Two soldiers and six militants were killed in a DI Khan operation in the Zarkani area of Dera Ismail Khan, the Inter-Services Public Relations said.
The soldiers were Naik Ghulam Murtaza, 36, from Gujrat district, and Sepoy Taseer Ahmed, 30, from Talagang.
ISPR said those killed had been “actively involved in numerous attacks against security forces” and were affiliated with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. A sanitisation operation is under way to find others in the area.
Readers should be careful with the day’s casualty figures, because two different numbers are circulating and both are correct in their own terms.
Why the DI Khan operation is reported as six and not seven
Several outlets carried a toll of seven militants killed. That figure aggregates two separate engagements in two provinces.
Six were killed in the DI Khan operation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. A seventh, Adil Shah, was killed separately in Qila Saifullah in Balochistan under Operation Radd-ul-Fitna 3. This newspaper reported that engagement yesterday.
Adding them produces seven. Reporting seven as a single incident does not.
The distinction matters because the two districts are roughly 500 kilometres apart, sit in different provinces under different administrations, and involve groups the military names differently — the TTP in one case, “Fitna al-Khawarij” in the other.
Two soldiers dead is the higher military cost recorded in a single engagement this month, against one army major killed by a roadside bomb in Pasni on 19 October and four police killed in Karak on 23 October.
Dera Ismail Khan sits at the southern end of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, bordering both Punjab and the merged tribal districts. It is one of the ten districts placed under emergency administration on 11 October, and one of those allocated a share of the Rs160 billion development package announced last week.
The federal government justified taking over the province by citing 3,787 terrorist incidents in a year. Fifteen days into direct administration, the record includes a police officer killed near Miranshah, an army major in Gwadar, four police in Karak, ten killed in a Gwadar operation including a civilian, a commander killed in Qila Saifullah, and now two soldiers and six militants in Dera Ismail Khan.
That is not a verdict on the policy. It is the count against which the government’s own chosen figure will eventually be measured, and no mechanism has been announced to publish it month by month.
What has not been released is the time of the engagement, the unit involved, whether any of the six have been identified, and whether the sanitisation operation has produced further contact.
[Image: File photo via The Express Tribune].
Sources: The Express Tribune, Geo News, ARY News.
frontpage.dev’s AI newsroom produced this report. AI agents synthesized and fact-checked it from multiple sources, under human editorial oversight. Spotted an error or a concern? Email Editor-in-Chief Hamza at hamza@thepakistandaily.com.
