Islamabad, Pakistan — The motorway linking Pakistan’s capital with Peshawar, about 180km (110 miles) to the northwest, has been closed to all traffic until further notice, according to a police notification. So have the highway towards Dera Ismail Khan, the Hazara motorway and the Grand Trunk Road at Attock. Each carries traffic between Islamabad and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province governed by the party of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan, whose supporters plan to march on the capital on Sunday, September 27, demanding his release.
The motorway from Lahore, about 375km (235 miles) to the southeast, remains open. Inside Islamabad, workers have welded shipping containers together and filled them with gravel and sand so they cannot be pushed aside. Several schools and colleges have been told to shut so police brought in from Punjab and Sindh can be housed there.
Police expect the march to draw between 20,000 and 25,000 people, according to local media reports. While two of the country’s main opposition parties announced marches on the capital this month, only Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has faced measures on this scale. Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), a religious party, also set out for Islamabad last week to protest against rising fuel prices.
On Monday, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif telephoned its leader, Hafiz Naeemur Rehman, and by Tuesday afternoon JI had postponed its march, pending a meeting between the two men. Instead, Khan’s three sisters, all over the age of 65, have been detained in Lahore and at least six of the party’s legislators in Islamabad, all under a 1960 public order law that allows preventive detention without charge. PTI says the true figure of those arrested is higher, and that one lawmaker taken from the parliament lodges has not been traced since.
Khan has been in prison since August 2023 and remains Pakistan’s most prominent opposition figure. But his party enters the final stretch before the protest weakened, with no major demonstration outside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa since November 2024, by its own account. Yet, say analysts, the Pakistani government appears to be treating the protest march as a far bigger threat than a regular political event would warrant.
It isn’t just afraid of this protest; it has turned this protest into a matter of its own survival.” More than 2,000 containers have been placed across Islamabad and at Attock Bridge, the main crossing between Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab, according to media reports, with 19,000 police officers on their way from Punjab and Sindh, and thousands more deployed at Attock. Dawn, the country’s leading English-language newspaper, said in an editorial that the government appeared to be preparing “not for a political event but an invasion”. Talal Chaudhry, the junior interior minister, rejected the suggestion that the government was shutting down the capital itself.
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