Habeel Khan was thirteen and working a shift at an eatery in the Bara bazaar on October 13 when police opened fire on a crowd protesting the suspension of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s elected government. The bullet entered his abdomen and left through his lower back. He lived four days. On the sixth day of federal rule, while Habeel was dying in a Peshawar hospital, the governor now running the province told reporters that its minerals would be extracted and sold, and named Lakki Marwat, Tank and Bannu as the places to begin. All three sit inside the zone the federal government had placed under emergency.
Far to the south, in the same week, a Qatari gas tanker bound for Karachi turned around in the Strait of Hormuz after a projectile struck it, hours after Iran had cleared its passage. Trucks loaded with potatoes, bananas and rice idled at Gabd and Taftan because Islamabad had shut its trade crossings with Iran without public explanation, and a twelve-kilogram cylinder of cooking gas went from 4,500 rupees to 7,000 in a matter of days. At Torkham and Chaman the gates to Afghanistan marked a full year closed. A restaurant owner in Landi Kotal who once fed truckers now carries bricks, and a transporter who used to cross the border several times a day drives 200 kilometres from home for work in Rawalpindi.
Following those threads through the month leads from a province taken over in the name of fighting terrorism and offered to mining companies within a week, to a Gulf war that Pakistan’s army chief tried to mediate while the country’s fuel bill, gas supply and workers abroad absorbed its blows, to two borders sealed at once with traders, drivers and families stranded on both sides, and finally to a state that answered criticism with jail terms, broadcast bans and blocked study circles. It covers October 1 through October 31, 2026.
