Ten policemen were martyred in Kohat on Wednesday when militants ambushed their convoy in the hills between Kohat and Karak. The dead include Deputy Superintendent of Police Haider Zaman of Gambat and Sub-Inspector Mukhtiar. Twelve more were injured, and police say their men killed 18 attackers in the gunfight. But most coverage has treated the reason the police were on that road as a footnote. It is the heart of this story. The convoy was not hunting a militant hideout. It was returning from a raid on illegal gold mining along the River Indus.
The gold was the reason they were there
The operation took place in Darbokach, in the Jalandhar Banda area of Gumbat tehsil, about 25 kilometres from Kohat city, along the Indus. Placer gold in the riverbanks has drawn diggers there for years, and local groups dispute access to the banks. The Kohat district administration had already imposed a 60-day restriction on parking excavators in the designated gold-mining blocks, known as Blocks C and D, because the machines were being used for unauthorised extraction. It also banned open-container fuel sales, the fuel the illegal diggers use. Police say the attackers were from the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, acting for criminal elements in the illegal gold trade. That claim is unverified. The TTP later claimed responsibility for the attack, according to Terror Monitor. The raid’s target was a mining operation the state calls illegal.
Fire from the hills, five vehicles burned
Kohat police spokesperson Muhammad Nauman Zeb said the attackers opened fire from the surrounding hilltops and trapped the police party. The Express Tribune reported that five police vehicles were set on fire during the assault. The convoy was on its way back from the site when the firing began, the police statement says. Earlier reports had said the team was on its way there. The police say their personnel returned fire and killed 18 attackers, a figure that comes from the police alone and has not been independently verified. Rescue 1122 said 12 injured policemen were taken to hospital. Kohat District Headquarters Hospital received 10 bodies and 10 injured men, two sent to Peshawar in critical condition. The two-hour road from Kohat city slowed the rescue.
The death toll itself is not settled
The first casualty figures did not agree, and they still have not been reconciled. Rescue 1122 put the number of police killed at 11. The police statement put it at 10. The Associated Press, citing local police officials, confirmed at least 10 officers killed. The Prime Minister’s office used the figure of 10 late on Wednesday. This story uses 10, the figure the police and the Prime Minister’s office both stand by, and records the 11 figure as the early Rescue 1122 count. The same caution applies to the 18 attackers killed, the police statement’s own figure, with no independent count published.
A province where police are the target
The ambush fits a wider pattern that has made Khyber Pakhtunkhwa the most dangerous province in Pakistan for police. According to police data cited by the Associated Press of Pakistan, the province recorded 680 attacks from January to September 2026, against 508 in the same period of 2025. Police martyred rose to 122 in the first six months of 2026, against 63 a year earlier. The South Asia Terrorism Portal counted 995 incidents in Pakistan in 2026 up to November 9, against 766 in all of 2025. The province has been under one month of Governor’s Rule in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, after the President approved emergency rule on October 11. Governor Faisal Karim Kundi sought a detailed report, and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif paid tribute to the fallen officers late on Wednesday. Funeral prayers for the martyred officers were held, Geo News reported. In Hangu, abducted policemen were recovered in Hangu, and in Mir Ali, security forces found militant hideouts inside a mosque in Mir Ali.
What happens next
Two questions now follow the police. The first is whether the gold-mining crackdown continues or pauses after this loss. The excavator and fuel bans show the administration had already decided the illegal mining could not be left alone, and stopping now would hand the riverbanks back to the interests the police say ordered the ambush. Police said on Thursday that a wanted militant commander had been killed in an operation in Khyber district and that a late-night attack on a police station in Dera Ismail Khan had been repelled. The Kohat ambush was not a battle over territory. It was an attack on a police party that had gone to stop people digging gold out of a riverbank, and that is why the gold, not just the gunfire, belongs at the centre of the story. More national news from Pakistan.
