Islamabad, Pakistan – On Wednesday, Sohail Afridi, the chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, sat at the head of a long table in Peshawar, hands clasped in front of him, and opened the 59th meeting of his cabinet. He was dressed in black and leaned forward as he spoke. When he reached the sharpest lines of his address, his voice dropped and slowed rather than rose.
For the past several days, he told his ministers, “plainclothes thugs” had been targeting his workers, officials and elected representatives from his party, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). Two of Afridi’s provincial ministers were targeted in a single week: One survived an assassination attempt and an abduction attempt. The other was ambushed near a motorway toll plaza and abducted.
His whereabouts are still unknown. The ex-premier has been in jail for more than three years but still commands widespread popularity across the country. The march was initially scheduled for Sunday.
But two days before the protest, after the government of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif arrested Khan’s sisters and tried to block entries to the national capital from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Afridi announced it had been pushed back by a week. The decision to start the march on this coming Sunday, he said, was not an act of “surrender” but one driven by “political strategy”. He is the PTI’s senior-most elected leader and the fulcrum around whom its protests for Khan’s release have revolved: addressing cabinet meetings one day, facing abduction claims of his own another.
When the protest is held, he warned, the crowds “will not be under anyone’s control” and would not return home until their demands are met. He was in Lahore to condole with the family of a PTI worker and to generate support for the upcoming rally. On September 14 after police arrested party workers, he climbed into a police van and refused to get out until they were freed.
The van initially drove off with him inside before he was dropped off soon after. Sweat-drenched and dishevelled, he was on the roadside, alleging a conspiracy to abduct him and accusing his political rivals of trying to break up the country. They want Pakistan to break apart.” Moments later, addressing his own workers, his tone shifted.
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