaponised by militants to target them since June.

Changing tactics

Militants usually employ improvised munitions during quadcopter attacks. Weapons of choice are grenades used in Russian-origin under-barrel grenade launchers, such as the GP-25, and small calibre mortar rounds.

Unprepared for the deployment of quadcopters modified to drop improvised munitions on targets, the police started to deploy nets over their installations or simply installed a canopy overhead to obstruct the munitions ahead of impact.

“We had to position snipers on rooftops to shoot down any approaching object,” Bannu Additional Inspector General of Police (AIG) Sajjad Khan said.

In one instance, a drone chased a vehicle evacuating 11 policemen, one of them wounded, following an ambush in the city’s outskirts.

“It was hovering and chasing,” Ebaad Wazir, the second-in-command in the Bannu police, who was driving the vehicle, recalled. Militants filmed a video of the chase, and it went viral on social media.

The introduction of drone warfare by militants — the first time they have been employed against Pakistani forces — manifested a new phase and perhaps the most deadly transformation of the decades-long war that has claimed thousands of lives, both civilian and uniformed, and uprooted hundreds of thousands of others.

The quadcopters, equipped with thermal imaging, are used for surveillance and dropping munitions. Militants are also adapting to changing battlefield conditions and now routinely change the frequencies on which their drones operate to try and stay one step ahead of jammers employed by security forces.

Intelligence and police officials said such tactics and knowledge require training and can only come with expertise shared by seasoned terrorists.

“Tactics deployed in complex suicide bombings carry telltale signs of this as well.”

Officials also did not discount the presence of foreign terrorists in the region, and said they could have been a likely source of such expertise.

Losing ‘the edge’

For nearly two decades until August 2021, Islamabad and its forces had the edge in terms of weaponry and tactics, although for the police, it still was an almost equal fight; close-quarters combat while armed with AK-47 rifles.

All of that changed when the United States, exhausted by the seemingly unending war in Afghanistan after spending trillions of dollars, withdrew from the country and left behind $7.1 billion worth of military equipment and defence articles.

According to a November 2022 report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, among the abandoned weapons were more than 300,000 small arms — including M-4s, M-16s, M-24s and M-249s — and 48,000 pieces of specialised equipment such as night vision goggles, thermal imaging scopes, and radio surveillance equipment.

“The Americans left Afghanistan in a deliberate mess,” a Pakistani security official, posted at the time in Kabul as part of the tripartite commission, recalled.

It did not take long for celebrations in some circles in Pakistan to turn into nightmares. Not only did militants’ attacks increase manifold, but the lethality of their attacks also spiked.

The battlefield landscape changed dramatically. Armed with US weapons with night vision and thermal capabilities, snipers shot and killed elements of security forces from as far as 1,500 metres, while steel-core 5.56 millimetre ammunition could pierce through bulletproof vests and helmets.

“They were killing our men like sitting ducks,” a senior police officer said.

Even the military-issued G-3 rifles, chambered in the 7.62mm Nato calibre, fell short on range and efficacy compared with the US M-4s and M-16s.

“They had an edge over us,” the police officer added.

As casualties began to mount, with militants relishing targeting unsuspecting personnel with thermal imaging scopes and uploading the videos on the internet, policymakers began to figure out what to do next.

What followed, according to senior police officers, was a process of long deliberations, interviews, and debriefings with scores of their colleagues in uniform who survived night attacks, to understand militants’ tactics and weapons used in the assaults and “reshape our tactics”.

It was not long before realisation dawned: not only had militants improved their strategy and tactics, but they also had much better weaponry.

“We were very late in adopting new technology,” IG Hameed acknowledged.

His men were not only short on better weapons but also on trained manpower to use them. It was a race against time to procure weapons and assemble a team to use them.

Soviet-era Dragunov designated marksman rifles, trusted by many soldiers and still in use, were fitted with long-range thermal scopes for better accuracy.

‘Tipping the balance’

With help from the military, efforts to procure an assortment of weapons and equipment from the international market began immediately.

Billions of rupees were spent and many billions more are to be poured in by the end of the next financial year to purchase weapons and equipment to keep up with the rising behemoth of militancy.

The list of the systems purchased so far includes American M-16s, M-24 sniper rifles, M-249 machine guns, light sniper rifles (LSRs), thermal weapon sights (TWS), anti-drone guns, medium and long-range surveillance and assault drones and high frequency jammers to shield armoured vehicles from roadside bombings.

Personnel are also being trained in marksmanship and special operation teams (SOTs) are being formed at the divisional level. They would later be expanded to district levels and are being armed and equipped with the latest weaponry to respond to threats and defend positions.

Police and military officials say the availability of better weaponry is already having an impact on the battlefield.

“We are tipping the balance”, the IG said.

In Bannu, the police say they are now seeing fewer quadcopter attacks on their police stations, thanks to anti-drone guns. In the past month, five drone attacks were repulsed; one was shot down by a police sniper, while two others were made dysfunctional with anti-drone guns.

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The number of drone and night attacks is declining in areas where militants realise state forces have night vision and anti-drone capabilities.

But as one senior police officer remarked, this was a long haul, a battle of nerves, resources and strategy.

“We may be killing them, but are we killing the problem?”

Header image: Pakistani Army soldiers secure the area, following a militant attack on the Frontier Constabulary (FC) headquarters in Bannu on September 2, 2025. — Reuters