The restiveness of Pakistan’s Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) provinces has long been a persistent condition, one which the centre has, especially in recent years, been trying to bring under control through a series of counterinsurgency (COIN) campaigns.
Historically, Pakistan’s COIN efforts would involve the Pakistan Army’s conventionally oriented, standing forces on one end, facing far more diffused and mobile, but also generally less armed and/or provisioned irregulars on the other. However, the current COIN experience is seeing the rise of a new advent: the use of drones by both sides of the conflict.
This two-way drone warfare is in itself a complex dynamic. Pakistan is both the end-user of the small-factor drone – e.g., quadcopter and first-person-view (FPV) drone – but must also defend against them across its fixed installations (e.g., air bases) and forward-deployed units.
The Threat Pakistan Is Absorbing
Some of the threats Pakistan has faced include repurposed Chinese commercial quadcopters – such as the DJI Mavic 3, Matrice series, and Air 2 airframes. These typically range in cost from USD $200 to $1,000 per unit. Insurgents have modified these drones with explosives weighing 400-700 g, grenades, or nail/ball-bearing packages. Currently, none of the reported drones have leveraged purpose-built release mechanisms; thus, they have largely consisted of crudely taped and tied improvisations. Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the Pakistan Army’s press wing, stated that in 2025, Pakistan faced 405 small-factor drone attacks in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
Director General ISPR Lt. Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry provided that figure at his year-end press conference, setting it against 5,397 terrorist incidents recorded across the country in 2025. Thus, quadcopter strikes accounted for close to one in every 13 attacks that year.
What has shifted through 2026 appears to be the method rather than the hardware. At Khazina Banda in Hangu, between 29 and 31 July, a drone strike opened on a police post before drones and heavy weapons engaged the reinforcement convoy that responded, leaving 11 police personnel dead and 28 injured.
Thus, the small-factor drone now appears to operate as the fixing element that pins a defender ahead of a ground assault, rather than as a standalone harassment tool. The Soufan Center recorded the 30 July engagement in Hangu along the same sequence, with drones preceding a small-arms assault.
Where the Drones Are Coming From
By the start of 2026, both the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) announced that they had set up formal drone arms. Not only does this indicate an intent to sustain, if not increase, the use of drones against the Pakistani state, but it also necessitates that both the TTP and BLA have access to a sufficient number of drones to sustain their strikes. While China does maintain end-user and destination restrictions on civilian and dual-use drones used for armed purposes globally (including Afghanistan), the TTP and BLA are evidently tapping into some type of secondary or tertiary market to support their operations.
However, the available reporting suggests that this market sits largely inside Pakistan rather than beyond it. Analysis by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) describes militant groups buying consumer electronics directly from local commercial hubs and online platforms to bypass import restrictions, with only the non-commercial parts smuggled in from Afghanistan’s unregulated markets.
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