Pakistans

Islamabad, Pakistan — Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff and Chief of Defence Forces, Field Marshal Asim Munir, is traveling to Tehran on Monday for talks with senior Iranian officials, Iran’s Foreign Ministry announced on Sunday.

It will be Munir’s third visit to Iran this year as Islamabad continues its push to mediate an end to the United States and Israel’s war on Iran.

Pakistani officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed to Al Jazeera that the trip would take place but declined to elaborate on its agenda.

The Pakistani military’s media wing, the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), as well as the Foreign Ministry and Information Ministry, did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment on the visit, which was unusually announced by Tehran rather than Islamabad.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said the trip would build on Pakistan’s efforts to “help strengthen peace and security in the region”.

Munir will hold talks with senior Iranian officials during his stay, Baghaei told reporters in Tehran.

The visit follows two phone calls between Munir and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi within four days, on Wednesday and Saturday.

The two officials discussed “regional developments” and ways to strengthen “peace, stability and security” in West Asia, according to Iranian state media.

A third trip this year

Munir’s first visit to Tehran this year came in April, days after the Islamabad Talks, the first direct US-Iran negotiations in more than four decades, ended without a breakthrough.

He returned in May, arriving hours after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said there had been “slight progress” in talks between Washington and Tehran.

His latest visit comes as the diplomatic track underpinning the Islamabad MoU has all but stalled, while Washington prepares a new round of sanctions.

The discussions are also expected to touch on this month’s announcement of the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye, which Munir attended in Mecca.

Yemen’s Houthi fighters, whose attacks on shipping lanes have repeatedly threatened to widen the conflict, are also likely to feature in his conversations with Iranian officials. The Houthis are widely believed to receive support from Tehran.

The issue carries particular weight for Islamabad.

Three Pakistani sailors were killed and several others wounded when Houthi forces struck a Tanzania-flagged commercial vessel in the Bab al-Mandeb Strait on August 11.

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar called the attack a violation of international law and “strongly condemned” it at the time.

Munir is expected to meet Iran’s newly appointed senior military leadership during the visit, according to Reza Afzal Samir, an Iranian journalist tracking the talks.

“He is well positioned to meet Iran’s newer senior military leadership, the new IRGC chief, the new Chief of General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, and the new Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council,” Samir told Al Jazeera, referring to Munir’s expected meetings with Major-General Ahmad Vahidi, Major-General Ali Abdollahi and Mohsen Rezaei respectively.

The officials were all appointed earlier this month.

A lapsed deal

The visit comes at a fraught moment for Pakistan’s mediation effort, which it has led after the war began six months ago.

The 60-day window set out in the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), signed by Pakistan, Iran and the US on June 17, lapsed in mid-August without either side agreeing to extend it.

Iran has kept the Strait of Hormuz shut, insisting that Washington first lift its naval blockade, end oil sanctions, unfreeze Iranian assets abroad and halt military threats. Tehran says the US has not met those conditions.

Munir’s trip also coincides with a fresh round of US economic pressure.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is due to detail on Monday what American officials have called the “toughest sanctions in history” against Iran, a package he has said is intended, alongside the continuing naval blockade, to “collapse” the government in Tehran.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry has called the plan “economic warfare”.

The trip also follows a month of regional realignment. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement on August 7, a mutual defence pact under which an attack on one signatory would be treated as an attack on all three.

Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi travelled to Tehran earlier this month to revive the stalled mediation push but returned without any concrete results.

Tensions elsewhere in the region have sharpened too.

The United Arab Emirates suspended trade and financial transactions with Iran last week after saying it had come under fire from two ballistic missiles launched from Iranian territory, a claim Baghaei denied.

But Munir’s visit, analysts say, signals that key regional mediators have not given up on efforts to revive talks, either direct or indirect, between Iran and the US, even as they try to balance their own relations with Tehran and Washington.

Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Albusaidi, who, like Munir, has held recent telephone conversations with Araghchi, is scheduled to visit Tehran on Tuesday, Iran’s state-owned IRNA news agency has reported.

What leverage does Islamabad have?

Analysts remain divided on what Munir’s visit can realistically achieve, given Pakistan’s limited ability to enforce any understanding it helps broker.

“Both sides see Pakistan as a country that has helped facilitate dialogue without any personal stake in the outcome, nothing to gain for itself,” said Qamar Cheema, a political analyst and head of the Islamabad-based Sanober Institute. “That gives it a certain clarity, and the ability to offer an off-ramp to everyone involved.”

Javad Heiran-Nia, director of the Persian Gulf Studies Group in Tehran, said Pakistan’s persistence was driven partly by self-interest.

“Pakistan is concerned about escalating tensions and the outbreak of another all-out war between Iran and the United States, which would further destabilise the region,” he told Al Jazeera, pointing to Islamabad’s reliance on energy imports from the Gulf and the risk of disruption to remittances from Pakistani workers there if instability spreads.

Zahid Mehmood, a retired two-star general and Pakistani defence strategist, went further, describing Munir as still carrying Washington’s own offer to Tehran.

“Pakistan is still carrying, in effect, Washington’s off-ramp to Tehran,” he told Al Jazeera. “The country remains the most trusted conduit available.”

Not every analyst sees Pakistan’s role as this central.

Andreas Krieg, an associate professor of defence studies at King’s College London, said Qatar, not Pakistan, remained the primary channel.

“Qatar is leading the political mediation and remains the essential communication bridge between Washington and Tehran,” he told Al Jazeera.

Munir’s contribution, he said, was narrower, a “military-to-military channel into an Iranian system in which the IRGC and wider security establishment have become increasingly important to decisions about war and peace”.

What Munir can deliver, and what he can’t

Iranian journalist Samir said Pakistan had a significant role in Iran’s calculus because of what it could do.

“Why should Iran listen to Pakistan? Because Pakistan still retains the leverage to actually do something and create a real opening for peace, rather than remaining silent and doing nothing,” he said.

Samir also predicted the Munir visit could be followed quickly by movement on Hormuz negotiations. “I think the timeline for a final agreement between Iran and Oman on the Strait of Hormuz is also drawing near,” he said. “If [Munir] succeeds in bringing Iran back to the table, I anticipate a new announcement from Oman and Iran on the strait shortly after.”

Krieg was more cautious about what Munir’s visit could deliver. The most meaningful outcome, he said, would be “confirmation that Iran’s security establishment would abide by a specific Hormuz deconfliction arrangement and restrain escalation through Yemen or Iraq if Qatar can secure reciprocal American movement”.

Without that, according to Krieg, “the communication bridge remains open, but the two sides continue moving towards another coercive cycle”.

Mehmood, the retired Pakistani general, was less equivocal.

“Pakistan is really the only exit card available to either side for their off-ramp,” he told Al Jazeera.

Former leader was escorted from Adiala jail to Shifa International Hospital, following court order, local media reports.

Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan has been transferred from jail to hospital by police and security, according to local media reports.

The founder of the opposition Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party was escorted by authorities in Islamabad from Rawalpindi’s Adiala jail to Shifa International Hospital in the capital late on Thursday, following the Supreme Court’s order, Pakistan’s Geo News reported.

Sources told Geo that authorities had earlier in the day completed preparations to shift the ousted prime minister, who is 73, to the hospital.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered the shift to be completed within two days.

The government had filed a petition against the decision.

PTI shared a live broadcast of the preparations for his transfer but has not yet released a statement about it. The Pakistani government is also yet to comment.

The transfer fulfils a demand that Khan’s party and family had been making for months, expressing concerns over his health.

Under the order, Khan is to be examined by a medical board that includes his personal physician.

Khan’s next hearing has been scheduled for September 16, and the former leader should remain hospitalised until at least then as per the order, according to one of Khan’s lawyers, Uzair Bhandari.

This would be the longest period Khan would be physically outside jail premises since he was imprisoned in August 2023 and convicted in several corruption-related cases that he and his party insist are politically motivated.

The former cricket-star-turned-politician was ousted in a parliamentary no-confidence vote in April 2022.

Iran has held firm on its conditions for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, as Pakistan’s interior minister, Mohsin Naqvi, visited Tehran, and the United States and Yemen’s Houthis launched attacks on shipping in the Gulf and the Red Sea.

The developments on Tuesday came as the US-Israel war on Iran showed no sign of ending, despite repeated claims from US President Donald Trump that a deal was close.

Mohsen Rezaei, the newly appointed head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, told China’s ambassador to Tehran that Washington must end its military campaign and release Iranian funds held abroad for a full reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

“As long as the US does not change its behaviour and accept Iran’s conditions, the Strait of Hormuz will not be reopened,” Rezaei said, according to Iranian media.

Writing on X, he insisted on an end to the US’s naval blockade on Iranian ports as well as a region-wide ceasefire, including in Gaza and Lebanon.

“IRAN’s message is clear,” he wrote. “The Strait of Hormuz will not reopen until the U.S. ends the war and blockade, releases Iran’s frozen assets, and agrees to a region-wide ceasefire, including in Lebanon and Gaza.

“Until all conditions are met, the Strait will remain closed.”

There was no immediate comment from Washington.

Trump has swung between threats of escalation and assurances of an imminent peace deal throughout the conflict.

In an interview broadcast late on Monday, he suggested that the uncertainty could last ⁠for a while, saying he might just “bop along” and let Tehran fail economically, or “hit” them “really, really hard”.

“I’m sort of negotiating,” Trump told Real America’s Voice. “They’re very devious negotiators.”

In Tehran, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met Pakistan’s interior minister, with the two sides discussing closer political, economic, trade, cultural and security ties, according to the Iranian presidency.

Naqvi’s visit comes as Islamabad mediates efforts to end the ongoing conflict.

Earlier, Qatar – another mediator in the conflict – said talks between Iran and Oman on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz had reached an advanced stage.

“We have heard positive statements from both capitals in the recent couple of days,” said Majed al-Ansari, spokesman for the Qatari Foreign Ministry. “Our main priority here is the reopening of the strait, maintaining the ceasefire and making sure that we are able to push forward towards the negotiation.”

Iran, meanwhile, said any agreement between it and Oman on routes in the Strait of Hormuz will have no impact on the reopening of the waterway.

US, Houthi attacks

Separately on Tuesday, US Central Command said a US Navy MH-60 helicopter fired two Hellfire missiles to disable the steering gear of a Panama-flagged cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz.

It said the ship had ignored repeated warnings to stop violating the US naval blockade of Iranian ports.

At the southern end of the Red Sea, four crew members were killed in a suspected Houthi attack on a small cargo vessel in the Bab al-Mandeb strait, according to Yemen’s Transport Ministry. Two Yemeni rescuers from an anti-Houthi military group were also killed, Yemen’s coastguard said.

The killings on board the Egyptian-owned Tihamah would be the first by Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi strikes on shipping since the war on Iran began in late February.

The Houthi-run Saba news agency reported that the ‌group had attacked a Saudi ship carrying military equipment in Bab al-Mandeb. It did not name the ship, and there was no immediate Saudi response to the report.

Thousands of people have been killed since the US and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28. Iran has also struck US assets and infrastructure in Oman, Jordan, Kuwait, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

In Iran, at least 3,527 people have been killed, while more than 27,00 have been wounded. At least 18 Americans have also died.

The conflict has also widened to Lebanon, where Iran-backed Hezbollah has launched attacks on Israel, and Israeli forces have carried out near-daily strikes.

Lebanon’s Health Ministry says Israel’s latest military escalation there, which began on March 2, has killed more than 4,300 people and injured more than 12,000. In Israel, at least 60 people have been killed in Iranian and Hezbollah attacks.

Leaders of Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement last Friday, pledging to strengthen collective deterrence against any act of aggression and stating that an armed attack on any one of the three would be regarded as an attack on all.

The pact comes as the three countries navigate growing regional tensions, including concerns over Israel’s expanding military reach and Iran’s regional influence.

Together, these countries form a sizeable military bloc. Riyadh is a top oil exporter, Ankara has NATO’s second-largest military, and Islamabad is the only nuclear-armed Muslim country.

In this explainer, Al Jazeera breaks down their combined land, air and naval strength.

Joint land, air and naval strength

Together, the three countries combine nearly 1.4 million active military personnel, 3,400 aircraft, 6,000 tanks and more than 340 naval assets according to the 2026 Global Firepower Index, which ranks the defence capabilities of 145 countries.

The index scores each country’s potential war-making capability across land, air and sea, drawing on factors including manpower, equipment, natural resources, finances and geography.

• Manpower: Combined, the three countries include about 1.4 million active personnel, backed by large paramilitary and reserve forces. Pakistan provides the largest pool of active personnel at 660,000, followed by Turkiye at 481,000 and Saudi Arabia at 247,000.
• Air power: Together they operate 3,415 military aircraft including fighter jets, helicopters, transporters and training military aircraft. Pakistan possesses some 1,397 aircraft, followed by Turkiye at 1,101 and Saudi Arabia with 917.
• Land forces: The three countries field some 6,046 tanks and more than 179,000 armoured vehicles, alongside thousands of artillery systems and multiple-launch rocket systems. Pakistan has the highest number of tanks at 2,677, Turkiye has 2,284 and Saudi Arabia, 1,085.
• Naval power: Their combined fleets include 344 naval assets, including 33 frigates, 24 corvettes and 22 submarines. Turkiye comes out top here with 192 naval assets, followed by Pakistan’s 120 and Saudi Arabia’s 32.
• Defence spending: Their combined defence budgets amount to about $124.4bn annually. Saudi Arabia has the largest military budget of the three at $63.9bn in 2026, while Turkiye set aside $51.4bn and Pakistan $9.1bn according to Global Firepower.

Complementary military powers

Andreas Krieg, an academic, security analyst and political risk consultant specialising in the Middle East and North Africa, said the pact’s significance lies in how the three countries’ different capabilities could complement one another.

“Saudi Arabia contributes capital, geography, infrastructure and political convening power. Turkiye contributes an increasingly sophisticated defence-industrial base, drones, missiles, sensors, electronic warfare, naval systems and NATO-derived military expertise,” he said.

Meanwhile, Pakistan contributes manpower, a large professional military establishment, operational experience, defence production and nuclear capability.

What does the alliance mean for each country?

For Saudi Arabia, the pact diversifies its defence partnerships beyond the United States, adding Turkiye’s advanced military capabilities and Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent, amid growing threats to vital maritime corridors such as the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandeb.

Pakistan is one of nine states that possess nuclear weapons, which it first tested in 1998. The country of more than 250 million people relies heavily on China for its arms imports.

Turkiye, which joined NATO in 1952, has no nuclear weapons of its own but hosts US warheads under NATO nuclear-sharing arrangements.

David Des Roches, a former director of Arabian Peninsula affairs in the US Department of Defense, told Al Jazeera that the deal also serves Saudi arms diversification amid Western export unpredictability, since Turkiye and Pakistan can supply items like 155mm artillery shells at scale.

For Turkiye and Pakistan, it opens Saudi financial markets for their defence industries – both have manufacturing capacity exceeding what their own economies can sustain.

Zaid M Belbagi, managing partner at Hardcastle Advisory, told Al Jazeera that, for the US, the stakes are high. “Pakistan is a recipient of US aid, Saudi Arabia is the largest foreign buyer of US military equipment, and Turkiye is NATO’s second-largest army after the United States – so the spectre of the US within this agreement is quite interesting,” he said.

Krieg added that the US remains highly important, particularly for intelligence, advanced missile defence, and high-end military technology – but said that regional actors want to convert their own resources into usable power rather than purchasing from Washington.

“The old model was overwhelmingly hub-and-spokes, with Washington at the centre and individual states looking primarily to the United States for security. What is emerging now is horizontal connectivity between regional powers,” said Krieg.

Which other countries could join the pact?

Egypt is the only country whose potential membership has been publicly raised by a signatory. Turkiye’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan called Egypt a “natural partner” and said he expected Cairo to join once technical issues are resolved.

Krieg said Egypt’s military weight, strategic geography and control of the Suez Canal would make it a significant addition to the pact.

But Cairo may be wary of binding military obligations and the impact on its existing agreements, analysts said. “Egypt may join only if the language protects its aid relationship with Washington, doesn’t undermine existing alliances and peace treaties, and maintains its own freedom to decide when and where it fights,” said Karim Elgendy at Chatham House.

Footage shows blast victims hurried into a hospital in northwestern Pakistan, after a suicide bombing at a police station in Kabal near the Afghan border killed at least 14 people. Crowds of people had been protesting nearby when the bomb exploded.

Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistan-administered Kashmir, formally known as Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), has spent the summer under an unofficial state of emergency.

Since early June, nearly 40 people have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces, with sit-ins and road blockades regular features in the region over this period.

Banks remained shut for two weeks. Mobile and internet services remain suspended across most of the territory. Poonch division, which borders India and has been the epicentre of the unrest, was effectively sealed off for weeks, disrupting the supply of flour and other essentials to a region that depends heavily on them.

The Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), the movement behind the protests, was banned by the local government on June 5, days before a planned demonstration.

Its leadership has since been arrested, has gone underground or has continued organising from sit-in camps in Rawalakot, the administrative headquarters of Poonch division.

Its demands, once centred on subsidised flour and cheaper electricity, have expanded to 38 points, chief among them the abolition of 12 assembly seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees.

All of this is unfolding as the region prepares to vote. Elections for the 45-seat Legislative Assembly, originally scheduled for July 27, have been split across three dates.

Mirpur division votes as planned, Muzaffarabad division and the 12 seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees follow on August 2, while Poonch division, where tensions remain highest, goes to the polls on August 10.

JAAC’s leadership is not on the ballot and has urged supporters to boycott the vote.

Of all the movement’s demands, one issue has proved impossible to resolve: the 12 refugee seats. The government says they cannot be touched without a constitutional amendment. JAAC wants them abolished outright.

Between those two positions lies a legal argument stretching back nearly a century, and a more fundamental question: who gets to decide who governs Muzaffarabad?

A dozen seats, one dispute

Of the AJK Legislative Assembly’s 45 elected seats, 33 are filled from constituencies within the territory.

The remaining 12 are reserved for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir who now live in different parts of Pakistan.

The arrangement traces its roots to electoral arrangements introduced in 1960, reinforced through laws in 1964 and 1970, before being formalised in AJK’s 1974 Interim Constitution and reaffirmed by the constitution’s 13th Amendment in 2018.

Chaudhry Muhammad Ibrahim Zia, a former chief justice of the AJK Supreme Court, said the basis for the seats goes back further still, to the AJK government’s founding declaration of October 24, 1947, which he said reflected “the collective will of the people of the State of Jammu and Kashmir”.

Refugee representation, he told Al Jazeera, has “a firm historical basis” rooted in that document. He rejects any suggestion that the seats are unconstitutional.

“They have both historical grounding and constitutional support,” he said. “These seats cannot be described as unconstitutional.”

Pakistan-administered Kashmir’s electorate has grown from 3.2 million voters in 2021 to more than 3.8 million this year, according to Election Commission figures.

Within that, the 12 refugee constituencies account for roughly 439,000 registered voters, scattered across cities including Lahore, Rawalpindi and Sialkot, rather than concentrated in a single geographical area like AJK’s territorial constituencies.

And that’s a problem, says Kashif Abbasi, a JAAC committee member.

“This election is meant for people who actually live in AJK,” he told Al Jazeera. “These 12 seats sit outside AJK’s jurisdiction. This doesn’t happen anywhere else.”

From flour to the assembly floor

JAAC’s demands were not always centred on the refugee seats. Its original charter was almost entirely economic, focusing on subsidised flour, electricity at cost price, and a share in the benefits from the Mangla and Neelum-Jhelum hydropower projects.

The refugee seats first appeared in the group’s expanded charter, submitted in October 2025.

Even then, JAAC did not initially seek their outright abolition. In written proposals submitted on May 30 this year, the group offered two alternatives.

It proposed retaining symbolic refugee representation until the Kashmir dispute is permanently resolved or replacing the 12 assembly seats with four seats in the AJK Council, the Islamabad-chaired body that exercises legislative authority over AJK’s federal-facing affairs.

The 14-member council, chaired by Pakistan’s prime minister, oversees subjects including electricity, banking and parts of taxation, areas that largely fall outside the AJK assembly’s authority. The territory has no representation in Pakistan’s national parliament.

“Our suggestion was that these seat-holders should instead be given representation on the Kashmir Council, and that their assembly seats be eliminated, with that money used elsewhere in the territory,” Khawaja Mehran, a member of JAAC’s core committee, told Al Jazeera recently.

Both proposals were rejected at an All-Parties Conference in Muzaffarabad on June 3.

Constitutional barrier

In June, the AJK Supreme Court addressed the issue directly.

The court held that the seats are protected under AJK’s constitution and can only be abolished through a formal constitutional amendment. They cannot be removed through executive action or public pressure.

A constitutional amendment, the judges wrote, is “a solemn constitutional act, not a concession to be wrested from a government under duress”.

Zia, the former AJK chief justice, said the opinion changed little about the existing legal position.

“These seats simply cannot be abolished without a proper constitutional process,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that, with the outgoing assembly’s term having ended, no such process is possible until a new legislature is elected.

The government’s account

Abdul Majid Khan, AJK’s former finance minister and himself from a refugee family, rejects the idea that the seat holders form an unaccountable political bloc.

He points instead to the size of the territory’s budget. AJK’s roughly 310 billion rupees (about $1.1bn) budget last year, he said, far exceeds the development funds allocated to the 12 refugee constituencies – nowhere near enough, in his view, to make them the powerful bloc JAAC describes.

“These are people who migrated for a larger cause,” Khan told Al Jazeera, referring to Kashmiris who fled Jammu, across the border, during the violence of 1947 following the partition of the subcontinent and settled across Pakistan in the decades that followed.

Refugee representation, he said, has existed since AJK’s first parliamentary election in 1975, when the territory’s first prime minister was himself from a refugee family.

At the June 3 conference that rejected JAAC’s proposals, AJK Prime Minister Faisal Mumtaz Rathore said any decision on the seats “can only be taken by the elected representatives in the House”, adding that most of JAAC’s other demands had already been met.

Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif told the National Assembly on June 11 that the future of the 12 refugee seats should be decided by voters, not under pressure from street protests.

He urged JAAC to contest the issue in the election rather than demand its resolution beforehand, asking: “How could you exclude them from the electoral process?”

A senior government official in Poonch, whose division has witnessed the worst of the unrest, took an even harder line.

“This is no longer a rights movement,” the official told Al Jazeera, requesting anonymity since he was not allowed to speak to the media, adding that the protesters were not only “challenging the authority of the state”, but also provoking the public through “inflammatory speeches and actions”.

Who holds power?

In mid-July, JAAC leader Umar Nazir Kashmiri told supporters at a sit-in in Rawalakot, Poonch division, that the group had written directly to army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir after concluding that its concerns were not reaching him “through official channels”.

He thanked Munir by name for “understanding the grievances of the people of Kashmir”.

Shaheen was more direct. “We believe real authority currently sits with Rawalpindi,” he told Al Jazeera, referring to Pakistan’s military establishment rather than the civilian government. “That’s why we’re forced to negotiate through that channel, since nobody else actually holds the authority.”

Ershad Mahmud, a Canada-based researcher on Kashmiri displacement and politics, said that “Islamabad’s bureaucracy, military and intelligence establishment have reduced AJK’s elected leadership to a largely symbolic role”.

The current crisis, he told Al Jazeera, has once again shown that the local leadership “lacks the authority to negotiate a political settlement with its own people”.

Unmet promise?

The dispute over the refugee seats is unfolding within a framework that predates Pakistan-administered Kashmir itself.

Under a United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan resolution adopted on January 5, 1949, and endorsed by the UN Security Council, Kashmir’s final status was to be determined “through the democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite”.

Nearly 80 years later, that has yet to happen on either side of the Line of Control.

Mahmud, who is also the author of Poonch: Identity, Politics and Resistance, argues the refugee seats endure partly because they continue to serve Islamabad’s interests.

“They let Pakistan maintain its position that AJK represents the entire former State of Jammu and Kashmir, not merely the territory it administers,” he told Al Jazeera. “And allows Pakistan-based political parties to influence government formation in Muzaffarabad.”

Islamabad, he said, treats the seats “as an instrument of its Kashmir policy and political influence”.

Hassan Kamal Wattoo, a Lahore-based constitutional lawyer, argues that giving greater autonomy to AJK “strengthens Pakistan’s case on the international stage”.

“There is no tension between real autonomy for AJK and an eventual plebiscite,” he told Al Jazeera.

Anam Zakaria, a historian and author of Between the Great Divide: A Journey into Pakistan-Administered Kashmir, however, argued that there was a deeper contradiction within AJK’s constitutional framework.

On the one hand lies India’s “longstanding and ongoing systemic violence and human rights abuses in [Indian-administered] Kashmir”, she said, arguing that nothing Pakistan has done or does in the part of Kashmir it administers can be compared with what’s happened in Indian-administered Kashmir, where tens of thousands of people have been killed in violence involving armed rebels and security forces since 1989.

At the same time, she pointed out, candidates seeking public office in Pakistan-administered Kashmir must first swear allegiance to AJK’s accession to Pakistan.

That requirement, she told Al Jazeera, also “in itself contradicts the right to self-determination” and sidelines Kashmiris who hold a different vision for the region’s future.

At least 28 people have been killed since protests began in June, as the region braces for a major protest march.

Islamabad, Pakistan – At least nine people were killed in clashes in Pakistan-administered Kashmir on Tuesday, as a planned protest march to the region’s capital, Muzaffarabad, temporarily stalled amid rising tensions.

Security personnel raided a house on the outskirts of Rawalakot town in the region’s Poonch district after receiving a tip-off about a weapons cache, but came under fire, officials said. An officer was killed.

In a separate clash in Sudhnoti district, protesters blocked a security convoy, which officials said came under a barrage of stones and gunfire. Seven protesters and a police officer were killed, according to authorities. Police officials have said that security personnel acted in self-defence.

Deadly protests have periodically rocked the region since the Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), a group that is leading a major protest movement, was proscribed under anti-terrorism laws on June 5.

Protesters wait in Rawalkot before march on Muzaffarabad

Meanwhile, protesters gathered under the JAAC’s umbrella were still in Rawalkot on Wednesday evening, despite announcing they would set off at 2pm on Wednesday, officials told Al Jazeera. The government has severely restricted internet and phone access in the region, making it harder to reach the protesters directly.

Munir Qureshi, deputy commissioner of Muzaffarabad, said the situation in the capital and surrounding areas was calm.

“Muzaffarabad and its adjoining areas are all clear, and there is no disturbance to public life,” he told Al Jazeera. “Internet access is limited due to the security situation, but otherwise the situation is normal and there is no protest or violence.”

Liaqat Ali Malik, inspector general of police for Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), told Al Jazeera the crowd in Rawalakot was estimated at between 3,000 and 4,000 people.

“There has been no violence today,” he said.

But tensions continue to simmer. The current unrest stems from a long-running dispute over political representation.

Political dispute

At the centre of the dispute are 12 seats in the region’s legislature reserved for Kashmiri refugees who migrated to Pakistan after 1947 and now live outside the region.

The JAAC argues the arrangement allows Pakistan-based political parties to influence the government of Pakistan-administered Kashmir while diverting development funds intended for the region.

Last month, the Supreme Court of the region ruled that the seats are constitutionally protected and cannot be abolished without a constitutional amendment, a decision that hardened the group’s protest campaign.

Elections in the region are scheduled for July 27.

At least 28 people have been killed since protests began on June 4, according to officials, while 79 have been injured.

Authorities said about 4,000 police and paramilitary personnel have been deployed across the region before the planned march to Muzaffarabad.

Khan, the Poonch commissioner, said marchers would not be allowed to pass through Rawalakot and would instead have to use mountain trails to reach Muzaffarabad.

With the passing of another government deadline for undocumented Afghans to leave, Pakistan has launched a new crackdown on thousands still living in the country.

In response to criticism, authorities say they are enforcing immigration laws and cite national security concerns.

Hundreds of thousands of Afghans have returned to a country they fled. The UN says they include undocumented migrants, refugees and Afghan citizen card holders.

The campaign has coincided with rising political tensions between Islamabad and Kabul.

But is politics involved in the rising tension between the neighbours? And how is Kabul dealing with the influx of returnees?

Presenter: Scott McLean

Guests:

Obaidullah Baheer – Adjunct lecturer at the American University of Afghanistan

Kamran Bokhari – Senior fellow with the Middle East Policy Council in Washington, DC

Zahid Mahmood – Pakistani defence analyst and former senior officer of the Pakistan Army

Karachi, Pakistan – Over a few breezy winter weeks in Karachi, boxing coach Younus Qambrani sent a steady stream of WhatsApp messages from his neighbourhood of Lyari – videos, photos, old newspaper clippings that together formed an extensive archive of how he teaches girls to throw a punch.

In one of the videos, the bearded and skullcap-clad Qambrani, 60, uses the palms of his hands and ducks as his young students practice throwing their punches. The thuds of the colliding boxing gloves and the scuff of the sneakers against the concrete floor of Qambrani’s Pak-Shaheen boxing club mask the din on the street.

Outside, motorcycles speed and sputter on narrow, labyrinthine roads, past omelettes sizzling on outdoor skillets in the many kebab bun stalls that pepper the neighbourhood of nearly 950,000 people: that is the population of Amsterdam packed into about three percent of the Dutch city’s land area.

To millions of followers of Bollywood, the Indian film industry across the border, Lyari is synonymous with brutal gang warfare waged against a perpetually grey background. It is where Bollywood’s highest grossing film of all time, Dhurandhar and its recently released sequel, Dhurandhar The Revenge are set.

The films — about a fictionalised covert mission conducted by India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) on Pakistani soil — have each earned more than $100m. In the first film, an Indian spy infiltrates Lyari’s criminal underworld and neutralises threats to India’s national security. In the sequel, the same agent continues his deep-cover operation inside Pakistan’s crime networks, again moving through Lyari’s streets.

But to Lyari locals, the neighbourhood is much more than the backdrop to blood and gore: It is a melting pot of cultures and tradition, rooted in history far deeper than Bollywood has dared to explore. It has an emerging rap and hip-hop scene, launching acts such as hip hop group, Lyari Underground, and masked rapper, Eva B, onto the national stage. The neighbourhood has also earned the nickname of Mini Brazil for being Pakistan’s mecca of football.

To be sure, Lyari has had a past rife with gang violence and unrest. Armed groups held significant influence from the mid‑2000s into the early 2010s, when battles between rival syndicates were at their peak. Gangs led by figures such as Rehman Dakait and, later, Uzair Baloch – both depicted in the Dhurandhar film and its sequel – turned parts of the neighbourhood into a militarised conflict zone. At the height of the violence, human rights groups reported about 800 people killed in Karachi in a single year, many of them in and around Lyari.

In 2012, the government launched what became known as Operation Lyari, a major crackdown in which police, backed by the Sindh Rangers paramilitary force, moved against armed groups in the area. The operation, and subsequent security campaigns, dismantled the main gang hierarchies and largely ended the era of open, large‑scale gang warfare in Lyari, even if other forms of crime persisted.

But Lyari, said social anthropologist Adeem Suhail, has always been about much more than that period of violence.

“Think of Naples or Sicily in Italy, which are among the major cultural hubs of the country (food, literature, music, etc) despite having long been associated with Mafia violence,” Suhail, an assistant professor at Pennsylvania-based Franklin and Marshall College, told Al Jazeera.

‘Preparing for war’ — of a different kind

Qambrani has been boxing alongside his brothers for as long as he can remember. He began when he was five years old, and was introduced to the sport by his father, uncles and brothers — all boxers. Throughout his childhood, Qambrani says he was a sick and frail child. But he was determined to build muscle and throw punches like the men who had inspired him as he was growing up.

Boxing is so popular in Lyari that in 1989 boxing legend Muhammad Ali visited the neighbourhood, when he was a special guest at the Asian Games in the capital, Islamabad.

Qambrani’s high school, Haji Abdullah Haroon Government College, opened its own boxing club while he was there. He joined, but the club shut down in a few years. So he found another club a little further away and began cycling there to train.

After honing his skills there, Qambrani founded Pak Shaheen Boxing Club in 1992. “I wanted to open a club in my own area,” Qambrani said. At Pak Shaheen, he started out by teaching young boys, aged seven to 16, how to box.

A sports enthusiast, Qambrani built friendships with coaches across the city, often visiting their training centres. At a friend’s karate classes at the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) in central Karachi, he noticed young girls practicing kicks and elbow strikes shoulder-to-shoulder with boys. “If girls can do karate, why not boxing?” he wondered.

Soon he began voicing this question to his peers in the local boxing community, saying he wanted to start training young girls. One of them told him that “little girls have weak brains” — a remark that left Qambrani silent.

Then he went home and began looking through news reports featuring stories of girls and women boxing internationally. He would cut out the news clippings and paste them into a notebook. “My eyes were on the whole world,” he recalled. “Girls are boxing in the outside world, why not here?” he would wonder.

So he started at home: when his daughter Anum turned three, he began playfully sparring with her. She would gaze at the many photos of her father and uncles at boxing championships, slip on his medals, and traipse into the living room, mimicking the victorious poses he struck in those pictures. “She couldn’t even run properly, but she would box,” Qambrani said.

Then, in 2013, he opened the doors of his club to young girls. Anum was 16 at the time, and became its first female member.

In 2015, several of Qambrani’s students participated in the South Asian Games, the biennial multi-sport event where athletes from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka compete against each other.

A year later, Anum won a district level championship called the Jinnah First Ever Karachi Women Boxing Championship held at a Lyari stadium. In the same year, she attended a training camp for women organised by the Sindh Boxing Association. Local media reports described this camp as the country’s first government-supported boxing event held for women.

It was Qambrani’s club where Aliya Soomro, Pakistan’s first woman to win a world boxing title, began her training. Last year, Soomro took a mere 45 seconds to knock out her opponent from Thailand to win the WBA (World Boxing Association) Asia 105-pound category.

For Qambrani, though, boxing is about more than medals and trophies. To him, it’s a vital defensive skill.

“Whoever is prepared for war is prepared for peace,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that the defenceless are the ones most likely to be attacked.

With its legion of young boxers, Lyari’s not defenceless. As its reputation and image are mangled by Bollywood, those who know the neighbourhood also turn to its history for support.

Lyari’s colonial history

It is not just the Dhurandhar films and Bollywood that Suhail, the social anthropologist, blames for what he describes as “terrible and exploitative” representations of Lyari. Journalistic and scholarly literature have been guilty too, he said.

Lyari is Karachi’s oldest recorded settlement — the earliest inhabitants of the neighbourhood came in 1728. The neighbourhood has survived British colonialism, the partition of the subcontinent, and nearly eight decades in independent Pakistan.

Suhail said Lyari had been a diverse working-class cultural hub since before the 1947 partition of British India.

Some of those working class communities were Baloch and Sindhi, because Karachi is at the tip of the southern Sindh province, which neighbours Balochistan province. Others were Marathi, Gujarati, Afghan and Siraiki migrants from labouring and artisan classes.

“This was because the British required labourers and artisans to develop Karachi into a burgeoning Indian Ocean port city.”

Suhail said that most of these labourers settled on the unplanned sides of the Lyari river, a small 50km-long seasonal river originating in the hills of Sindh, which flows through Lyari before emptying into the Arabian Sea.

“These cosmopolitan working class populations brought with them culinary traditions, dances, religious practices (multi-religious, multi-caste), songs, sports and more,” Suhail said.

He added that Lyari has a “strong cultural memory of East Africa and the Arabian Gulf, which adds to its uniqueness.” The neighbourhood is home to both Baloch and Afro-Baloch communities—people of African ancestry living in Balochistan.

Suhail explained that Lyari’s long history as a cultural hub of Karachi is often forgotten “because, after partition, the city’s demographics shifted drastically and Karachi became an Urdu-speaking Muhajir-majority city.” Muhajirs are Urdu‑speaking Muslims who migrated to Pakistan from India during and after the 1947 partition.

Sarwat Viqar, a professor of humanities at John Abbott College in Montreal, Canada, echoed Suhail’s views.

“Because Lyari has been represented one-dimensionally in the media as only a hotbed of criminality, drugs and the gang wars, what has been overlooked are the rich cultural practices that have always been part of life here,” Viqar told Al Jazeera.

Suhail added that Lyari had also consistently been at the heart of labour movements, and a base of support for reformers, anti-colonial activists and later campaigns for the rights of Pakistan’s various ethnic groups, including the Baloch, Sindhi and Pashtun communities.

“Lyari — because it was the first, most diverse, and most vibrant working-class zone as Karachi was becoming a city — also became the hub of working-class politics,” he told Al Jazeera.

But the neighbourhood’s own fortunes have also oscillated over the years.

“The degree of ‘development’ in Lyari has always been a function of how strong the working-class movement in Karachi was,” Suhail said. “When it was strong—such as in the 1930s and again in the 1970s—Lyari saw development. When ruling elites were strong, it did not.”

What Dhurandhar gets wrong

In the film, Lyari first comes into focus when a long-haired Ranveer Singh, playing undercover Indian RAW [Research and Analysis Wing] agent Jaskirat Singh Rangi, eyes the “Welcome to Lyari town” gate.

The gate looks very similar to the real one in Karachi. Other elements on screen ring familiar too: juice shop owners chanting idiosyncrasies to cajole customers; quick and garbled salams; and the somewhat unkempt colonial era architecture of old Karachi.

But then, the three-hour film’s dusty colour grading seems to wash out Lyari’s cultural depth and its vibrant subcultures.

“We can see how the obscene fetishisation of Lyari and the Baloch with violence and criminality is evident” in the film, Suhail said.

Describing Dhurandhar as “mediocre”, he said it lacks the depth of other Indian gangster films.

For example, in Ram Gopal Varma’s Satya 1998 and Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur 2012, we see “culturally dense but non-apologetic depictions of Mumbaikar or Bihari gangs that understand the political economy of colonial and post-colonial state formation and how it crystallises in the gangsters portrayed,” Suhail opined.

Satya unpacks the criminal underworld of India’s metropolis Mumbai, following the titular character who arrives in Mumbai seeking a job but is falsely imprisoned and subsequently introduced to the underworld. Gangs of Wasseypur is set in a time before India’s independence in 1947 and follows power struggles, mafias and generational cycles of revenge in India’s eastern state of Jharkand.

In contrast to these films, Dhurandhar, has “heavy-handed homophobic, Islamophobic, hyper-masculine jingoism” and “the characters themselves appear to have no history at all,” Suhail added.

Unlike Lyari

Back at Qambrani’s club, 10 girls aged eight to 16 gather for an hour of sparring every day except Sunday, training for city tournaments that they compete in every two months.

Qambrani is looking to buy a folding, portable boxing ring to take school to school. His dream: to make boxing accessible to as many girls in the neighbourhood as possible. His challenge: he is struggling to find a portable ring in Pakistan and needs funding.

Dhurandhar and Bollywood do not matter at his Lyari club. Qambrani has a new generation of girl boxers to train.