Hangu, Pakistan – Police officer Fayyaz Khan and his colleagues ducked for cover as drones carrying explosives rained them down on their checkpost in northwest Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province this year. The April 16 attack was claimed by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), commonly known as the Pakistan Taliban, and its fighters then opened fire from all sides of the Sarki Piyala police checkpost in Hangu district, about 30km (18 miles) from the border with Afghanistan and a hotbed of deadly attacks by armed groups, mainly the TTP. The confrontation lasted roughly seven hours, killed the driver of an armoured vehicle and injured a constable, Khan, a 40-year-old police inspector, recalled.
At that moment, we did not even know whether we would make it back home alive,” Khan told Al Jazeera. To defend against such attacks, the police in Hangu came up with an unlikely, low-cost solution – fishing nets strung several metres overhead between the checkpost’s rooftops and perimeter walls, forming a kind of aerial ceiling. Simple in construction and resembling what fishermen use for their work, the netting was first installed two months ago, according to the local police.
Since then, Khan said, no drone attacks have taken place at Sarki Piyala. He said the police in Hangu have asked for additional funding from the provincial government to expand the programme and their request is under review. A spokesman for the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police said the nets have been installed at checkpoints and police posts in at least five other vulnerable districts: Kohat, Karak, Bannu, Lakki Marwat and Dera Ismail Khan.
Even military outposts at some sites in the province have deployed the antidrone netting system. The fishing nets have been put up in response to a shift in the tactics of armed groups, which are pairing gunfire and mortars with drones and quadcopters. Pakistan has seen an increase in armed attacks in recent years, mainly targeting the police and the military, with many of them claimed by the TTP, which says it is fighting for a Taliban-style, religious-driven government in Pakistan.
Pakistani officials have repeatedly accused Kabul’s Taliban government of providing the TTP a safe haven on its soil and have demanded that it prevent cross-border attacks into Pakistan. Kabul has denied the accusations and called the attacks Islamabad’s domestic security problem. In Hangu, the deadliest of such attacks happened on July 29 when attackers stormed a police outpost with quadcopters rigged with bombs before launching a ground ambush, killing at least 11 police officers and wounding 28.
Fifteen attackers were also killed in the hours-long assault, claimed by the TTP. On September 20, another exchange of fire in Hangu killed six soldiers and eight attackers, according to the Pakistani army. That attack came two days after another armed group, called Ittehad-ul-Mujahideen Pakistan, killed 23 people, including 16 police officers, and bombed a mosque in coordinated attacks in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Kohat district.
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