What the director general said on 6 January
Pakistan’s Director General of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, used his first extended press conference on Tuesday 6 January 2026 to set out the military’s full-year tally of its 2025 counter-terrorism campaign. Addressing journalists in Rawalpindi, the army’s chief spokesperson declared 2025 a “landmark and consequential year in our fight against terrorism”, and gave precise cumulative figures: 75,175 intelligence-based operations (IBOs), 5,397 terror incidents and 2,597 terrorists killed across the country. He detailed that 1,235 law enforcement personnel and civilians were martyred in 2025, and that 27 suicide bombings took place — 16 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 10 in Balochistan and one in Islamabad, at the judicial complex, including two carried out by female bombers. Dawn, Geo News and The News all reported the same headline numbers from the briefing.
The asymmetry between security-force and civilian losses was central to the message. Lt Gen Chaudhry said the ratio of terrorists killed to people martyred in 2025 was 2:1 — an inversion of the 1:3 ratio of 2021, when 193 terrorists were killed and 592 security personnel were killed. He attributed the shift to a “complete clarity” the state and people had reached in 2025 that “these terrorists are khawarij [and] they have no relation with Islam”, using the official designation for the banned Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan and framing Balochistan-based groups as Fitna-al-Hindustan, a state-coined term highlighting India’s alleged role. He said the public now recognised “the India–Afghan Taliban terrorism nexus, the other external sponsors of terrorism, the international acknowledgement and acceptance of Pakistan’s stance on terrorism, and internal facilitators — most of whom were found in politics — of terrorism”.
Why Khyber Pakhtunkhwa leads the count
Of the 5,397 terror incidents in 2025, the DG ISPR said, 71 per cent — 3,811 — were reported from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with the remaining 29 per cent (1,557) from Balochistan and 29 from other areas. Asked why the majority of incidents took place in KP, he said it was the result of “the politically conducive environment provided [to terrorists], and the political-terror nexus that is flourishing in the province”. The Geo report cites an annual Centre for Research and Security Studies tally showing fatalities in KP rose from 1,620 in 2024 to 2,331 in 2025 — a more than 40 per cent increase. The DG ISPR also criticised the provincial leadership headed by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf chief minister Sohail Afridi, and said elements of the KP government were “seeking help from Afghanistan” and resisting counter-terrorism operations.
He played a clip of Afridi speaking in Pashto and rejected the chief minister’s contention that other countries were not facing terrorism originating from Afghan soil, saying terror outfits were operating in Afghanistan “under whose patronage more than a dozen terrorist organisations had been operating. Everyone knows this but the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government.”
The Afghanistan, India and TTP triangle
The briefing was as much about external attribution as about operational numbers. Lt Gen Chaudhry named the Afghan Taliban as the hub from which TTP, Fitna-al-Hindustan networks and several other groups he said were operating in the region were being directed. He said the Afghan Taliban had begun “organising the TTP according to its organisational structure” and was training it, that around 2,500 non-Pakistani, non-Afghan terrorists — including fighters who had arrived from Syria — were also using Afghan territory, and that “modern US equipment worth $7.2bn left behind in Afghanistan” — including night-vision devices, sniper rifles, body armour, M-4 and M-16 rifles and ammunition — was reaching militant groups in the black market. He said India was “the biggest patron for terrorism in Pakistan” and was using the Afghan Taliban as proxies and providing financial and other assistance, a pattern he said had hardened after the May 2025 conflict with India.
The official statement of consequence from October 2025 returned repeatedly. After the four-day war with India in May 2025, the DG ISPR said, terrorism in Pakistan surged because “Indians immediately sought to influence non-state actors” operating from Afghan soil. In October 2025, after what Pakistan said were repeated attempts to get Kabul to act, the military struck “terrorists along the Pak-Afghan border”, striking TTP fighters who were Pakistani citizens. The Afghan Taliban’s subsequent attacks on Pakistani posts, the briefing said, gave Pakistan “the full right to respond” — and “dozens of Afghan posts were obliterated within hours”. The October border closure, Lt Gen Chaudhry said, had produced “the killing of an average of 276 terrorists per month” in the last quarter of 2025.
He listed 10 “high-impact” terror incidents in 2025 and said “all 78 terrorists involved in the 10 major incidents” had been killed. “None of them went back alive, and 60 civilians were martyred in those incidents.” 16 of the killed were high-value targets, including Amjad Ali, second-in-command in the shura of the TTP.
National Action Plan and Balochistan
A second front of the briefing was implementation of the National Action Plan (NAP) and the Azm-i-Istehkam operation launched in 2024. The DG ISPR played confessional videos of arrested militants, said “all political parties and segments of society had reached a consensus on the necessity of implementing the NAP to eliminate terrorism”, and acknowledged that “there are still deficiencies, and there is a lot of room for improvement” in implementation. He pointed to Balochistan — a day after the provincial government there had merged the Levies Force into the police and abolished all “B-areas” — as a working example, citing district-level coordination committees that had met 472 times between February and November 2025, allocated Rs23bn in provincial and Rs8bn in federal funding, completed 127 of 949 planned projects and run 54,000 social engagement activities. He said the distinction between Category-A and Category-B areas in Balochistan had ended under the Balochistan Police Act, 2011.
On Afghanistan, the DG ISPR said Pakistan had been pressing the Afghan Taliban for “the constitution of a verifiable mechanism” and that Pakistan had evidence “of where and to whom the Afghan Taliban had been providing refuge”. Asked about the future of the closed border, he said the country’s security and territorial integrity were the state’s top priority, and that “the border closure only had advantages for Pakistan and no losses, as terrorism was permeating through it”. He acknowledged that Pakistan had conducted talks with the Afghan Taliban in Doha and Istanbul in 2025, but said “they are the de facto rulers in Afghanistan” and that 225 border flag meetings, 836 protest letters and 13 demarches had taken place with the same interlocutor since 2021.
What remains contested on 6 January
Several claims in the briefing rest on institutional narrative and were not independently corroborated on the day. The headline 75,175 IBOs and 2,597 terrorists-killed figures are military tallies, not independently audited counts; the same applies to the breakdown of 5,397 incidents and the assertion that 71 per cent came from KP. The DG ISPR also criticised PTI’s KP government and referenced the political-terror nexus in the province, but did not disclose evidence on the day identifying specific politicians, parties or facilitation networks beyond the framing of his presentation. New Delhi has consistently denied the claim that India sponsors terrorism in Pakistan, and there was no third-party evidence on 6 January to confirm or rebut the transfer of US-origin weapons from Afghanistan into militant hands.
The civilian-toll figure of 60 dead in the 10 major attacks and the 1,235 martyrs across all 2025 incidents are both reporter-level counts supplied by the same officials running the operations. The DG ISPR acknowledged that 2025 began with the May conflict followed by a rise in incidents, but he did not on Tuesday disclose the breakdown of civilian versus security-force losses — a separation that sub-national rights and journalism outfits had earlier reported as skewed toward security personnel.
For readers, the verified facts on 6 January are the institutional annual accounting the army chose to publish: 75,175 IBOs, 5,397 incidents, 2,597 terrorists killed, 1,235 martyrs and a series of named high-value targets killed in 2025 — alongside the army’s claim that all 10 “high-impact” terror incidents were perpetrated by Afghans. The wider story — whether the briefing overstates the Afghan and Indian role, whether the political-terror nexus claim will yield formal evidence, and whether Pakistan’s October strike-and-border strategy holds against the next round of militant planning — was not answered on the day.
Sources & reporting notes
This article is an original synthesis of three independent accounts of the 6 January 2026 DG ISPR press conference in Rawalpindi. All headline figures — 75,175 IBOs, 5,397 incidents, 2,597 terrorists killed, 1,235 martyrs and the 10 "high-impact" attacks — come from the official briefing as transcribed by the three outlets; no independent inventory of the year's operations was published on the day. The KP fatality figure (2,331, up from 1,620) is from a third-party count cited by Geo News (Centre for Research and Security Studies) and is the only non-military datum in this article.
- Dawn — DG ISPR says Afghans involved in major terrorist incidents in Pakistan in 20256 January 2026 · Editorially independent Pakistan coverage; provides the largest verbatim transcript of the briefing, the geo-political framing of Afghan-Taliban/India ties, and references to the special-reports data and the Pakistan Land Port Authority and NIFTAC setup.
- Geo News — PTI resisting counter-terror efforts at every forum, seeking help from Afghanistan: ISPR DG6 January 2026 · Independent Pakistan coverage of the same briefing; supplies the Centre for Research and Security Studies KP fatality count and the political exchange between Lt Gen Chaudhry and the KP chief minister.
- The News International — ISPR DG assails PTI for seeking Kabul's support amid rising terror incidents in KP6 January 2026 · Third independent Pakistan account; corroborates the IBO and terrorist-killed figures, the "10 major incidents" claim, the 78 terrorists killed across those attacks and the October strike against TTP infrastructure.
