Pakistan promised its proxy warriors one thing above all others: sanctuary. For decades, that promise held. Lashkar-e-Taiba commanders walked freely through Lahore’s markets, Jaish-e-Mohammed operatives ran furniture shops in Karachi under false identities, Hizbul Mujahideen infiltration chiefs maintained homes in Rawalpindi within walking distance of Pakistan Army headquarters, and Khalistan Commando Force leaders took morning strolls through gated housing societies without fear. The promise of sanctuary was not informal or incidental; it was the foundational contract between the Pakistani state and the proxy groups it deployed against India. Train, arm, launch, return, and live safely ever after. That contract is now broken, and every city that once sheltered India’s most-wanted has become a theater for targeted killings that follow a consistent, disciplined, and unmistakable pattern.

The transformation did not happen overnight, and it did not happen everywhere at once. It began in Karachi in early 2022, when Zahoor Mistry, one of the five hijackers of Indian Airlines flight IC-814, was shot dead by two motorcycle-borne assailants outside his furniture shop in Akhtar Colony. Mistry had lived in Karachi for years under the alias Zahid Akhund, running Crescent Furniture and moving through the city’s chaotic streets with the confidence of a man who believed no one was looking for him. Two bullets to the head proved otherwise. Within months, similar killings surfaced in Rawalpindi, then Lahore, then Rawalakot in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, then Sialkot, then Nawabshah in rural Sindh, then Landi Kotal deep inside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s tribal belt. Each killing shared operational features with the others: motorcycle-borne assailants, point-blank range, precise targeting of individuals designated as wanted by India, rapid escape, and no claim of responsibility.

The geographic breadth of these killings is what separates them from isolated acts of violence in a country where political and sectarian killings are tragically common. Pakistan records hundreds of targeted killings every year, most of them linked to ethnic disputes, sectarian rivalries, criminal enterprises, or the ongoing Balochistan insurgency. What distinguishes the shadow war’s pattern is the target profile: every individual killed fits a specific criterion, designation by the Indian government as a wanted figure under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, affiliation with organizations that India considers existential threats, and operational histories that include planning or facilitating attacks on Indian soil. This target profile cannot be explained by any internal Pakistani dynamic. Sectarian killers do not target Kashmiri, Punjabi, Pashtun, and Sikh individuals from four unrelated organizations using identical methods. Criminal networks do not align their victim selection with a foreign government’s designation lists. The target profile is the first and most powerful piece of evidence that something external, systematic, and strategically directed is at work.

This article maps that geographic transformation city by city. For every Pakistani city where a wanted figure has been killed, it names the target, identifies the organization, records the date and method, and examines the geographic significance of the location. The resulting picture is not a collection of isolated incidents scattered randomly across a map. It is a systematic campaign that has penetrated every major region of Pakistan, from the Arabian Sea coast to the Afghan frontier, from the Line of Control to the heartland of Punjab. The map is itself an argument: Pakistan’s guarantee of sanctuary has been broken, and every city that sheltered India’s enemies, Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Sialkot, Nawabshah, Rawalakot, Landi Kotal, has now witnessed at least one targeted killing. The safe haven is no longer safe, and the individuals who relied on it know this.

The Guarantee That Broke

Understanding the transformation requires understanding what the guarantee was and why it held for so long. Pakistan’s relationship with proxy armed groups was never a temporary arrangement born of crisis. It was, as Christine Fair argues in her definitive study of Pakistan’s military strategy, a core feature of the army’s revisionist foreign policy, a way of prosecuting conflict against India without triggering the full-scale conventional war that Pakistan’s smaller military could not win. The army’s embrace of groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed was not reluctant or regretful; it was strategic, sustained, and thoroughly institutionalized.

The roots of this institutionalization reach back to the 1947 war over Kashmir, when Pakistan first dispatched irregular fighters into the princely state. Over the following decades, the practice evolved from ad hoc deployment to systematic cultivation. The 1965 Operation Gibraltar, in which Pakistan Army personnel disguised as irregulars attempted to infiltrate Kashmir, demonstrated both the appeal and the risks of proxy warfare. The real acceleration came after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, when Pakistan’s ISI became the primary conduit for CIA funding to the Afghan mujahideen. The Afghan jihad provided Pakistan with a blueprint for managing armed proxies: recruit through madrassas, train in dedicated camps, arm through covert supply chains, and deploy under the cover of religious motivation. When the Afghan jihad ended, this blueprint was redirected toward Kashmir, and the organizations that would later become India’s primary security threats, LeT, JeM, and Hizbul Mujahideen, were built on the infrastructure originally created for the Afghan war.

The sanctuary guarantee that accompanied this relationship operated on multiple levels. At the most basic level, Pakistani cities provided physical protection. LeT’s 200-acre compound in Muridke, just outside Lahore, functioned as a training campus and organizational headquarters in plain sight. JeM’s base in Bahawalpur, Masood Azhar’s hometown in southern Punjab, served as the group’s planning and logistics center. These facilities were not hidden. They were known to every intelligence service in the world, listed in United States Department of State Country Reports on Terrorism, documented in United Nations Security Council sanctions filings, and photographed by commercial satellites. Their survival was not a function of concealment but of state protection.

At a deeper level, the sanctuary guarantee provided something more valuable than physical safety: it provided impunity. Wanted figures lived under their own names in many cases, or under thin aliases that Pakistani authorities could have penetrated in an afternoon. Hafiz Saeed, co-founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba and the most internationally sanctioned individual in Pakistan, maintained a residence in Lahore’s Johar Town that was effectively a private compound, complete with mosque, madrasa, personal vehicles, and Pakistan Army bodyguards. After Indian media documented the facility, the Pakistan Army claimed Saeed was imprisoned, but the compound remained operational. The impunity was not accidental; it was the entire point. Organizations that fight your proxy wars require the assurance that they will not be abandoned.

Ayesha Siddiqa, the Pakistani defense analyst whose work on the military’s economic empire exposed the institutional incentives behind the proxy relationship, described the guarantee as a function of military corporatism. The Pakistan Army’s vast business holdings, its political dominance, and its self-conception as the sole guarantor of national security created an institutional environment where maintaining proxy groups was rational from the army’s perspective, even when the international consequences were severe. The Financial Action Task Force grey-listing, repeated Indian diplomatic protests, American frustration, and occasional sanctions all failed to break the guarantee because the army calculated that the proxy groups’ utility against India outweighed the costs.

For the individuals who operated within this system, the guarantee was existential. Consider the life of Shahid Latif, the JeM operative who masterminded the January 2016 attack on the Indian Air Force base at Pathankot that killed seven security personnel. Latif had originally infiltrated Kashmir in 1993, was arrested in India in 1994, and spent sixteen years in an Indian prison where he met and was radicalized further by Masood Azhar himself. After his release and deportation to Pakistan in 2010, Latif settled in the Daska area of Sialkot district in Pakistan’s Punjab, became the imam of Noori-e-Madina mosque, and operated as JeM’s local launching commander while living openly in the community. He was detained briefly by Pakistani authorities after the Pathankot attack drew international attention, then released, and resumed his activities. His entire post-deportation life was built on the assumption that Pakistan would protect him. On October 11, 2023, three men who had pretended to be worshippers entered the mosque during pre-dawn prayers and shot him dead.

The guarantee broke because something changed on the other side of the equation. The Pulwama attack of February 14, 2019, in which a JeM suicide bomber killed forty Central Reserve Police Force personnel in Kashmir, is widely cited as the inflection point. India’s response to Pulwama, the Balakot airstrike of February 26, 2019, was the first time Indian aircraft had struck targets inside Pakistan since the 1971 war. But the airstrike was a single event, a dramatic escalation followed by a rapid de-escalation. The shadow war that began afterward was something different: a sustained, low-intensity campaign of targeted killings that did not announce itself, did not claim credit, and did not stop. The Balakot airstrike broke the barrier to using force inside Pakistan. The shadow war that followed broke the sanctuary guarantee itself.

The shift was not purely reactive; it reflected a deeper transformation in India’s strategic posture that had been building for years. Ajai Sahni, director of the South Asia Terrorism Portal and one of the most careful analysts of India-Pakistan dynamics, observed that India’s tolerance for Pakistani-sponsored attacks had steadily eroded over the two decades following the IC-814 hijacking. Each major attack, the 2001 Parliament assault, the 2006 Mumbai train bombings, the 2008 Mumbai siege, the 2016 Pathankot and Uri attacks, generated political pressure for retaliatory action. The Balakot strike demonstrated that India possessed both the capability and the political will to act. The shadow war demonstrated that the action could be sustained, calibrated, and operationally deniable, a combination that traditional military strikes could not achieve.

India’s alleged approach also drew lessons from intelligence agencies whose extraterritorial operations were well documented. The Guardian’s investigation, citing unnamed Indian intelligence sources, reported that RAW’s shift to targeting individuals overseas was directly inspired by Israel’s Mossad and its decades-long practice of hunting designated targets on foreign soil. The parallel is instructive in both its similarities and its limits. Mossad’s post-Munich “Wrath of God” program operated across Europe and the Middle East for years before Israel acknowledged it. The operational model, using intelligence-directed local assets or deployed teams to execute carefully surveilled targets, bears resemblance to the pattern observed in Pakistan. But the scale differs: Mossad’s program targeted approximately two dozen individuals over several years, while the Pakistan campaign has reportedly reached over twenty confirmed killings in four years across a far larger geographic area.

Karachi: The City Where the Campaign Began

Karachi is Pakistan’s largest city, its economic capital, its most chaotic metropolis, and the place where the shadow war’s first confirmed killing occurred. With a population exceeding fifteen million, Karachi is a city of dense informal settlements, labyrinthine market districts, sprawling industrial zones, and entrenched criminal networks that operate alongside and sometimes within the city’s political and security structures. For decades, these very characteristics made Karachi the ideal refuge for wanted individuals. A city where the police struggle to enforce traffic laws is not a city where a man living under a false name will be found by accident.

Zahoor Mistry exploited exactly this quality when he settled in Akhtar Colony, a working-class commercial district in Karachi’s eastern neighborhoods, after the IC-814 hijacking in 1999. Under the alias Zahid Akhund, Mistry ran Crescent Furniture, a small business that provided cover for his presence in the area. He had lived in Karachi for over two decades by the time two men on a motorcycle entered his furniture warehouse on March 1, 2022, and shot him twice in the head at close range. CCTV footage from the area showed the assailants wearing helmets and face coverings, arriving on a motorcycle, entering the shop, executing the killing, and departing within minutes. Pakistan’s Geo TV reported the death of a “businessman” in Karachi without providing details. The Pakistani media was instructed not to report on the incident, according to local intelligence sources cited by Indian journalists.

The most consequential aspect of Mistry’s killing was not the death itself but the funeral that followed. Top JeM leaders, including Rauf Asghar, the organization’s operational chief and the brother of Masood Azhar, attended the prayer meeting in Karachi. Their attendance was documented by local observers, and the intelligence value was immense. A funeral that was supposed to honor a fallen comrade instead exposed the physical presence and identities of JeM’s senior leadership to anyone who was watching. Mistry’s funeral was the most expensive intelligence gift the shadow war ever produced, because the leadership that attended revealed themselves at a moment when they believed they were among friends.

Karachi’s significance extends beyond Mistry. The city hosts a concentration of LeT, JeM, and Jamaat-ud-Dawa operatives who have settled there over decades, drawn by the city’s size, its economic opportunities for cover employment, and its history of providing refuge to individuals fleeing law enforcement in other provinces. Saleem Rehmani, another individual wanted by India and designated as a “terrorist” under Indian law, was shot dead in Karachi in January 2022, just weeks before Mistry’s killing. Rehmani’s death attracted less attention than Mistry’s, partly because his organizational profile was lower and partly because the pattern had not yet been recognized as a pattern. In retrospect, Rehmani’s killing was the opening move: the first confirmed incident in what would become a multi-year, multi-city campaign. Multiple targeted killings of wanted figures have been reported in the city’s sprawling neighborhoods in the years since, and the pattern in Karachi follows a consistent operational signature. The assailants arrive on motorcycles, a mode of transport so common in Karachi’s congested streets that it attracts zero attention. They identify the target through surveillance that appears to span weeks or months, a finding consistent with the detailed knowledge of daily routines that the killings demonstrate. They strike during moments of predictable behavior, such as when the target opens his shop or walks a familiar route, and they escape into the dense traffic within minutes.

The operational environment Karachi provides is paradoxically both the reason the city was a safe haven and the reason it has become such an effective hunting ground. The same density that conceals wanted individuals also conceals their pursuers. The same chaos that makes policing difficult also makes surveillance of a single target relatively simple, because no one notices two men on a motorcycle watching a furniture shop. Karachi’s criminal underworld, extensively documented in Pakistani police records and judicial proceedings, provides a ready supply of individuals willing to participate in violent acts for payment, and the city’s ethnic and sectarian fault lines create opportunities for deniability, since any killing in Karachi can be attributed to gang violence, sectarian rivalry, or personal disputes.

For the broader campaign, Karachi served as the proving ground. If the first killing had been botched, if Mistry’s assailants had been identified and captured, if Pakistani police had broken the operational cell, the campaign might have ended before it started. Instead, the clean execution in a city with extensive CCTV coverage, active police presence, and dense population demonstrated that the operational model worked. After Karachi, the campaign expanded outward to cities where the risks were different but the method remained constant.

Rawalpindi: Into the Garrison City

If Karachi demonstrated that the shadow war could penetrate Pakistan’s largest city, Rawalpindi demonstrated something more provocative: the campaign could operate within sight of the Pakistan Army’s own headquarters. Rawalpindi is the twin city of Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, and it is home to General Headquarters (GHQ), the nerve center of the Pakistan military. The city’s streets are patrolled by military police, its neighborhoods are monitored by multiple security agencies, and its proximity to the centers of state power makes it arguably the most surveilled urban area in Pakistan outside of the Islamabad Red Zone.

Bashir Ahmad Peer, alias Imtiyaz Alam, was shot dead in Rawalpindi on the evening of February 20, 2023. Peer was the launching commander of Hizbul Mujahideen, responsible for organizing the infiltration of armed fighters from Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir across the Line of Control into Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. Originally from the Babarpora area of Kupwara district, he had crossed into Pakistan over fifteen years earlier and settled in Rawalpindi, where he maintained contact with Hizbul’s broader network and coordinated logistics for infiltration operations. The Indian government had designated him as a wanted figure under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act on October 4, 2022, a designation that specifically named his role in providing logistics to banned groups and his participation in online propaganda campaigns to unite former fighters across multiple organizations.

Two assailants on a motorcycle shot Peer from point-blank range outside a shop in Rawalpindi. The method was identical to the Karachi killings: motorcycle approach, close-range gunfire, rapid departure, no claim of responsibility. Pakistani media reported the killing with minimal detail, and some outlets attributed it to inter-group rivalry, suggesting that internal disputes among Pakistan-based armed organizations had led to Peer’s death. The Inter-Services Intelligence was also suggested by some reports as a possible actor, given Peer’s connections to figures who had defied Pakistan’s writ.

The attribution debate surrounding Peer’s death is itself instructive. Pakistani authorities have every incentive to frame the killings as internal matters rather than successful penetrations by a foreign intelligence service. Admitting that RAW operatives or RAW-directed assets can conduct assassinations in Rawalpindi, a city that functions as the Pakistan Army’s backyard, would be an acknowledgment of catastrophic security failure. The alternative explanations, inter-group rivalry, personal disputes, ISI housecleaning, serve a domestic narrative purpose regardless of their accuracy. But the pattern is difficult to explain away through internal rivalries alone. Peer was killed using the same method, with the same timing, and with the same operational signature as individuals killed in Karachi, Lahore, Sialkot, and Rawalakot. At some point, coincidence stops being a credible explanation.

Peer’s biography reveals the layered infrastructure that sustained him in Rawalpindi and that the killing disrupted. Beyond his infiltration duties, he participated in online propaganda groups designed to unite former fighters from Hizbul, LeT, and other organizations into coordinated networks. He was accused by pro-Zakir Musa Telegram channels of facilitating the death of Ansar Gazwat-ul-Hind chief Zakir Musa on May 23, 2019, a charge that reflected the internal tensions between pro-Pakistan and pro-caliphate factions within the Kashmir armed movement. In March 2007, the Pakistan Army’s Military Intelligence Directorate had detained him after he dispatched a twelve-man unit to reinforce a subordinate commander without authorization. His relationship with the Pakistani state was therefore complex: he was a useful asset whom the state protected, but also an occasionally disobedient one whom the state periodically disciplined. His killing in Rawalpindi eliminated a node in a network that spanned multiple organizations and multiple decades of proxy warfare.

For the geographic analysis of the safe haven transformation, Rawalpindi represents the most symbolically significant penetration. Killing a wanted figure in Karachi’s chaos is operationally difficult but conceptually unremarkable, since Karachi has always been violent. Killing one in Rawalpindi, where the Pakistan Army maintains its tightest grip on public order, sends a message that transcends the individual target. The city’s military checkpoints, intelligence offices, and surveillance cameras are designed to detect exactly the kind of covert operation that killed Peer. That the operation succeeded despite these defenses implies either a level of operational skill that overwhelms Pakistan’s garrison-city security, or a level of local complicity that undermines it, or both. If Rawalpindi is not safe, nowhere in Pakistan is safe, and the individuals living under the sanctuary guarantee in other cities must reckon with the possibility that they are next.

Lahore: The Heart of Pakistan Under Siege

Lahore is Pakistan’s cultural capital, the capital of Punjab province, the center of the country’s political establishment, and the city most closely associated with the infrastructure of jihad against India. Hafiz Saeed’s primary residence was in Lahore’s Johar Town. LeT’s organizational headquarters, from which the 2008 Mumbai attack was coordinated, are in the Lahore suburbs. The Jamaat-ud-Dawa network, LeT’s charitable front that served as its recruitment pipeline, maintained its largest concentration of offices and seminaries in and around Lahore. For senior leadership of Pakistan’s proxy groups, Lahore was not merely a safe haven; it was home.

The June 23, 2021, car bombing near Hafiz Saeed’s residence in Johar Town was the earliest signal that Lahore’s sanctuary was under threat. A vehicle packed with an estimated thirty kilograms of explosives detonated near Saeed’s compound, killing three people and wounding more than twenty. Pakistan’s National Security Adviser Moeed Yusuf publicly attributed the attack to India, stating that while the three individuals arrested were Pakistani citizens, the intelligence assessment indicated a foreign hand behind the operation. The car bomb did not kill Saeed, who was reportedly not at the residence at the time, but it demonstrated that the most protected individual in Pakistan’s proxy apparatus could be reached in his own neighborhood.

Paramjit Singh Panjwar’s killing in Lahore on May 6, 2023, confirmed that the safe haven had been comprehensively breached. Panjwar, the chief of the Khalistan Commando Force, had lived in Lahore for decades under the alias Malik Sardar Singh. He maintained a residence in Sunflower Society in Johar Town, the same upscale suburb where Saeed lived. Born in Panjwar village near Tarn Taran in India’s Punjab, he had led the KCF since the 1990s, was involved in the assassination of retired General Arun Vaidya in 1986 and the killing of Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh in 1995, and had been designated as a wanted individual by the Indian government in July 2020 under the UAPA. He took morning walks through his housing society with the confidence of a man who had lived undisturbed for years. On May 6, at approximately 6 AM, two motorcycle-borne men shot him dead during his walk.

Panjwar’s killing shattered two assumptions simultaneously. First, it showed that the campaign was not limited to Kashmiri armed groups affiliated with LeT, JeM, or Hizbul. The KCF is a Sikh separatist organization with no Kashmir connection, meaning the target selection criteria extended beyond the Kashmir theater to encompass any group designated as a threat by India, regardless of ideology or operational focus. Second, it showed that Lahore’s police, military checkpoints, and intelligence presence offered no meaningful protection against the operational model the campaign employed. If two men on a motorcycle can kill a wanted figure during a morning walk in one of Lahore’s most prosperous neighborhoods, the city’s surveillance infrastructure is either incapable of preventing such events or not genuinely trying.

Panjwar’s biography illuminated the depth of the ISI-Khalistan relationship that the killing disrupted. Born in the Tarn Taran district of India’s Punjab, he had joined the KCF in 1986 and risen through its ranks during the Punjab insurgency. Under his leadership, the organization was linked to the assassination of retired General Arun Vaidya in 1986 and the killing of Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh in 1995. After the collapse of the Punjab insurgency in the mid-1990s, Panjwar crossed into Pakistan and settled in Lahore with ISI support. His wife and children relocated to Germany, but Panjwar remained in Lahore, maintaining contact with KCF operatives in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Europe. He was designated as a wanted figure by the Indian government under the UAPA in July 2020, a designation that specifically named his involvement in drug and weapons smuggling, his efforts to reactivate former fighters and sleeper cells in Indian Punjab, and his role in arranging arms training for youths in Pakistan. His killing in Lahore decapitated an organization that had survived for nearly four decades by adapting its operations from guerrilla warfare to transnational logistics and recruitment.

The 2026 escalation in Lahore represented the sharpest acceleration of the campaign’s geographic ambition. On April 16, 2026, Amir Hamza, a founding member of Lashkar-e-Taiba and co-founder of the organization alongside Hafiz Saeed, was shot by unidentified gunmen outside a news channel office at Hamdard Chowk. Hamza suffered severe injuries and was reported in critical condition. This was the second assassination attempt against him in less than a year, following a previous attack near his residence in May 2025. Hamza is not a mid-level operative or a regional commander; he is one of the founders of LeT, a member of its central advisory committee, a designated sanctioned individual by the United States Treasury Department, and a figure whose elimination or incapacitation would represent the deepest blow to the organization’s leadership in its history.

The Hamza attack elevated the stakes beyond anything the campaign had previously attempted in Lahore. Panjwar was a veteran of a largely defunct Khalistan organization; his killing was significant but did not threaten the operational core of Pakistan’s active proxy infrastructure. Hamza was different. His stature within LeT, his proximity to Saeed, his role in recruitment, fundraising, and propaganda, and his designation as a sanctioned figure all made him a target of extraordinary value. That the assailants could reach him outside a news channel office in central Lahore, despite the heightened security that followed the first attempt on his life, suggested either extraordinary operational capability or local support from individuals within Lahore’s own communities.

Sialkot and Daska: The Punjab Frontier

Sialkot sits in Pakistan’s northeastern Punjab, less than fifteen kilometers from the Indian border at Jammu, and it has functioned for decades as a launching pad for infiltration into Indian-administered Kashmir. The proximity to the border made Sialkot a natural base for JeM operatives who organized the dispatch of armed fighters across the Line of Control. Shahid Latif, the JeM operative who masterminded the Pathankot airbase attack, chose Daska, a town within Sialkot district, as his base of operations after his deportation from India in 2010.

Latif’s biography illuminates the sanctuary guarantee at its most granular. He had infiltrated Kashmir in 1993, was captured in 1994, and spent sixteen years in the Kot Balwal jail in Jammu, where he met Masood Azhar, who was also imprisoned there until his release in the IC-814 hostage exchange of December 1999. After serving his full sentence, Latif was deported through the Attari-Wagah border crossing and returned to Pakistan, where he formalized his membership in JeM and became its launching commander in Sialkot. He served as imam of the Noori-e-Madina mosque in Daska, a position that gave him both community standing and a predictable daily routine. He was wanted by India’s National Investigation Agency for his role in the Pathankot attack, which killed seven IAF personnel during a three-day siege in January 2016. He was also linked to the 2013 attacks on the Samba and Hiranagar police stations. Despite this record, he lived openly in Daska, surrounded by bodyguards but not hidden.

On October 11, 2023, three men arrived at the Noori-e-Madina mosque on a motorcycle during the pre-dawn Fajr prayer. They entered the mosque complex, pretending to be worshippers, and opened fire on Latif as he was leaving after prayers. Latif and his security guard Hashim Ali were killed on the spot. His close associate, Maulana Ahad, the prayer leader of the mosque, was seriously wounded and died the following day. The attackers escaped on the motorcycle. Punjab Police registered an FIR against six unknown suspects. The district police officer of Sialkot described it publicly as a targeted killing and an act of terrorism.

The mosque pattern that killed Latif in Daska was not new. Abu Qasim had been shot inside a mosque in Rawalakot a month earlier, in September 2023. The repetition of the mosque method across different cities and different organizational targets confirmed what the modus operandi analysis of the campaign had already suggested: the attackers exploit the one daily routine that is both perfectly predictable and socially impossible to abandon. A devout man will attend pre-dawn prayers at the same mosque every morning. He cannot avoid the mosque without arousing suspicion in his own community, and the pre-dawn hour provides darkness for approach and escape. The mosque is simultaneously the most vulnerable moment in the target’s day and the most difficult to defend without fundamentally altering the target’s way of life.

Sialkot’s significance for the broader safe haven transformation lies in its proximity to the Indian border and its role in JeM’s operations. The city is not a chaotic metropolis like Karachi or a sprawling cultural capital like Lahore. It is a relatively small, well-ordered Punjab city where unfamiliar faces attract attention and where the military and police maintain routine checkpoints due to the border’s proximity. Conducting a targeted killing in Sialkot requires either local assets who blend into the community or infiltration capabilities that can bypass the security architecture of a border-adjacent garrison area. Whichever explanation applies, the operational confidence implied by the Latif killing is significant.

The elimination of Latif, coming after the killings of Mistry in Karachi, Peer in Rawalpindi, and Panjwar in Lahore, completed the geographic encirclement of Pakistan’s Punjab heartland. Karachi is in Sindh, Rawalpindi is in Islamabad Capital Territory’s twin city, and Sialkot is in Punjab proper. No province, no region, and no city type, large or small, chaotic or ordered, was immune.

Sialkot’s significance also extends to its role in the India-Pakistan border dynamic. The city sits along one of the most heavily militarized frontiers on earth. Pakistan Army units maintain permanent deployments in the Sialkot sector, and the Indian Army’s corresponding formations across the border in Jammu have fought Pakistani forces in this area during the 1965 and 1971 wars. The Working Boundary, the de facto border in the Sialkot-Jammu sector, is monitored by observation posts, surveillance radars, and regular patrols on both sides. JeM chose Sialkot as a launching base precisely because the proximity to the border reduced the distance that infiltrators needed to travel through hostile terrain. The operational planners of the Pathankot attack, which Latif organized, exploited the Sialkot-Jammu corridor to dispatch the four-man assault team that penetrated the airbase in January 2016.

Conducting a targeted killing in a city that serves this dual function, both as a launching base for cross-border infiltration and as a garrison zone with heightened military presence, required the attackers to navigate a security environment that was more alert and more layered than most Pakistani cities. The Pakistan Rangers, a paramilitary force under the Interior Ministry, maintain a visible presence in Sialkot in addition to the regular police and Pakistan Army units. Intelligence agencies, both civilian and military, monitor the city for cross-border communications, suspicious movements, and evidence of Indian intelligence activity. That the attackers could penetrate this environment, identify Latif’s prayer schedule at a specific mosque, position three operatives inside the mosque complex before dawn, execute the killing, and escape without capture suggests either a catastrophic failure of Pakistan’s border-zone security or a level of operational proficiency that Pakistan’s counter-intelligence has not yet been able to match.

Rawalakot and Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir: Beyond the Line of Control

Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir holds a unique position in the geography of the shadow war. It is the territory from which armed infiltrators are launched across the Line of Control into Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, the staging ground for decades of proxy conflict, and the region where multiple training camps and staging facilities have been documented by Indian and international intelligence assessments. For the operatives who organize infiltration operations, PoK is not merely a safe haven; it is the front line, the place where they do their work.

Riyaz Ahmad, alias Abu Qasim, was shot dead inside the Al-Qudus mosque near Sabir Shaheed Stadium in Rawalakot on September 8, 2023. Ahmad was a Lashkar-e-Taiba commander who had crossed into Pakistan from the Jammu region in 1999 and established himself as a key operational figure within LeT’s Kashmir-focused infrastructure. He was identified as one of the primary conspirators behind the Dhangri terror attack of January 1, 2023, in which gunmen attacked a village in the Rajouri district of Jammu and Kashmir, killing seven civilians and injuring thirteen. An improvised explosive device planted at the scene detonated the following morning, increasing the casualty toll.

Ahmad mostly operated from LeT’s base camp in Muridke, near Lahore, but had recently relocated to Rawalakot. He was a close associate of Sajjad Jaat, LeT’s chief commander, and managed the organization’s financial operations in addition to his operational role. According to the FIR examined by the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, Ahmad was sitting in the second row of worshippers during Fajr prayers when a man wearing trousers, a shirt, and a helmet fired four bullets at him. A second man waited in the mosque’s veranda. Both fled after the attack. Ahmad had stayed at the mosque overnight as a guest of the prayer leader, Qari Amjad Hashmi, and was scheduled to depart on Friday. The timing suggests that the attackers knew his travel schedule and were positioned to intercept him during a brief window of opportunity in an unfamiliar location.

The killing of Abu Qasim in Rawalakot carried operational implications that distinguished it from the urban killings in Karachi and Lahore. Rawalakot is not a large city; it is a town in the Poonch division of PoK, situated in mountainous terrain with limited access roads and a security presence dominated by the Pakistan Army. Conducting operations across the Line of Control requires either assets already embedded in PoK communities or the ability to infiltrate operatives into a region where the Pakistan military maintains heightened vigilance due to its role as a launch zone for Kashmir operations. The irony is pointed: the very territory from which Pakistan organizes armed infiltration into India has become a territory where India’s alleged agents can conduct targeted killings.

Ahmad’s operational profile made his killing particularly damaging to LeT’s Kashmir apparatus. He was not merely a field commander but a financial manager who oversaw the organization’s funding streams. Eliminating a financial operative disrupts not only the tactical planning he managed but the monetary flows that sustain training camps, weapons procurement, family stipends for deceased fighters, and the logistical pipeline that moves recruits from Pakistani cities to PoK staging areas and then across the Line of Control. His dual role, both operational and financial, meant that his death created cascading disruptions across multiple organizational functions, a compounding effect that a purely tactical leader’s elimination would not produce.

The Dawn newspaper’s reporting on the incident, based on the FIR filed by local authorities, provided unusually granular detail about the killing. Ahmad had stayed at the Al-Qudus mosque overnight as a guest of the prayer leader, suggesting he was transiting through Rawalakot rather than residing there permanently. The attackers knew his travel schedule well enough to position themselves in the mosque for the pre-dawn Fajr prayer. One attacker waited in the mosque’s veranda while another entered the prayer hall, sat or stood in proximity to Ahmad, and fired four bullets. The coordination between the two men, one inside and one outside, mirrors the pattern observed in other killings and suggests trained operatives following a rehearsed protocol rather than improvising under pressure.

The Rawalakot killing made Abu Qasim the fourth commander of various organizations to be killed in Pakistan in 2023 alone. Three months earlier, in March, Hizbul Mujahideen’s Bashir Ahmad Peer had been killed in Rawalpindi. The geographic spread, Rawalpindi in February, Lahore in May, Rawalakot in September, Sialkot in October, traced an arc across the breadth of Pakistan’s territory that no single inter-group rivalry or internal security operation could plausibly explain. Each killing occurred in a different province or territory, targeted a member of a different organization, and used the same operational method.

Landi Kotal and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa: The Tribal Frontier Breached

Every previous confirmed targeted killing of a wanted figure occurred in Pakistan’s Punjab, Sindh, or PoK. The reported killings of LeT affiliates in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s tribal regions broke a geographic barrier that the campaign had not previously crossed. KPK, the former North-West Frontier Province, is Pakistan’s most militarized region outside the Kashmir sector. The Pakistan Army maintains heavy deployments in the tribal districts, conducts ongoing counterinsurgency operations against the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and operates checkpoints, surveillance networks, and rapid-response forces throughout the region.

Sheikh Yousaf Afridi, an LeT commander responsible for the organization’s regional operations in KPK, was reportedly killed by unidentified gunmen in Landi Kotal, a town in the Khyber tribal district near the Torkham border crossing with Afghanistan. Landi Kotal sits approximately 250 kilometers from Islamabad, deep inside territory where the Pakistan Army and Frontier Corps maintain extensive presence due to both the Afghan border and the ongoing TTP insurgency. The town is not a place where outsiders move freely without attracting scrutiny.

Afridi’s killing posed an attribution puzzle that distinguished it from the killings in other cities. Some Pakistani analysts attributed the KPK killings to TTP internal feuds, since the tribal belt is rife with inter-group violence and the TTP has a documented history of killing rivals. However, Afridi was an LeT operative, not a TTP member, and the TTP has no known history of targeting LeT personnel. The two organizations operate in parallel rather than in competition: LeT focuses on India and Kashmir, while TTP focuses on the Pakistani state. Their operational territories, recruitment bases, and strategic objectives do not overlap in ways that would generate lethal rivalry. Attributing Afridi’s death to TTP feuding requires explaining why the TTP would expend operational resources killing a member of a non-competing organization in a territory where both groups face pressure from the same Pakistani military.

The alternative explanation, that the shadow war’s operational reach has extended into the tribal frontier, carries implications more unsettling for the Pakistani security establishment than any previous killing. Punjab and Sindh are civilian-administered provinces where police, rather than military forces, are primarily responsible for public order. PoK is a contested territory where the Line of Control creates inherent permeability. But KPK’s tribal districts are military-administered zones where the Pakistan Army controls movement, monitors communications, and maintains intelligence networks designed to detect exactly the kind of infiltration that targeted killings require. If the campaign can operate in Landi Kotal, it can operate anywhere in Pakistan, and the geographic transformation from safe haven to hunting ground is complete.

The KPK penetration also raises questions about the nature of the local assets the campaign employs. Pashtun tribal territory is famously resistant to outsiders, and conducting surveillance and execution in Landi Kotal would require individuals who can move through Pashtun communities without arousing suspicion. This implies either the activation of Pashtun assets recruited specifically for the campaign, or the exploitation of existing rivalries and grievances within the tribal belt, or a combination of both. The tribal belt’s social fabric is defined by clan loyalties, blood feuds, and transactional relationships that an outside intelligence service could exploit if it understood the local dynamics. Cash payments, promises of protection, or leverage over individuals with existing vulnerabilities could all provide the recruitment mechanisms necessary to field operatives in territory where no outsider could survive independently.

The broader context of KPK’s security environment adds another layer to the analysis. The province has experienced a dramatic increase in violence since 2021, with the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies documenting 295 attacks in KPK in 2024 alone, claiming 509 lives. Much of this violence is attributed to the TTP and its affiliated factions, and the security forces’ attention is heavily focused on this insurgency. Conducting a targeted killing against an LeT figure in this environment benefits from the ambient violence that provides cover. In a province where shootings occur on a daily basis, one additional killing is less likely to attract sustained investigative attention, particularly when the victim is a member of an organization, LeT, that the TTP and its affiliates do not consider an ally. The operational planners of the shadow war may have selected KPK’s tribal belt not despite its volatility but because of it, using the province’s chronic instability as camouflage for an operation that would be far more conspicuous in a quieter environment. Whatever the mechanism, the result is the same: LeT’s KPK regional structure, which was supposed to be protected by the remoteness and military saturation of the tribal belt, has been penetrated.

Nawabshah and Rural Sindh: Beyond the Urban Centers

The shadow war’s geographic ambition extends beyond Pakistan’s cities into its rural heartland. Nawabshah, a city in Sindh’s Shaheed Benazirabad district, is roughly 275 kilometers northeast of Karachi, situated in the agricultural flatlands of the Indus river valley. It is not a center of political power, not a military garrison town, and not a location that features in the typical narrative of India-Pakistan conflict. It is, however, a location where Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s madrassa network maintained a significant presence, feeding recruits into LeT’s operational pipeline.

Sardar Hussain Arain, a JuD operative responsible for the organization’s madrassa network in rural Sindh, was reported killed by unknown gunmen in Nawabshah. Arain’s role within JuD was not operational in the kinetic sense; he was not a field commander or a planner of specific attacks. His function was institutional: he oversaw the network of religious seminaries that served as recruitment centers for JuD and, by extension, for LeT’s broader apparatus. The madrassas he managed provided religious education that doubled as ideological conditioning, funneling young men into the organization’s orbit and making them available for radicalization and eventual operational deployment.

The targeting of Arain in Nawabshah revealed a dimension of the campaign that the urban killings had not fully exposed. If the campaign were limited to eliminating individuals who had planned or executed specific terror attacks against India, Arain would not have been a priority target. His significance was structural rather than operational: by disrupting the madrassa network, his elimination degraded the recruitment infrastructure that produces the next generation of operatives. This targeting logic, going after the pipeline rather than only the product, suggests a strategic vision that extends beyond immediate retaliation toward long-term degradation of the proxy apparatus.

Nawabshah’s geographic remoteness also demonstrates operational depth. Conducting a targeted killing in rural Sindh requires intelligence coverage and local assets in a region far removed from the urban centers where the campaign has primarily operated. The logistical demands of such an operation, identifying the target, confirming his location and routine, positioning operatives, executing the killing, and facilitating escape through agricultural terrain with limited road networks, imply a level of preparation and local knowledge that casual or opportunistic operations would not produce. Sindh’s law enforcement infrastructure in rural areas relies heavily on tribal and feudal power structures, and the police presence in towns like Nawabshah is qualitatively different from the security apparatus in Lahore or Islamabad. Outsiders in rural Sindh attract scrutiny from local communities that operate on the basis of personal familiarity, meaning that whoever conducted the surveillance and execution either belonged to the local community or had been thoroughly embedded in it.

The killing exposed the geographic reach of JuD’s own infrastructure across Sindh, information that Pakistani authorities had long downplayed. In the aftermath, Pakistani reports documented the extent of JuD’s educational and charitable operations in rural Sindh, confirming what Indian intelligence assessments had long alleged: that the organization’s presence extended far beyond the Punjab heartland into Pakistan’s poorer, more remote provinces. JuD’s madrassas in Sindh operated under the cover of charitable work, providing education and social services to underserved communities while simultaneously serving as the entry point for ideological conditioning. The model was replicable across dozens of districts, and Arain’s death illuminated the network he had built, drawing attention to it in ways that made that network harder to maintain in its previous form.

The strategic logic of targeting the recruitment pipeline rather than only its products represents an evolution in the campaign’s approach. The earlier killings in Karachi, Rawalpindi, and Lahore focused on senior commanders with direct operational roles in planning or facilitating attacks against India. Arain’s targeting suggests that the campaign’s planners have recognized that eliminating individual commanders, while disruptive, does not address the institutional machinery that produces their replacements. The madrassa-to-militant pipeline is the factory floor of Pakistan’s proxy apparatus. Disrupting the floor, even at one node, sends a signal to every madrassa administrator across the country: the campaign is aware of the pipeline’s structure and is willing to target individuals whose roles are institutional rather than kinetic.

Muridke and the LeT Heartland

Muridke, a town roughly thirty-five kilometers northwest of Lahore, is synonymous with Lashkar-e-Taiba. The organization’s compound there, Markaz-e-Taiba, sprawls across approximately 200 acres and contains training facilities, residential quarters, a seminary, a hospital, a publishing house, a mosque, and administrative offices. The compound has been photographed by satellites, documented by the United States Treasury Department, listed in UNSC sanctions documents, and described in detail by former operatives who have defected or been captured. It is the single most documented and most protected facility associated with any Pakistan-based proxy group.

No confirmed targeted killing has occurred inside the Muridke compound itself, and the compound’s fortified perimeter, armed guards, and Pakistan Army surveillance make a direct penetration extremely unlikely. But the compound’s significance for the safe haven transformation lies in what the campaign’s geographic spread implies for Muridke’s future. If the campaign can reach Karachi, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Sialkot, Rawalakot, Landi Kotal, and Nawabshah, the argument that Muridke’s defenses will hold indefinitely becomes progressively less convincing. Abu Qasim had recently relocated from Muridke to Rawalakot, where he was killed. Amir Hamza maintained connections to both the Muridke infrastructure and Lahore, where he was shot. The geographic tightening of the campaign around the Lahore-Muridke corridor suggests that the compound itself, while not yet directly targeted, is increasingly within the operational envelope of the forces conducting these killings.

The behavioral evidence from the broader LeT organization corroborates this assessment. Pakistani media reports and Indian intelligence assessments both indicate that senior LeT figures have increased their personal security measures since the campaign began. Travel patterns have changed; routine movements have been curtailed; bodyguards have been added or augmented. These behavioral shifts, which Pakistani sources have confirmed without attributing them explicitly to the shadow war, constitute indirect evidence that the sanctuary guarantee has been eroded in the minds of the individuals it was supposed to protect.

For Muridke, the question is not whether the campaign has penetrated the compound but whether the compound’s inhabitants believe it eventually will. Fear is a more effective weapon than any bullet, and the progressive geographic encirclement of Muridke, Karachi to the south, Sialkot to the northeast, Rawalpindi to the northwest, Lahore to the east, creates a psychological pressure that physical defenses cannot fully alleviate. When every colleague’s city has become a hunting ground, the compound that once felt impregnable begins to feel like a prison with known coordinates.

The Muridke compound’s documented existence also creates a strategic paradox for Pakistan. The facility is listed in UNSC sanctions documents, identified in United States Treasury Department designations, and photographed by commercial satellites with sufficient resolution to identify individual buildings. Any state considering covert action against LeT’s infrastructure knows exactly where Muridke is, what it contains, and how it is defended. The compound’s continued operation depends entirely on Pakistan’s willingness to protect it, and that protection depends on the calculation that sheltering LeT serves Pakistan’s strategic interests. The shadow war’s message to LeT’s leadership at Muridke is that the protection they depend on is not absolute: if the campaign can reach Zahoor Mistry in Karachi’s backstreets and Shahid Latif inside his own mosque in Daska, the compound’s walls are not a guarantee but a hope. The distinction between safety and perceived safety has collapsed across Pakistan, and Muridke is no exception to that collapse.

The Geographic Signature of the Campaign

Taken together, the city-by-city record of targeted killings reveals a geographic signature that is itself an analytical artifact. No competitor site, no Wikipedia entry, no SATP database, and no news archive has assembled the spatial pattern in a single analytical frame. The pattern is as follows.

The campaign began in Karachi, Pakistan’s most chaotic and most penetrable city, where the operational model could be tested under conditions that maximized both opportunity and deniability. The choice of Karachi as the initial starting point was not accidental. The city’s ambient violence, its overwhelmed law enforcement, and its history as a site where targeted killings occur on a daily basis meant that the initial operations could proceed without generating the kind of national security alarm that a killing in Islamabad or Lahore would have triggered. Karachi provided a permissive environment for rehearsal, and the lessons learned there informed the subsequent expansion. It expanded to Rawalpindi, sending a psychological signal that proximity to the Pakistan military’s headquarters provided no protection. It moved to Lahore, striking at the heart of LeT’s organizational infrastructure and at the KCF leadership that lived in the same neighborhoods. It extended to Sialkot and Daska, targeting JeM’s border-adjacent operations hub and killing the Pathankot mastermind inside his own mosque. It crossed into PoK, reaching a launching zone for Kashmir infiltrations where the Pakistan Army maintains active control. It penetrated Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s tribal belt, the most militarized and most remote region in the campaign’s geography. And it reached into rural Sindh, disrupting the recruitment pipeline that sustains the proxy apparatus.

The geographic expansion follows a logic that is neither random nor purely opportunistic. Each new city represented a higher level of operational ambition than the last. Karachi was the easiest target environment: a chaotic megacity where violence is endemic and outsiders blend in. Rawalpindi was harder, because of the military presence and the heightened counter-intelligence activity that accompanies proximity to GHQ. Lahore was harder still, because of its political significance, the concentration of armed group leadership, and the enhanced security that senior figures maintained. Sialkot was difficult because of its border proximity, small-town visibility, and the Pakistan Rangers’ presence in the border zone. PoK was the most ambitious urban operation, because it occurred in territory controlled by the Pakistan military specifically to manage the Kashmir front. KPK was the furthest geographic reach, penetrating the most militarized and most ethnically distinct region in the campaign’s geography. Each step outward tested and confirmed the campaign’s ability to operate in progressively more challenging environments, and each success created the operational confidence for the next expansion.

The geographic signature also reveals what the campaign is not. It is not a series of border-area operations conducted by infiltrators from India, since Karachi and Nawabshah are hundreds of kilometers from any Indian border. It is not a single-city phenomenon that could be attributed to local criminal networks, since the same operational method appears in seven or more distinct geographic locations. It is not ethnically or organizationally confined, since the targets include Kashmiri, Punjabi, Pashtun, and Sikh individuals affiliated with LeT, JeM, Hizbul, and KCF. The scope is national, the method is uniform, and the target selection criteria align precisely with India’s designation of individuals as wanted figures under the UAPA.

The geographic distribution also refutes the narrative that the killings represent internal Pakistani dynamics dressed up as foreign operations. If the killings were driven by ISI housecleaning, they would cluster around individuals who had defied Pakistan’s institutional interests, and the organizations targeted would show a pattern consistent with ISI priorities rather than Indian ones. Instead, the targets span organizations that Pakistan’s state apparatus has supported and protected: LeT, JeM, Hizbul, and KCF all received ISI patronage at various points in their histories, and their leadership casualties serve Indian security interests rather than Pakistani ones. The geographic distribution mirrors Indian threat assessments, not Pakistani internal politics. A map of the killings overlaid on a map of India’s UAPA designations would show near-perfect correspondence.

The complete timeline of targeted killings records at least twenty incidents that Pakistani officials or international investigators have attributed to the campaign, spread across the period from 2022 through the present. When mapped geographically, these incidents cover an area from Karachi on the Arabian Sea coast to Landi Kotal on the Afghan border, a distance of approximately 1,700 kilometers, and from Rawalakot near the Line of Control to Nawabshah in interior Sindh, a distance of roughly 1,100 kilometers. No comparable geographic spread exists in any known covert assassination program operating under conditions of complete deniability against state-sponsored targets. The Israeli campaign against Palestinian individuals after Munich operated across four European countries but targeted individuals living as private citizens in open societies. The American drone campaign targeted individuals in ungoverned spaces of Yemen, Somalia, and the Afghan-Pakistan border. The Indian campaign, if that is what it is, targets individuals living under active state protection in the cities of a nuclear-armed rival, a level of operational audacity that exceeds any documented historical parallel.

The Intelligence Architecture Behind Geographic Penetration

The geographic scope of the campaign implies an intelligence architecture that is national in scale and local in execution. Sustaining operations across seven or more distinct cities, each with different security environments, ethnic compositions, and operational challenges, requires multiple capabilities operating in coordination.

The first and most fundamental requirement is target identification. The individuals killed in the campaign are not prominent public figures whose locations can be determined from social media or news reports. Many of them lived under aliases, in modest neighborhoods, engaged in civilian occupations that provided cover for their organizational roles. Zahoor Mistry ran a furniture shop under a false name. Paramjit Singh Panjwar lived under the alias Malik Sardar Singh. Bashir Ahmad Peer had been in Rawalpindi for over fifteen years without attracting public attention. Locating these individuals required intelligence methods that could penetrate the alias infrastructure, whether through human sources within the organizations, signals intelligence, financial tracking, or some combination of all three.

The second requirement is surveillance. Every targeted killing in the campaign demonstrates knowledge of the target’s daily routine that could only have been acquired through sustained physical observation. The attackers knew which shop Mistry entered in the morning, which route Panjwar walked, which mosque Latif attended for Fajr prayers, and which mosque Abu Qasim was staying at overnight. This granular knowledge implies surveillance teams operating in each target city for periods measured in weeks or months, watching, recording, and transmitting information about movement patterns to the individuals who would eventually carry out the killing. Maintaining multiple surveillance teams across multiple cities simultaneously is a logistical challenge that requires organizational depth, secure communications, and significant financial resources.

The third requirement is local recruitment. The pattern decoded by operational analysts strongly suggests that the individuals who physically carry out the killings are recruited locally rather than deployed from a central pool. The attackers in Karachi appear to be familiar with Karachi’s streets; the attackers in Landi Kotal appear to be able to move through Pashtun territory without arousing suspicion. The Guardian’s April 2024 investigation, citing unnamed intelligence sources, reported that the campaign employed a range of local assets including individuals recruited from criminal networks, disaffected members of rival organizations, and, most strikingly, would-be fighters who were convinced they were killing “infidels” rather than designated targets. This recruitment model, using local labor for local operations, minimizes the operational footprint and maximizes deniability, since the attackers themselves may not know the full chain of command that directed them.

The fourth requirement is escape and extraction. In every confirmed case, the attackers departed the scene without being captured. In a city like Karachi, where motorcycle traffic is continuous and police response times are measured in tens of minutes, escape is relatively straightforward. In smaller cities like Daska or Rawalakot, where the community is tighter and strangers are more noticeable, escape requires either pre-positioned vehicles, safe houses, or routes out of the area that avoid the checkpoints that Pakistani police and military establish after major incidents. The consistent success of the escape phase across all geographic locations suggests pre-planned withdrawal routes and, potentially, local support networks that provide temporary concealment during the immediate post-incident search period.

The fifth requirement, and perhaps the most revealing, is operational security across the full chain. Not a single operational cell connected to the campaign has been publicly dismantled by Pakistani security forces. Pakistani authorities have arrested individuals in connection with specific incidents, including suspects in the Shahid Latif killing and the car bombing near Hafiz Saeed’s residence, but these arrests have not led to the unraveling of the broader network. This suggests either extraordinary compartmentalization, where each city’s operatives know nothing about operatives in other cities, or a level of operational discipline that prevents captured individuals from providing information that could compromise the wider structure. The absence of leaks, defections, or successful counter-intelligence penetrations over a four-year period across multiple cities is itself a data point that suggests professional intelligence service involvement rather than freelance criminal activity.

Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Muhammad Syrus Sajjad Qazi, speaking at a January 2024 press conference in Islamabad, described the killings as involving a “sophisticated international set-up spread over multiple jurisdictions.” This characterization, while serving Pakistan’s narrative interest in framing the killings as foreign aggression rather than domestic security failure, also inadvertently confirms the multi-jurisdictional, multi-city, organizationally complex nature of the campaign. The question Qazi did not address, and which no Pakistani official has publicly answered, is why Pakistan’s own intelligence apparatus, the ISI, which is widely regarded as one of the most capable intelligence agencies in South Asia, failed to detect and prevent a campaign of this scope operating on Pakistani soil for over four years.

The ISI’s failure to counter the campaign is itself analytically significant. The ISI maintains one of the densest human intelligence networks in the region, operates signals intelligence infrastructure, and controls extensive counter-intelligence assets. Its inability to detect and disrupt a foreign-directed assassination campaign operating in Karachi, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Sialkot, Rawalakot, Landi Kotal, and Nawabshah simultaneously raises questions that go beyond mere competence. Saikat Datta, the Indian defense journalist who has written extensively on RAW’s evolution, has argued that the campaign’s success reflects not only the capability of the attacking side but also the structural weaknesses of Pakistan’s internal security architecture. The ISI is designed primarily as an offensive intelligence agency focused outward, toward India and Afghanistan, rather than as a domestic counter-intelligence service focused on preventing foreign penetrations. Its organizational culture, its promotion incentives, and its strategic priorities all orient it toward projecting influence abroad rather than defending the homeland. The shadow war has exploited precisely this structural bias.

Competing Theories and the Attribution Debate

The question of who is conducting the targeted killings is formally unresolved, and the competing theories deserve careful examination before adjudication.

The first theory, advanced by Pakistani officials and supported by The Guardian’s April 2024 investigation, is that India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), has directed or facilitated the killings. Pakistani security officials, speaking to Al Jazeera on condition of anonymity, acknowledged at least six killings in 2023 and two in 2022 as incidents they believe were carried out by a hostile intelligence agency. Foreign Secretary Qazi formally alleged that there was “credible evidence” of Indian involvement. The Guardian’s report, citing both Pakistani and unnamed Indian intelligence sources, described a program in which RAW employed various methods to achieve the killings, including the recruitment of local assets through intermediaries and the exploitation of existing criminal networks.

The second theory, maintained by India’s official position, is categorical denial. Indian Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar has stated that it is not India’s policy to carry out targeted killings overseas. This denial is consistent with India’s standard diplomatic posture on covert activities, and it does not differ from the denials issued by other countries whose intelligence agencies are alleged to conduct extraterritorial operations. The denial creates a formal ambiguity that serves India’s diplomatic interests, since admitting to the killings would create legal, diplomatic, and potentially military consequences that the current ambiguity avoids.

The third theory, advanced by some Pakistani analysts and by organizations like JuD, is that the killings are the result of internal rivalries among Pakistan-based groups, or that they represent ISI housecleaning of individuals who had become liabilities. This theory has been applied most frequently to killings that can be plausibly attributed to inter-group disputes, such as Bashir Ahmad Peer’s death, given his connections to figures who had defied Pakistan’s influence. However, the theory fails to explain the consistent operational method, the geographic spread, the alignment of targets with India’s UAPA designation list, and the absence of any organizational claim of responsibility for the killings. Internal rivalries produce scattered, idiosyncratic violence; they do not produce a national campaign with uniform methodology targeting individuals from four different organizations across seven cities.

The fourth theory is that the killings are conducted by a combination of actors, with India providing intelligence and financing while local criminal or militant networks provide operational execution. This hybrid model is consistent with the evidence from the Khalistan investigations in North America, where United States prosecutors alleged that an Indian intelligence official directed a plot to kill Sikh separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in New York by engaging a middleman who contacted a would-be assassin. The middleman model, intelligence agency to intermediary to local executor, would explain both the national geographic scope and the locally adapted execution style of the Pakistan killings. It would also explain why Pakistani arrests in individual cases have not led to the broader network: the individuals physically conducting the killings may genuinely not know who ordered them, because the chain of command passes through intermediaries who compartmentalize information at each level.

The Guardian’s investigation added a fifth dimension to the attribution debate by reporting that the campaign employed would-be jihadists who believed they were killing “infidels” rather than designated targets. If accurate, this method represents a sophisticated form of operational deception in which the executors are motivated by religious conviction while the directors operate from strategic calculation. The jihadist recruits believe they are serving their faith; the intelligence apparatus that directs them is serving a state’s security objectives. The method is cynical but operationally brilliant, because recruits motivated by ideology are less likely to seek payment, less likely to negotiate, less likely to demand information about the chain of command, and more likely to maintain silence if captured, since they believe they acted out of religious duty rather than as agents of a foreign government.

The adjudication of these theories must rest on the evidence pattern rather than on any single government’s claims. The evidence pattern, consistent method, national scope, alignment with Indian designation lists, simultaneous targeting of multiple organizations, absence of claims of responsibility, and behavioral changes among surviving targets, most strongly supports a state-directed campaign with local execution. The internal-rivalry theory cannot produce this pattern. The ISI-housecleaning theory cannot explain why the targets are uniformly individuals wanted by India rather than individuals who have defied Pakistan. The hybrid model, Indian direction with local execution, is the explanation that best fits the observable evidence, and it is the explanation that both Pakistani officials and international investigators have converged upon.

India’s denials are not evidence of innocence, any more than Israel’s decades-long denials of Mossad operations were evidence that the operations did not occur. States routinely deny covert operations as a matter of institutional policy, not as a matter of factual truth. The analytical task is not to take any government’s official claims at face value but to assess which explanation best accounts for the totality of the observable evidence.

What the Transformation Means

The transformation of Pakistan’s safe havens into hunting grounds is not merely an operational development; it is a strategic inflection point with consequences that extend beyond the individuals killed and the cities penetrated. Pakistan’s sanctuary guarantee was the foundation of its proxy strategy against India. Without the assurance that operatives could train, plan, execute attacks across the border, and return to safe refuge in Pakistan’s cities, the proxy model collapses. The entire value proposition of fighting India through armed groups rests on the assumption that the groups’ members will survive to fight again. When they stop surviving, the proposition changes.

The behavioral evidence confirms that the transformation has registered with the intended audience. Pakistani media reports and Indian intelligence assessments both document behavioral changes among senior figures affiliated with the proxy groups. Increased personal security, curtailed travel, changes of residence, and reduced public movement all indicate that the sanctuary guarantee is no longer trusted by the individuals it was supposed to protect. These behavioral changes impose costs on the organizations even when no killing occurs, because a leader who cannot travel freely, cannot meet subordinates openly, and cannot attend the mosques and gatherings that sustain organizational cohesion is a leader whose effectiveness is degraded by the very act of staying alive.

However, the analysis must acknowledge what the campaign has not accomplished and may not be able to accomplish. Pakistan remains a functional safe haven for the vast majority of individuals associated with proxy armed groups. The shadow war has targeted senior, named figures whose identities are known to Indian intelligence and whose UAPA designations make them formal targets. It has not penetrated the vast support infrastructure of madrassas, fundraising networks, logistics operators, and local facilitators who sustain the proxy apparatus at the grassroots level. The madrassa network that Sardar Hussain Arain managed in Sindh continues to operate, staffed by individuals whose names do not appear on any designation list. The safe haven is damaged, not destroyed, and the sanctuary guarantee is broken for the most prominent figures while remaining functionally intact for the thousands of lower-level participants who keep the machine running.

This limitation exposes the fundamental strategic dilemma of the campaign. Decapitation, the strategy of removing senior leaders to degrade organizational capability, has a mixed track record in the broader history of counter-terrorism. The American drone campaign eliminated dozens of senior al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders between 2004 and 2016, yet both organizations continued to recruit, plan, and execute attacks. Israel’s targeted killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders has not ended either organization’s capacity for armed resistance. The pattern suggests that decapitation works best when combined with sustained pressure on the organizational infrastructure that produces new leaders. Without that broader pressure, the eliminated leaders are replaced, sometimes by individuals who are less experienced but also less known, making them harder to target. The shadow war’s evolution toward targeting institutional figures like Arain, who managed recruitment rather than operations, may reflect an awareness of this limitation and an attempt to address it.

The connection between the shadow war’s geographic transformation and Operation Sindoor, India’s May 2025 missile strikes against targets inside Pakistan, reinforces the House Thesis that the covert campaign and the overt military action are not separate categories of response but phases of a single strategic trajectory. The shadow war degraded specific individuals; Sindoor struck the infrastructure those individuals served. The shadow war demonstrated that Pakistan’s cities could be penetrated; Sindoor demonstrated that Pakistan’s military installations could be hit. The shadow war broke the sanctuary guarantee for individuals; Sindoor broke the immunity of facilities. Together, they constitute a comprehensive assault on the foundational assumption of Pakistan’s proxy strategy: that sheltering armed groups against India carries no domestic consequences.

The Pahalgam massacre of April 2025, in which gunmen killed twenty-six tourists in the Baisaran Valley of Kashmir, served as the immediate trigger for Sindoor. But the trajectory from the shadow war to Sindoor was not a reaction to a single event; it was the culmination of a strategic progression that had been building since Pulwama. Each step, from the Balakot airstrike to the first targeted killing in Karachi to the systematic geographic expansion of the campaign to the conventional missile strikes of Sindoor, represented an escalation that became permanent. India did not return to the status quo ante after Balakot. It did not halt the shadow war after Karachi. It did not stop targeting new cities after Rawalpindi. And after Sindoor, it did not withdraw the covert campaign that had preceded the conventional strikes. The shadow war and the open war are not separate categories. They are phases of a single campaign, and every city that was once a safe haven is now evidence of that truth.

The safe haven network that Pakistan built over decades was designed to survive diplomatic pressure, sanctions, FATF grey-listing, and international criticism. It was not designed to survive systematic operational penetration of every city in which it operates. The geographic scope of the shadow war has exposed the network’s greatest vulnerability: that a guarantee of sanctuary is only as strong as the ability to enforce it, and Pakistan’s ability to enforce it has been comprehensively demonstrated to be inadequate. Every city that was once a safe haven is now a hunting ground. The map has been redrawn, and the individuals who live within it know it.

The transformation carries implications that extend beyond the immediate India-Pakistan theater. If a covert campaign can systematically penetrate the cities of a nuclear-armed state with the fourth-largest military in the world, the precedent applies to every state that shelters proxy groups. Iran’s support for Hezbollah, Turkey’s relationship with various Syrian factions, and Pakistan’s own patronage of the Afghan Taliban all rest on similar sanctuary guarantees. The shadow war in Pakistan demonstrates that those guarantees are only as durable as the sheltering state’s counter-intelligence capability, and that a determined adversary with sufficient intelligence assets can erode them without triggering the conventional military response that the nuclear umbrella is supposed to deter. The geographic transformation documented in this article is not merely a case study in India-Pakistan relations. It is a template for the future of covert conflict between states that have learned that proxy warfare invites asymmetric response, and that the cities that shelter proxies will eventually become the places where those proxies are found and killed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is Pakistan still a safe haven for India’s most-wanted individuals?

Pakistan remains a functional safe haven for thousands of individuals associated with proxy armed groups, particularly at the lower and middle levels of organizational hierarchies. The madrassa networks, fundraising operations, logistics chains, and recruitment pipelines continue to function in cities across Pakistan’s Punjab, Sindh, and KPK provinces. However, the sanctuary guarantee has been broken for senior, named figures who are designated under India’s Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. Multiple senior commanders and operatives from LeT, JeM, Hizbul Mujahideen, and the Khalistan Commando Force have been killed in targeted attacks across at least seven Pakistani cities since 2022. The safe haven is damaged for individuals at the top of the hierarchy while remaining largely intact for the broader base.

Q: Which Pakistani cities have experienced targeted killings of wanted figures?

The confirmed and reported cities include Karachi in Sindh, Rawalpindi adjacent to the federal capital, Lahore in Punjab, Sialkot and its suburb Daska in Punjab, Rawalakot in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, Landi Kotal in the Khyber tribal district of KPK, and Nawabshah in rural Sindh. This geographic spread covers a distance of approximately 1,700 kilometers from Karachi to Landi Kotal and encompasses every major region of Pakistan.

Q: Where do India’s most-wanted individuals live in Pakistan?

India’s most-wanted individuals have been documented living across Pakistan’s major cities and smaller towns. Hafiz Saeed maintained a compound in Lahore’s Johar Town. Masood Azhar is based in Bahawalpur, southern Punjab. LeT’s primary compound is in Muridke, near Lahore. JeM operatives have been documented in Sialkot, Bahawalpur, and Karachi. Khalistan-linked figures have lived in Lahore’s upscale housing societies. Hizbul Mujahideen’s launching commanders have maintained residences in Rawalpindi. Many individuals lived under aliases, conducting civilian businesses as cover, such as Zahoor Mistry, who ran a furniture shop in Karachi’s Akhtar Colony under the name Zahid Akhund.

Q: Why can Pakistan not protect the individuals living on its soil from targeted killings?

Pakistan’s inability to protect designated targets from the shadow war reflects a combination of factors. The country’s major cities, particularly Karachi, present security challenges that overwhelm police resources. The sanctuary guarantee was designed to protect individuals from legal proceedings and diplomatic pressure, not from covert operational penetration by a foreign intelligence service. The operational method employed in the killings, motorcycle-borne assailants striking during predictable routines, exploits the routines of daily life that security measures cannot fully eliminate without isolating the target from their own community. Pakistani security agencies face the challenge of defending a dispersed set of targets living in diverse locations against an adversary that chooses the time, place, and method of each engagement.

Q: Has the shadow war changed how individuals affiliated with proxy groups behave in Pakistan?

Pakistani media and Indian intelligence assessments both report behavioral changes among senior figures since the campaign began. These include increased personal security details, changes of residence, curtailed travel between cities, reduced attendance at public gatherings and prayer congregations, and altered daily routines. Amir Hamza, the LeT co-founder, reportedly had his security enhanced after the first assassination attempt in May 2025, though the second attempt in April 2026 demonstrated that enhanced security was insufficient. These behavioral shifts degrade organizational effectiveness even when no killing occurs, because leaders who cannot move freely cannot manage their organizations as efficiently.

Q: Which city in Pakistan has seen the most targeted killings of wanted figures?

Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and economic capital, has seen the highest concentration of targeted killings, consistent with its role as the primary residence for many individuals associated with multiple armed groups. Karachi’s dense population, chaotic security environment, and extensive criminal networks make it both the most popular refuge for wanted individuals and the most operationally favorable environment for targeted killings. The city’s status as an elimination capital is examined in detail in the dedicated Karachi analysis in this series.

Q: Have any wanted individuals fled Pakistan because of the targeted killings?

There are no confirmed reports of senior designated individuals fleeing Pakistan entirely as a result of the shadow war, though some have relocated within the country. Abu Qasim relocated from LeT’s Muridke base camp to Rawalakot in PoK, where he was subsequently killed, suggesting that relocation within Pakistan does not provide safety. The difficulty of fleeing Pakistan entirely lies in the limited options available: individuals designated under UNSC sanctions or national counter-terrorism laws face arrest in most countries, and their organizational ties make independent survival outside Pakistan’s protected ecosystem extremely difficult.

Q: Why did Pakistan become a safe haven for proxy groups in the first place?

Pakistan’s role as a safe haven for proxy armed groups is a product of the military’s strategic culture, as analyzed by scholars including Christine Fair and Ayesha Siddiqa. The Pakistan Army adopted armed proxies as an asymmetric instrument to prosecute its rivalry with India without triggering full-scale conventional war. The proxy groups, including LeT, JeM, and various Kashmiri organizations, were trained, armed, and deployed by the ISI to conduct operations in Indian-administered Kashmir and across India. In exchange, these groups received sanctuary on Pakistani soil, protection from law enforcement, and institutional support that included training facilities, fundraising networks, and organizational infrastructure. The arrangement was strategic, sustained, and institutionalized over decades.

Q: What is the modus operandi of the targeted killings across these cities?

The operational method is remarkably consistent across all geographic locations. Assailants typically arrive on motorcycles, a mode of transport common in Pakistani cities that attracts minimal attention. They target individuals during predictable daily routines, particularly during pre-dawn Fajr prayers at mosques, morning walks, or arrivals at places of business. The attackers fire at close range, typically aiming for the head, and depart on the same motorcycle within minutes. No group has claimed responsibility for any of the killings, and the assailants wear helmets and face coverings that prevent identification. CCTV footage recovered from several incidents confirms the motorcycle-borne method across multiple cities.

Q: What was the significance of Zahoor Mistry’s funeral in Karachi?

Mistry’s funeral in Karachi was attended by senior JeM leadership, including Rauf Asghar, the organization’s operational chief and brother of JeM founder Masood Azhar. The attendance of senior leadership at a funeral for a rank-and-file operative exposed their identities and physical presence in Karachi to any observer monitoring the event. The intelligence value of the funeral was immense: it confirmed which leaders were alive, in Karachi, and willing to attend public gatherings, and it generated photographic and video evidence of their presence. The funeral has been described as one of the most consequential intelligence gifts the campaign produced in its early stages.

Q: How does the mosque pattern work in the targeted killings?

Several high-profile killings have occurred inside or immediately outside mosques during pre-dawn Fajr prayers. Shahid Latif was killed inside the Noori-e-Madina mosque in Daska. Abu Qasim was shot inside the Al-Qudus mosque in Rawalakot. The mosque pattern exploits a vulnerability that is both predictable and socially undisruptable: a devout individual will attend the same mosque for pre-dawn prayers at approximately the same time every morning. The pre-dawn hour provides darkness for the assailants’ approach and departure. The prayer position, seated in rows, provides the attacker with a stationary and exposed target. And the social pressure to attend prayers prevents the target from avoiding the mosque without arousing community suspicion.

Q: What is the connection between the shadow war and Operation Sindoor?

The shadow war’s targeted killings and Operation Sindoor, India’s missile strikes against targets in Pakistan in May 2025, represent two phases of the same strategic approach. The shadow war targeted individuals; Sindoor targeted infrastructure. The shadow war operated covertly; Sindoor operated openly. Together, they constitute a comprehensive challenge to Pakistan’s proxy strategy, demonstrating that India can reach both the individuals who plan and execute attacks and the facilities where they train and organize. The convergence of covert and conventional force is the defining feature of India’s evolved counter-terrorism posture.

Q: Who was Shahid Latif and why was his killing significant?

Shahid Latif was a senior JeM operative who masterminded the January 2016 attack on the Indian Air Force base at Pathankot, which killed seven IAF personnel. He originally infiltrated Kashmir in 1993, was captured in 1994, and spent sixteen years in Indian prison, where he met JeM founder Masood Azhar. After deportation to Pakistan in 2010, he became JeM’s launching commander in Sialkot and served as imam of a mosque in Daska. He was killed on October 11, 2023, by three gunmen who entered the mosque during Fajr prayers. His death was described by Indian officials as the biggest blow to JeM on Pakistani soil.

Q: What are the competing theories about who conducts the killings?

Four primary theories exist. First, Pakistani officials allege that India’s RAW directs the killings, a position supported by The Guardian’s investigation. Second, India officially denies any involvement. Third, some Pakistani analysts attribute the killings to internal rivalries among militant groups or to ISI housecleaning. Fourth, a hybrid model suggests Indian intelligence provides direction and financing while local assets in each city carry out the operations. The evidence pattern, including consistent methodology across cities, alignment with Indian designation lists, simultaneous targeting of multiple unrelated organizations, and absence of responsibility claims, most strongly supports the hybrid model of state direction with local execution.

Q: What does the geographic spread of killings reveal about operational capability?

The geographic spread, covering at least seven cities and towns across four provinces and territories, reveals a multi-regional operational capability that could not be sustained by a single individual, a single cell, or a single internal faction. It implies national-level intelligence coverage capable of identifying and locating targets living under aliases in diverse urban and rural environments. It implies the ability to recruit local assets in ethnically, linguistically, and geographically distinct regions ranging from Karachi’s Urdu-speaking neighborhoods to KPK’s Pashto-speaking tribal districts. And it implies secure communications and coordination mechanisms that can synchronize operations across distances of over 1,500 kilometers.

Q: What role does Pakistan’s ISI play in the attribution debate?

Pakistan’s ISI occupies an ambiguous position in the attribution debate. As the country’s primary intelligence service, the ISI would be responsible for detecting and preventing foreign intelligence operations on Pakistani soil. The scale of the shadow war, with over twenty reported killings across multiple cities over four years, raises uncomfortable questions about whether the ISI failed to detect the campaign, chose not to prevent it, or was complicit in certain killings that served Pakistan’s internal interests. Some analysts have suggested that the ISI may have facilitated specific killings as a way of eliminating individuals who had become liabilities. Pakistani officials reject any suggestion of ISI complicity and attribute the killings exclusively to foreign aggression.

Q: How does the India-Pakistan targeted killing campaign compare to other covert programs?

The campaign’s closest historical parallel is Israel’s post-Munich “Wrath of God” program, in which Mossad systematically hunted and killed the individuals responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. Like the Israel program, the India-Pakistan campaign targets designated individuals on foreign soil, operates without official acknowledgment, and employs local assets in each target country. The key differences are scale, since the Pakistan campaign covers a larger geographic area, and deniability, since Israel eventually acknowledged its operations while India maintains formal denial. The operational model also resembles elements of the United States drone campaign in the global war on terrorism, though the shadow war employs human operatives rather than unmanned aerial vehicles.

Q: What would it take for Pakistan to restore the safe haven guarantee?

Restoring the sanctuary guarantee would require Pakistan to accomplish what it has failed to do for over four years: detect and dismantle the operational networks conducting the killings. This would require either penetrating the intelligence architecture directing the campaign, which implies counter-intelligence capabilities that have not been demonstrated, or creating physical security environments around designated individuals that prevent motorcycle-borne assailants from reaching them, which would require transforming the daily lives of dozens or hundreds of individuals across multiple cities. Neither objective is easily achievable, and the campaign’s consistent operational success suggests that Pakistan’s security services have not identified a reliable countermeasure.

Q: What is the long-term strategic impact of the safe haven transformation?

The long-term impact depends on whether the campaign can be sustained and whether it can be expanded to target the mid-level and grassroots infrastructure that sustains the proxy apparatus. If the campaign remains focused on senior designated figures, its impact will be significant but bounded: leadership losses degrade organizational capability but do not eliminate the underlying recruitment, training, and fundraising infrastructure. If the campaign expands to target the institutional backbone, the madrassa networks, the fundraising chains, the logistics operators, the impact could be structurally transformative. The killing of Sardar Hussain Arain in Nawabshah, who managed a madrassa network rather than a combat unit, may signal that this expansion is already underway.

Q: Will the targeted killings in Pakistan stop?

No available evidence suggests that the campaign is decelerating. The 2026 attacks in Lahore, including the second attempt on Amir Hamza in April, indicate continued operational tempo. The geographic expansion into new areas suggests continued ambition. The absence of any successful Pakistani counter-operation that has publicly dismantled an operational cell suggests continued impunity. The campaign appears to be in an expansion phase rather than a consolidation or withdrawal phase, and the transformation of safe havens into hunting grounds shows no signs of reversal.

Q: How has the international community responded to the targeted killings in Pakistan?

The international response has been muted compared to similar allegations involving India in other jurisdictions. The killings of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada and the alleged plot against Gurpatwant Singh Pannun in the United States generated significant diplomatic crises, in part because they occurred in Western democracies with robust investigative and judicial institutions. The killings in Pakistan have generated Pakistani diplomatic protests and formal allegations but have not produced the same level of international investigation or diplomatic consequence. This asymmetry reflects both the complexities of Pakistan’s own relationship with the individuals killed, most of whom are internationally designated figures with documented connections to armed groups, and the geopolitical dynamics that make Western governments less inclined to confront India on behalf of Pakistani interests.