The Taliban Hunters Panorama

Pakistan, a nation under siege.

Almost every day, in towns and cities across the country,

the Taliban attack.

Bombings, assassinations, kidnappings.

Even schools have been a target.

Pakistanis are paying with their lives.

Entire districts of the country's largest city, Karachi,

have been infiltrated by the Taliban.

The last line of defence,

a police force that was never intended to fight terrorism.

They're fighting an enemy intent on destroying anyone

that gets in the way of their jihad or holy war.

We follow the so-called Taliban hunters,

the men who risk their lives every day on the front line.

Almost 24 million people live in Karachi.

It's Pakistan's commercial centre

and one of the largest cities in the world.

But it's also become one of the most dangerous cities.

I've been reporting from here for over ten years, and I've seen how

the escalation of terrorist violence is threatening the whole city.

Now I want to see how the police are responding.

I arrived in Karachi this morning

and already there's been news of a police officer murdered

in a suspected Taliban attack.

Mohammed Iqbal had been receiving death threats from militants.

He was gunned down in a drive-by shooting

just before dawn at the end of a 14-hour shift.

With so many police here, the funeral prayers themselves are a target.

The fightback is led by the police,

who've become known as the Taliban hunters.

With a force of just 15,000 officers,

they police a city of 24 million people.

And they've lost 156 of their colleagues in just one year

in the fight against the Taliban.

Specialist Superintendent Ijaz heads this branch of the Taliban hunters

and plans anti-terrorist raids from his base in central Karachi.

His team monitor militant activity

across the city from this surveillance centre.

Could you point out the areas where the Taliban has a strong presence?

Urangi, Baldir, Saeedabad, these areas,

then we have Surjani, we have Sarabghot area,

so basically the slums are encircling the city.

And these slums, they are very dangerous.

It's from the slums that the Taliban organise their attacks.

Officer Ijaz shows me shocking footage

of the Taliban's campaign of terror.

These indiscriminate violent attacks keep Karachi's citizens

living in a constant state of fear.

But it's target killings or assassinations

that are the Taliban's most common tool of terror,

with almost 200 reported last year.

Here, the officer shows me CCTV footage of two Shia preachers

being gunned down by Taliban members on motorbikes.

Police, journalists

and anyone opposing Taliban ideology is a potential target.

Another attack. This gunman strikes and drives away unchallenged.

On average, ten people die from violence in Karachi every day,

many of them at the hands of the Taliban.

Yet Ijaz's men are ill-equipped to fight an enemy with growing power.

They are fighting a full-fledged war.

So they are not equipped and they are not trained for it yet.

They were trained for traditional policing,

but it is not traditional policing. They are fighting terrorism.

Inadequate funding means the Taliban hunters on the ground

have no special training and lack basic equipment.

Many officers carry ageing weapons

and others work sometimes without essentials, like bulletproof vests.

Ahmed Rashid is one of Pakistan's most respected experts on militancy.

He lectures on terrorism at universities around the world.

First of all, there are far too few policemen in a city

like Karachi to deal with the situation.

You know, the numbers are appalling.

The police is hugely underfunded, underpaid,

lacking proper education, equipment. I mean, it's very, very sad.

It's estimated that robberies cost Karachi

millions of dollars every day.

The Taliban is behind much of this,

having forced previously powerful organised gangs

out of their territory.

Are the Taliban using Karachi as a kind of cash cow?

With kidnapping, crime, bank robberies, fundraising,

they carried on their Taliban activity in Karachi.

The Taliban hunters have been tipped off

about two suspected militants thought to be planning an attack.

They've been planning this raid for four weeks.

From the moment they leave their compound,

they know they're vulnerable to Taliban lookouts and informants.

The Pakistani Taliban or TTP,

have taken control of much of the territory

on the outskirts of Karachi in recent years.

The team is heading into one of the most notorious slums,

Ittehad town, a TTP strong hold.

As we enter Ittehad town in the early hours of the morning,

the streets are empty.

The final approach towards the target house has to be on foot.

The lights are turned off and the team creep forward

with a night-vision camera.

Taliban watchmen have been known to sound an alarm

as a call to arms for local comrades,

who then flood the area to attack police.

If spotted, the team will only have moments to leave the area.

No-one knows how many Talibs are inside and who could be watching.

With everyone in place, Officer Ijaz gives the signal.

GUNSHOT

The suspects open fire.

GUNSHOT

SHOUTING

GUNSHOT

SHOUTING

The men are disarmed, their weapons seized.

The priority now is getting out of the slum.

ALARM RINGS

As soon as we got in there, there was the sound of a kind of an alarm

and a few of the officers told me

that these Taliban members sound the alarm

to tell people in the area that the police are here.

That's why we have to make a quick exit right now.

We have to get out of the area.

Sometimes there is resistance from the local public.

We've managed well.

We were very brief and very quick. So that ended well.

-It could have got really dangerous if we'd stayed any longer?

-Yes, exactly.

Going into the area, that's not dangerous.

Leaving the area is always full of...risks.

Because then they are alarmed, everybody knows.

They might try to ambush the motorcade

if those guys are really important for them.

They will try to get them released from police custody.

The squad believe the suspects were in the final stages of planning

to kidnap a prominent businessman, who they'd been shadowing in Karachi.

They'll be left in their cells for the next five days.

Officer Ijaz says the silence makes prisoners more eager to talk.

But with every arrest comes the renewed risk of a revenge attack.

A regular visit to the graveside of his former boss

provides a stark reminder that even the most senior officer

can be killed by the Taliban.

He was a hero and he was a hero of Karachi police,

and as far as the dangers or risks or hazards of this job

are concerned, myself, my fellow colleagues,

they are working day in and day out to eradicate this terrorism.

Officer Ijaz had been a close friend.

After the murder,

it was he who became the new face of the Taliban hunters.

He's a prominent target, and the Taliban can strike at any time.

On constant watch is Officer Akbar,

who sees it as his personal duty to keep the boss alive.

In the five years he's been in the force,

Akbar has got used to the threat from the Taliban.

For over a decade, the Taliban

and its affiliate groups have waged war on the Pakistani people.

But until recently,

the militants were largely based in rural areas in the north.

Last summer, the government began its most far-reaching

anti-Taliban operation to date,

the army forcing them out of their stronghold in North Waziristan.

By the spring of 2015, the government was claiming victory,

but the military campaign had simply shifted the geography of war.

The movement of terrorists southwards meant that Pakistan cities

were the Taliban's major targets,

with Karachi the greatest prize of all.

The Taliban suspects captured in the raid have now been

held in silence for two days.

Whenever they are in police custody, within 24 hours or 48 hours,

they lose their psychological strength.

Karachi police have been accused of physical mistreatment

and even torture of prisoners.

A 2014 Human Rights Watch report

also said there had been extra-judicial killings

and mystery disappearances of terrorist suspects.

But Officer Ijaz insists that his men employ nothing more than,

as he puts it, a little arm-twisting.

But is it an effective method of extracting information,

as you put it, "arm-twisting"?

Can you get reliable evidence that way?

You must understand this.

They are hardened criminals, they are hard-core extremists.

You cannot offer them a bouquet,

you cannot offer them a chocolate to get information out of them.

It's clear to me that there's some indifference

to the human rights of suspects here.

Perhaps a response to the constant threat of revenge attacks

against the police and their families.

Officer Ijaz is one of the Taliban's top targets.

The family home must be guarded 24 hours a day.

You have armed guards outside,

so your kids must see these armed men with guns.

Are they aware of the work that you do?

Yeah, they are aware of the work,

like they know that I'm a police officer.

From the day, when they were born, they were living with these gunmen,

so they can't tell me the difference.

But the constant danger to their children

is forcing his wife to reconsider their future.

We are seriously thinking to leave this Karachi place.

If Ijaz is not leaving it, at least I would be thinking to leave it

within six to seven months because it's pretty unsafe for me.

So, basically, Officer Ijaz would stay working here

-and you'd move to another city?

-Yeah, probably, probably.

It's not only police and their families that are targets.

Business owners, politicians,

in fact, anyone with obvious wealth is at risk.

This video was sent to the family of a local businessman.

Karim - not his real name - was kidnapped by the Taliban.

He was ultimately rescued from his kidnappers,

but his family have asked that we conceal his identity.

It was just another morning in Karachi's business district,

but on this day, the Taliban lay in wait.

Here, if you can see, this is the white Corolla, this is arriving,

this is the factory gate.

-OK, so, he's arriving for work?

-He is arriving. This was in the morning.

These two guys were standing here.

And as soon as he stopped the car,

there is one guy towards the driving seat.

This guy snatched the keys from the driver.

And as soon as they drag him out,

they placed him inside the car and sped away.

After a month in captivity, Karim was freed during a police shoot out.

His kidnappers are still awaiting trial.

The latest available statistics

show that 132 cases of kidnapping were reported in Karachi in 2014.

With an estimated 4 million handed over in ransom money to the Taliban.

The kidnappers have little to fear from the courts,

even if they're charged.

Recently released figures show that,

of 115 cases of kidnap over a 12-month period,

there wasn't a single conviction.

At the time of filming, of 286 suspected Taliban members

behind bars in the city's main prison,

just three had been convicted.

I think the reason that the judiciary has really failed

over these last ten years is because they're scared.

I mean, we have had numerous lawyers, judges,

defence counsels, witnesses being killed by the militants,

so you get kidnappings taking place, shootings taking place,

and generally I think there is an air of terror.

At his office in Karachi, Provincial Minister Sharjeel Memon

admits the current legal system is failing.

Our present judicial system is too slow and the way the cases are...

linger on for years and years.

Attacks in major cities have meant mounting pressure for reform.

The government's response

has been the introduction of anti-terrorism courts,

with the aim of fast-tracking trials.

We have formed military courts.

For those terrorists from Taliban, Al-Qaeda...

Are you aware of the conviction rates within those courts?

I think that there is some betterment in the system.

There is an improvement, but actually they are under 6%.

It's under 6% conviction rate. Is that acceptable?

Obviously, these special courts formed one year ago

and things need to...

We want to bring a change, so it needs some time.

The justice system was thrust into the spotlight

after last year's attack on a school in Peshawar.

133 children were killed in the massacre at the Army Public School.

Peace rallies were held in every Pakistani town,

with the public demanding that more be done to stop the terror.

In response, the government lifted the moratorium on the death penalty,

but little else has changed.

Nothing since the Peshawar killings of those students has been done

to actually reform, strengthen, modify the judicial system.

We've had a lot of Draconian laws passed, that you will be hanged

for terrorism on the slightest suspicion,

that you're guilty until you can prove you are innocent.

But we have - I mean, you know, these are Draconian laws that have

nothing to do with reforming the judicial system.

I'm on my way back to the police compound.

I've heard there have been more raids today

and five militants have been shot in a gun battle.

We discover there've been some more arrests, too.

WAILING

I got to the compound about ten minutes ago

and, as soon as I got here,

I could hear screaming from the interrogation area down there.

You can see two suspects that are up against the wall right now.

Every time I've asked Officer Ijaz about what he calls "arm-twisting",

he's avoided the question.

I'm told I can talk to the two Taliban suspects

who were arrested on the raid two days earlier.

The police insisted on parading them into the room

with their heads covered.

They require me to conduct my interview

with the suspects' identities concealed.

They say it's for the prisoners' safety, as well as their own.

I have no way of knowing

how the suspects have been treated by the police.

They tell me they are proud Taliban members

and they're apparently eager to talk.

I need to ask you something, Officer Ijaz.

When I arrived at the compound,

I did hear some screaming from one of the interrogation rooms.

You've told me in the past, you've referenced

this kind of arm-twisting techniques that you use.

What techniques do you use?

We don't do this.

Because... Not exactly.

Torture is not a solution to the problem, actually.

We can... We can...

If we... If at all we beat them, we can get whatever we want to.

But that is not true.

Basically, we try to a little bit pressurise them or...

they are hardened criminals,

sometimes we threaten them of dire consequences.

We have to ask them in a harsh manner, obviously.

Officer Ijaz's uncomfortable response may be open to interpretation.

But it's clear he's frustrated by a judicial system

that results in very few convictions for terrorism.

Despite their claim of multiple murders,

these suspects may never face trial.

The threat from militants is now the single most pressing issue

for Pakistanis struggling to maintain some sense of normality

in their daily lives.

A paramilitary force, the rangers, have now joined the fightback

but, just last month, two police officers were killed

during an anti-terrorist shoot out.

Pakistan remain vulnerable to the Taliban, who are ever-willing

to take their war into Pakistan's cities, airports and schools.

Police alone cannot do this job.

If we are strong enough, we will just wipe them out from Karachi

and then there will be no threat to police officers.

Obviously, we feel vulnerable sometimes,

but that's not the point.

We have to fight it. There is no other way.

We just can't leave the battlefield and run away.