KARACHI: As shopkeeper Ali Akbar went to open his store last week along the main street of Thatta, in Pakistan’s Sindh province, he found himself wading through a sea of people who had blocked the road, causing an enormous traffic jam.
It wasn’t a political rally – the normal cause of such crowds. It was people without water.
“They were demanding the government declare a water emergency and resolve their woes on a war footing,” Akbar told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone call. “It was extremely hot, but they remained resolute.”
Over a week, the people had walked 140 km (85 miles) from the Indus delta region, desperate to find an answer to worsening water shortages and land losses to erosion in their home villages.
Zuhaib Ahmed Pirzada, a young environmental activist from Thatta, said an original 50 or so marchers from the area around Kharo Chan – where the delta meets the Arabian Sea — were joined by others as they marched north.
By the time the crowd reached Thatta, there were 1,500 marchers.
Tanzeela Qambrani, a legislator from Badin district, in southern Sindh province, said the region has seen the “slow death” of the delta for many years.
Water expert Simi Kamal, who works at the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund and started a foundation focused on water and food security, said the spread of large-scale irrigation along the Indus River is partially to blame for less water reaching the delta.
But she said “mismanagement” of water, including wasteful flood irrigation and failure to leave enough water in systems to support nature, played a far bigger role.
“Together these have been catastrophic for the environment as well as the local population,” she said, predicting that a shifting climate would only make the problem worse.
LOWER FLOW
The Indus is a water lifeline for over 200 million Pakistanis, about 50 million of them near the river’s end in Sindh, according to the US-Pakistan Center for Advanced Studies in Water and other agencies.
A report by environmental and development group Lead Pakistan said that as demands on the Indus’ water grow, the delta is receiving less than a third of the water it needs.
The flow is also less than what it is due under a 1991 water sharing accord among Sindh, Punjab, Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces, the report said.
Khalid Hyder Memon, a former irrigation department official in the Sindh provincial government, said he felt Punjab province, upstream, was “stealing” water that should be Sindh’s share.
He said repeated protests and requests over the last two years for a water audit by an independent body had not yet been acted on by the Indus River System Authority, which monitors water distribution and sharing.
“An audit would establish how much water there is in the system and how much is released to each province,” said Memon, who worked on irrigation issues for 37 years.
But Usman Tanveer, deputy commissioner of Thatta, said recent shortages of water in Sindh were in part the result of cool June temperatures in Gilgit-Baltistan’s Skardu district, with less snowmelt coming from the foothills of the Karakoram mountains.
“It takes between 17 to 25 days for the water from Skardu to reach us. The unprecedented and persistent low temperatures delayed snow melt and created havoc for us,” he explained.
Qambrani said the Sindh government needs to show “seriousness” in dealing with growing water threats as climate pressures become the new normal, and as sea level rise and less water and sediment flowing down the Indus erodes delta land.
“Here in the delta, the sea is fast swallowing up our land. The government must come up with a sound plan now or we will have a huge population of climate refugees to deal with,” the legislator said.
On Sunday, the international Green Climate Fund announced it was providing $35 million in funding, supported by $12.7 million in funds from Pakistan, to improve water management and farming practices in eight climate-hit districts in Pakistan, including in Sindh and Punjab provinces.
The six-year project, which the UN Food and Agriculture Organization will begin running this year, aims in part to help small-scale farmers learn how to farm with less water.
It will also give them access better weather information to plan more effectively for droughts and other climate-related risks.
MORE DESALINATION, FEWER FISH
On the orders of Sindh province’s chief minister, a government team met with those leading the march to Thatta, and listened to their demands.
Those included remodeling of waterways, installation of many more desalination plants, repair of non-working plants, and closure of illegal fish farms.
“If they install at least 100 other reverse osmosis plants for the nearly 400 big and small villages in the coastal belt of Sindh, our drinking water problem would be resolved,” said 27-year old Ayaz Lashari, one of the organizers of the march.
Tanveer, the Thatta district commissioner, said the irrigation department had already begun visiting illegal fish farms, which had been “slapped with notices of closure,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The farms use water allocated for irrigation and do not pay the required water tax, he said.
“We would like people to come up and tell us exactly who is stealing the water and from where and we will take immediate action,” he promised.
Lashari, one of the marchers, and his large extended family once owned 600 acres of farmland, where they had 300 cows, 250 buffalos and a Jeep, “which was unheard of” then, he said.
They grew sugarcane, cotton, wheat, rice, vegetables and “the finest, most sweet bananas”, he said.
Now, however, 267 acres of their land have now been lost to the sea, he said, and another 275 acres have become saline and infertile.
“My brothers and uncles just cultivate 27 acres of the remaining 58 acres, as we do not have the financial resource to buy inputs for the entire 58 acres,” he said.
He and his family live in a rented house on rented land, with his father supplementing the farm income by working in a government department, Lashari said.
Lashari has his own ambition: To become a lawyer.
As water disappears, parched southern Pakistan farmers march north
As water disappears, parched southern Pakistan farmers march north
- Indus is a water lifeline for over 200 million Pakistanis
- The delta is receiving less than a third of the water it needs
‘Look ahead or look up?’: Pakistan’s police face new challenge as militants take to drone warfare
- Officials say militants are using weapons and equipment left behind after allied forces withdrew from Afghanistan
- Police in northwest Pakistan say electronic jammers have helped repel more than 300 drone attacks since mid-2025
BANNU, Pakistan: On a quiet morning last July, Constable Hazrat Ali had just finished his prayers at the Miryan police station in Pakistan’s volatile northwest when the shouting began.
His colleagues in Bannu district spotted a small speck in the sky. Before Ali could take cover, an explosion tore through the compound behind him. It was not a mortar or a suicide vest, but an improvised explosive dropped from a drone.
“Now should we look ahead or look up [to sky]?” said Ali, who was wounded again in a second drone strike during an operation against militants last month. He still carries shrapnel scars on his back, hand and foot, physical reminders of how the battlefield has shifted upward.
For police in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, the fight against militancy has become a three-dimensional conflict. Pakistani officials say armed groups, including the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), are increasingly deploying commercial drones modified to drop explosives, alongside other weapons they say were acquired after the US military withdrawal from neighboring Afghanistan.
Security analysts say the trend mirrors a wider global pattern, where low-cost, commercially available drones are being repurposed by non-state actors from the Middle East to Eastern Europe, challenging traditional policing and counterinsurgency tactics.
The escalation comes as militant violence has surged across Pakistan. Islamabad-based Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies (PICSS) reported a 73 percent rise in combat-related deaths in 2025, with fatalities climbing to 3,387 from 1,950 a year earlier. Militants have increasingly shifted operations from northern tribal belts to southern KP districts such as Bannu, Lakki Marwat and Dera Ismail Khan.
“Bannu is an important town of southern KP, and we are feeling the heat,” said Sajjad Khan, the region’s police chief. “There has been an enormous increase in the number of incidents of terrorism… It is a mix of local militants and Afghan militants.”
In 2025 alone, Bannu police recorded 134 attacks on stations, checkpoints and personnel. At least 27 police officers were killed, while authorities say 53 militants died in the clashes. Many assaults involved coordinated, multi-pronged attacks using heavy weapons.
Drones have also added a new layer of danger. What began as reconnaissance tools have been weaponized with improvised devices that rely on gravity rather than guidance systems.
“Earlier, they used to drop [explosives] in bottles. After that, they started cutting pipes for this purpose,” said Jamshed Khan, head of the regional bomb disposal unit. “Now we have encountered a new type: a pistol hand grenade.”
When dropped from above, he explained, a metal pin ignites the charge on impact.
Deputy Superintendent of Police Raza Khan, who narrowly survived a drone strike during construction at a checkpoint, described devices packed with nails, bullets and metal fragments.
“They attach a shuttlecock-like piece on top. When they drop it from a height, its direction remains straight toward the ground,” he said.
TARGETING CIVILIANS
Officials say militants’ rapid adoption of drone technology has been fueled by access to equipment on informal markets, while police procurement remains slower.
“It is easy for militants to get such things,” Sajjad Khan said. “And for us, I mean, we have to go through certain process and procedures as per rules.”
That imbalance began to shift in mid-2025, when authorities deployed electronic anti-drone systems in the region. Before that, officers relied on snipers or improvised nets strung over police compounds.
“Initially, when we did not have that anti-drone system, their strikes were effective,” the police chief said, adding that more than 300 attempted drone attacks have since been repelled or electronically disrupted. “That was a decisive moment.”
Police say militants have also targeted civilians, killing nine people in drone attacks this year, often in communities accused of cooperating with authorities. Several police stations suffered structural damage.
Bannu’s location as a gateway between Pakistan and Afghanistan has made it a security flashpoint since colonial times. But officials say the aerial dimension of the conflict has placed unprecedented strain on local forces.
For constables like Hazrat Ali, new technology offers some protection, but resolve remains central.
“Nowadays, they have ammunition and all kinds of the most modern weapons. They also have large drones,” he said. “When we fight them, we fight with our courage and determination.”
