On Friday, 24 April, readers of the International New York Times in Pakistan opened the front page to find a chilling void. Where Zia ur Rahman’s investigation on rising Shia anger over the Iran war should have stood, there was nothing. Just a blank rectangle and a quiet disclaimer at the bottom noting that the article had been pulled by the local publishing partner, with the New York Times newsroom playing no part in the decision. The article, titled “Pakistan’s Leaders Try to Contain Rising Anger Over Iran War at Home,” appeared online and in every other international edition. Inside Pakistan, where roughly 35 million Shias live, the very citizens the story is most concerned about were denied the right to read it. The blank page said more about Pakistan than the article itself ever could.
The decision to erase the report was not editorial caution but state-driven damage control. The article connected Pakistan’s diplomatic posturing during the US-Iran war, which began in February 2026 after the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with mounting anger inside the country’s Shia community. Reporter Zia ur Rahman observed that even as Islamabad postured as a peacemaker abroad, it was scrambling to contain unrest at home. Protests had erupted in Karachi, Islamabad, Skardu and Gilgit-Baltistan, with several civilians killed by police and security forces. In Karachi, US Marines opened fire when crowds stormed the American consulate, and at least ten people died. None of this troubled the global press. Inside Pakistan, the entire conversation simply vanished.
The man at the centre of this clampdown is Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, who, in November 2025, under the controversial 27th Constitutional Amendment, was elevated to Chief of Defence Forces with command over all three services and lifelong immunity from prosecution. At an iftar gathering in Rawalpindi a month before the censorship incident, Munir reportedly told a delegation of Shia clerics, “If you love Iran so much, then go to Iran.” The remark, captured by multiple Pakistani and Indian news outlets, was an open warning to a community that constitutes roughly 15 percent of Pakistan’s population. Shia clerics, including Allama Sibtain Haider Sabzwari of the Shia Ulema Council, hit back, accusing the army of acting at the behest of foreign powers. The censored NYT story carried similar warnings about sectarian fallout, which is precisely why it had to disappear from print.
The censorship cannot be separated from a broader pattern of organised violence against Pakistan’s Shia minority. Between July and November 2024, more than 200 people were killed in sectarian clashes in Kurram, with over 80 dying in the three days from 21 to 23 November alone. A November 2024 ambush of a Shia pilgrim convoy near Parachinar killed at least 38 worshippers, including women and children, triggering days of retaliatory violence. Attacks in Parachinar, Quetta and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa together killed well over a hundred Shias in 2025. Then on 6 February 2026, a suicide bomber walked into the Khadija Tul Kubra Mosque in Tarlai Kalan, on the outskirts of Islamabad, and detonated his vest during Friday prayers. At least 32 worshippers were killed and 170 were injured, making it the deadliest attack in the capital since the 2008 Marriott Hotel bombing. The state offered condolences and moved on.
This is the established pattern. Whenever Shia blood is spilt, the Pakistani establishment performs ritual condemnation, then chooses containment over justice. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has repeatedly described the Kurram situation as a humanitarian crisis, but the state has neither dismantled the militant networks responsible nor prosecuted the planners. The military, which maintains a heavy footprint across these districts, appears more invested in policing Shia anger than protecting Shia lives. Successive governments have signed peace accords, including the 2008 Murree Jirga, only to let them collapse. Almost every Shia family in Parachinar has lost someone. Yet the political and security establishment treats sectarian killing as a manageable nuisance rather than the existential crisis it has become for one of the world’s largest Shia populations outside Iran.
The censorship of the NYT report is part of a wider collapse of press freedom under Munir. In May 2025, Reporters Without Borders ranked Pakistan 158 out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index, a drop of six places from its 2024 ranking of 152. RSF placed Pakistan in the “very serious” red zone alongside Afghanistan, Iran and China. The Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, amended in January 2025 without parliamentary consultation, has become the favoured weapon of the state. Under the new provisions, spreading so-called false information carries a penalty of up to 3 years in prison and a fine of more than USD 7,000.
The crackdown extends beyond domestic borders. In February 2026, RSF reported that four Pakistani journalists living in exile were sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment, part of what the watchdog called a campaign of transnational repression that includes passport cancellations, frozen bank accounts, intimidating phone calls, and doxxing of personal data. Among those targeted is investigative reporter Ahmad Noorani, who in March 2025 published a detailed investigation into Munir’s family wealth. In July 2025, an Islamabad court ordered 27 YouTube channels blocked under PECA, including those of journalists Matiullah Jan, Asad Ali Toor, Wajahat Saeed Khan and Moeed Pirzada.
In January 2026, an anti-terrorism court handed life sentences to eight journalists and YouTubers for digital activity in support of Imran Khan amid the 2023 Pakistani protests. Self-censorship is no longer a personal choice in Pakistani newsrooms. It is the basic survival reflex of a profession operating under the direct surveillance of an army that no longer tolerates scrutiny. Therefore, the blank space on the front page of the Pakistani version of the New York Times is not a printing error. It is the visual confession of a state at war with its own citizens, with its own minorities and with the truth. Pakistan’s establishment is convinced that erasing a story is the same as solving a problem.