Thousands of Pakistanis who lived along their nation’s tense border with Afghanistan have been left stranded after being driven from their homes last month to make way for a military campaign against Islamist fighters that their government now says it never planned.
Local and national officials have given conflicting accounts of the abrupt mass relocation of residents in the Tirah valley, a rugged region that has long been a key transit route and staging ground for attacks across the border. Local governments say they were told to move the residents, but national officials in Islamabad, the capital, say the central government and armed forces never gave such an order.
No official figures have been released, but district officials estimate that more than 60,000 people have been displaced by the evacuation, which began in early January. Many faced snow and freezing temperatures as they fled the border.
However, national officials have begun to deny that a military operation is underway or that they asked residents to leave their homes. At a news conference in Islamabad last Tuesday, Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, seemed skeptical that an evacuation had even taken place, calling the displacement a “seasonal migration.”
Pakistan’s army has so far made no statement about the operation.
That has left the displaced families feeling stuck, and fearful that they will not receive financial compensation that they had been promised — and without which they are unable to get back home.
One was Fazal Badshah, who fled with his family on Jan. 10 along with thousands of others traveling through the freezing winter cold. He said he left after a local mosque broadcast the order to evacuate over loudspeakers that echoed through the Tirah valley.
“It seems the government thinks we are fools,” Mr. Badshah said in the town of Bara, where he is staying with relatives. “They do not care about our suffering.”
Many made the dangerous 70-mile exodus through winter weather and multiple government checkpoints to Bara, a town near Peshawar where they have sought temporary shelter.
“A journey that should have taken hours took two days after we were stranded in a snowstorm,” said Irshad Ali, a trader from Tirah. “Now we are stranded again, our displacement unacknowledged and our return home uncertain.”
The disconnect comes as Pakistan’ has stepped up efforts to combat Islamist militantsin Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the border province that includes the valley, where violence has surged since the Taliban’s return to power in neighboring Afghanistan in 2021. The Pakistani Taliban, also known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, has launched deadly assaults on police stations and security convoys from bases in Afghanistan.
There were nearly 700 attacks that killed more than 1,000 people across Pakistan last year, with more than half taking place in the border province, according to the Pak Institute of Peace Studies, an independent research institute.
Accusing the Taliban in Afghanistan of aiding the group, Pakistan expelled 900,000 Afghans living in Pakistan last year and hit Afghanistan with airstrikes, including its capital, Kabul. The Taliban administration has repeatedly denied the allegations and insisted that the insurgency is Pakistan’s domestic security problem.
The local government received word from federal officials and law enforcement agencies late last year that the Pakistan’s military planned an intervention in Tirah, according to two district officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the plan.
On their instructions, thousands of families left starting in January. They received assurances that they would be compensated for damaged property and paid a monthly stipend the equivalent of $178 per family until April, when they were told they could return.
Speaking at a political rally on Sunday, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s chief minister, Muhammad Sohail Afridi, accused the central government of reversing its position and demanded a public apology for those “forcibly displaced.”
While the problems may be a case of miscommunication, they have highlighted a bitter political confrontation between the national officials in Islamabad and the provincial government, which is led by Pakistan’s main opposition party.
The central government is widely seen as aligned with Pakistan’s powerful military, but Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is governed by the P.T.I., the party of a former prime minister, Imran Khan, who has been imprisoned since 2023 following his removal from office after a confrontation with senior military leaders.
P.T.I. lawmakers frequently call for troops to withdraw from border districts, arguing that repeated military operations have harmed civilians without addressing the roots of Pakistani Taliban movement. They blame the group’s resurgence in part on political instability following Mr. Khan’s imprisonment.
Last month, Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, a military spokesman, accused the provincial government of providing “a politically conducive environment” to the group, linking it to the region’s growing wave of violence.
Security analysts warn that the absence of unified front between local leaders and the military could undermine Pakistan’s counterterrorism efforts and could allow the rebels to exploit public frustration.
“The central and provincial governments are politicizing the security and humanitarian crises, while people in the region bear the brunt of this intergovernmental confusion and chaos,” said Syed Fakhar Kakakhel, an independent researcher on regional Islamist movements.
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