Islamabad, Pakistan — Two boys scale the rusted corner of a shipping container marked “EVERGREEN” in block white letters. They kick up into handstands, legs steady, without so much as a glance upward, even as traffic passes on the road behind them. The clip runs 27 seconds, cut exactly to a verse from rap singer Cheema Y’s Punjabi track “Police”, about containers of smuggled goods crossing the border that nobody can account for.
The four-tonne container beneath their feet carries nothing at all. It is one of what transport associations and officials put at between 1,500 and 2,000 heavy steel boxes barricading Islamabad’s roads ahead of an opposition march. The idea for the video, shared on Instagram six days ago, was the brainchild of 26-year-old Mujaddad Asrar, a callisthenics and parkour athlete.
Asrar has been staging shoots like this one on Islamabad’s containers for several years. This clip, along with several others, went out from a friend’s account rather than his own, because the friend has a bigger following, he says. It’s basically a fifth season.
The containers have been up for nearly four weeks as part of efforts by the country’s government to block an upcoming march on the capital by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), the party of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan. The party had planned to set off on September 27 from Peshawar, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, then pushed the date back to October 4, citing “strategic reasons.” The march is PTI’s latest attempt to pressure the government into releasing Khan, the country’s most popular political figure according to polls, who has been behind bars for more than three years. Islamabad has been here before several times in recent years.
In August 2024, as PTI petitioned the Islamabad High Court over a cancelled rally permit at D-Chowk, the square where the city’s high-security Red Zone starts, then-Chief Justice Aamer Farooq remarked that the authorities had turned the capital into a “container city”. Talal Chaudhry, the state minister for interior, however, said the use of containers ahead of the coming protest reflects standard practice rather than overreach. Islamabad police initially sought roughly 820 million rupees ($2.9m) for a week of security arrangements around PTI’s planned march, according to local media reports.
With the march delayed a week, officials now expect the final bill to top 1 billion rupees ($3.6m). Container rental sits at the centre of that budget: one estimate puts the daily rental for more than 1,500 containers at 46.5 million rupees ($167,000). While owners maintain they have not been paid for their containers, Chaudhry disputes this.
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