Militants in Pakistan’s most populous province are said to be training for what they expect will be an ethnic-based civil war in neighbouring Afghanistan after foreign forces withdraw in 16 months.
In the past two years, the number of Punjab-based militants deploying to regions bordering on Afghanistan has tripled and is now believed to be in the thousands, says analyst Mansur Mehsud.
He runs the FATA Institute, an Islamabad-based think tank studying the mix of militant groups that operate in Pakistan’s tribal belt running along much of the 2,600-kilometre Afghan-Pakistan border.
Mehsud, himself from South Waziristan where militants also hide out, says more than 150 militant groups operate in the tribal regions, mostly in mountainous, heavily forested North Waziristan.