Pakistan Security Report 2020

Marking a decline of over 36 percent from the year before, different militant, nationalist/insurgent and violent sectarian groups perpetrated a total of 146 terrorist attacks across Pakistan in 2020 including three suicide blasts. These attacks claimed in all 220 lives – a decline of 38 percent from those killed in such attacks in 2019 – and injured another 547 people.

A distribution of these terrorist attacks by their perpetrators suggests that so-called religiously inspired militant groups such as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), its splinter groups Hizbul Ahrar and Jamaatul Ahrar (both groups declared a return to their parent group, i.e. TTP in August 2020), as well as other militant groups with similar objectives such as local Taliban groups, Lashkar-e-Islam and ISIS-affiliates perpetrated 95 terrorist attacks – compared to 158 in previous year – which killed 140 people and injured 344 others. Meanwhile Baloch and Sindhi nationalist insurgent groups carried out 44 attacks – as compared to 57 such attacks in 2019 – which claimed 71 lives and wounded another 189 people. As many as seven of the reported terrorist attacks in 2020 were sectarian-related – half from such attacks in the year before – which killed nine people and inflicted injuries on 14 others.