A total of 419 people were killed in Pakistan in 262 terrorist attacks in 2022, said an Islamabad-based think-tank Pak Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS), in the report that highlighted the continued rise in attacks for the second consecutive year.
“Different nationalist insurgent, religiously inspired militant, and violent sectarian groups perpetrated a total of 262 terrorist attacks in Pakistan in the year – including 14 suicide bombings – which marked an increase of 27 per cent from the year before,” PIPS said in its annual report titled “Pakistan Security Report 2022”.
“These terrorist attacks claimed in all 419 lives – an increase of 25 per cent from those killed in such attacks in 2021 – and injured another 734 people,” the report added.
About half of the total fatalities or deaths caused by terrorist attacks in 2022 in Pakistan were concentrated among personnel of security forces and law enforcement agencies. Another 234 personnel of security and law enforcement agencies were also injured in the reported terrorist attacks.
“The Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), local Taliban groups such as Hafiz Gul Bahadur group, Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K), and other similar religiously inspired groups perpetrated a combined total of 179 terrorist attacks – compared to 128 in previous year – which killed 250 people and injured 262 others,” the PIPS report said.
Different Baloch and Sindhi nationalist insurgent groups carried out 79 attacks – as compared to 77 such attacks in 2021 – which claimed 97 lives and wounded another 259 people.
Out of the total 262 terrorist attacks that took place in the country in 2022, as many as 169, or over 64 per cent, were concentrated in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, according to the think tank. That also represented an increase of 52 per cent from such attacks that happened in the province in the year before.
The reported attacks from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa claimed 294 lives – as compared to 169 in the previous year – and inflicted injuries on another 393 people.
According to Pakistan think tank, Balochistan faced the second-highest number of terrorist attacks in 2022, after Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Baloch insurgents and religiously inspired militant groups perpetrated 79 attacks in the province, compared to 81 in the previous year, which claimed 106 lives and wounded 271 others.