PTI Delay Leaves Islamabad Sealed Behind Rented Containers

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf postponed its long march on Islamabad to October 4, after the government had already sealed the capital with more than 2,000 shipping containers. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Sohail Afridi said Friday that the party’s political committee had unanimously agreed to leave Peshawar on that date, a week later than the original September 27 start.

The boxes, the closed motorways and the seized trucks are still there. The march is not.

Islamabad Stays Boxed In After the Date Moved

Double-stacked containers sit on entry roads, some welded together and fitted with outward spikes, while sandbags have been stacked on bridges. A police official put the force inside the capital at 22,000 police and other security staff. Around Attock, the Punjab gateway from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, more boxes have been pushed onto the crossings that feed the twin cities.

The National Highways and Motorway Police said the closures began at 11pm on September 23 and run until further orders, citing the law-and-order situation. Motorcyclists have been threading gaps between the steel. Cars have sat in jams on the approaches.

Nayhmat Khan, a 25-year-old schoolteacher, said the Islamabad-Peshawar motorway was closed and that ordinary people were facing serious difficulties because of it. Section 144 has been in force in Islamabad since September 18 for two months, banning gatherings of five or more people, processions and rallies, including in the Red Zone. Punjab has run a separate 13-day ban on gatherings.

ROUTES STILL SHUT INTO THE CAPITAL

• M-1 Peshawar Motorway: Closed in both directions between Swabi and the Islamabad Toll Plaza, with southbound traffic turned off at Swabi Interchange.
• M-2 Lahore Motorway: Heavy goods vehicles barred between Kot Momin and the capital.
• M-14 and Hazara Motorway: Closed under the same advisory, along with stretches of GT Road (N-5) and the Rawalpindi-Kohat and Abbottabad-Hassanabdal links.
• Attock Bridge: Treated as the main choke point from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, with containers, sandbags and spikes on the crossing.

The federal government also approved Rangers for Islamabad and several Punjab districts from September 20 to October 5, with orders that troops may respond in self-defence. Punjab asked the interior ministry to downgrade or jam mobile and internet service at spots in Rawalpindi and Attock on September 27, the date the march was first due.

PTI Moved the Date After the Boxes Went Up

Afridi made the new date official at a Peshawar press conference on September 25, after sounding earlier in the day as if the column would still roll. He said the struggle was for the supremacy of the Constitution, restoration of an independent judiciary, media freedom and Haqiqi Azadi as envisioned by Imran Khan, and he likened the wait to a Test match. Allies including Tehreek Tahafuz Ayeen-e-Pakistan chief Mehmood Khan Achakzai and Senate opposition leader Allama Raja Nasir Abbas were told of the committee’s vote, he said.

A senior PTI leader, speaking before the announcement on condition of anonymity, was blunter about the point of waiting. There was a proposal to exhaust the federal government and law enforcement agencies, because they had already closed the federal capital and a number of routes. The same leader said the party had already got what it wanted from the march, because roads were shut and hundreds of millions of rupees were being spent on law enforcement.

Party spokesperson Zulfi Bukhari left the door open to moving earlier than October 4.

We can now do it whenever we deem fit. The question is to the government, as to how long they’re willing to keep the country closed off?

Zulfi Bukhari, PTI spokesperson

That is the lever. Keep the steel in place and Islamabad lives under a march that is not on the calendar. Pull it down and the road from Peshawar is open again before the new date. PTI told supporters in Britain to keep their September 27 protest, and to cheer a Pakistan column that would leave Peshawar later.

Pakistan ready to March for Rule of Law, release of Imran Khan and all political prisoners and restoration of judiciary & constitution! #ستمبر27_عوام_تو_نکلے_گی pic.twitter.com/IfHDC34HnO

— PTI (@PTIofficial) September 24, 2026

Advocate Naeem Haider Panjutha had floated a different bargain a day earlier, saying the protest could wait if the government agreed to elections within six to eight months, freed Khan and other political prisoners, and investigated the May 9 and November 26 crackdowns. Sheikh Waqas Akram, another spokesperson, said no such proposal was before any party forum and that only Khan could decide even if it were.

Seized Trucks and Cargo Left to Spoil

The people paying first are not marchers. They are drivers, helpers and owners whose rigs were taken to build the wall. All Pakistan Goods Alliance chairman Nisar Hussain said police in Islamabad and Punjab had taken at least 2,700 vehicles, each with a three-member crew. He said the police had not booked the men so much as held them at stations except for meals, and had taken phones, papers and keys.

WHAT THE GOODS ALLIANCE SAYS WAS TAKEN

Muhammad Owais Chaudhry, president of the All Pakistan Goods Transport Owners Association, said operators were already refusing to send vehicles toward Islamabad, upper Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Kashmir.

Goods transporters are gripped by fear and uncertainty. If timely relief is not provided, the supply chain will come to a complete halt.

Muhammad Owais Chaudhry, president, All Pakistan Goods Transport Owners Association

Islamabad Inspector General Muhammad Sohail Chaudhry, after meeting transport representatives, ordered that containers carrying medicines, food and other perishable goods be returned at once, and that rent be paid for boxes kept for law-and-order work. Hussain said some laden boxes came back after that meeting, but about 400 were still in police hands. He also said the alliance had never received a penny for past seizures and alleged that police and bureaucrats had swallowed earlier rent pots.

Diesel by Rail While the Rent Clock Runs

Capital police have asked for Rs827 million to cover container rents, housing, food and transport for officers brought in from Punjab and Sindh, plus tear-gas shells and rubber bullets. They have been working on a turnout of 20,000 to 25,000 protesters and had been told to have the setup ready by the evening of September 26, with the trouble expected to last about a week from the original start. October 4 pushes that window out.

Petroleum Minister Ali Pervaiz Malik on September 24 told officials to plan for fuel moving even if roads stay shut. Pakistan Railways said it would free the maximum number of wagons for high-speed diesel, with a special watch on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Pakistan State Oil said extra stocks were already sitting at critical depots. The Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority opened a control room to coordinate supplies. Malik also told officials to keep crude flowing into Attock Refinery and to move its finished product, so a logistics jam would not force a shutdown.

That is a government admitting, in the language of depots and wagons, that a political blockade is now a fuel problem. The M-1 closure sits on the same corridor the diesel trains are being asked to backstop. Shopkeepers in the capital have already been waiting on goods that never left the yards where police parked them.

Why Were Imran Khan’s Sisters Detained?

Aleema Khan, Dr Uzma Khan and Noreen Niazi hold no office in PTI. They have spent the years since August 2023 trying to see their brother at Adiala Jail in Rawalpindi and talking about his health. All three were ordered held for 30 days under Section 3 of the Punjab Maintenance of Public Order Ordinance and moved to Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore.

THE WEEK THE FAMILY WAS TAKEN OFF THE ROAD

1. September 14, 2026: The Islamabad High Court issues a short order that no political party, leader, provincial government or public office holder has a lawful right to occupy roads, highways, interchanges, toll plazas or buildings in or leading to the capital.
2. September 18, 2026: Islamabad’s district administration imposes Section 144 for two months. Additional District Magistrate Anam Fatima’s order bans gatherings of five or more people.
3. September 20, 2026: Police detain Aleema Khan in Lahore under the MPO, with her driver, and shift her to Kot Lakhpat. A district notice says her presence at any public place would pose a grave threat to public safety.
4. September 21, 2026: Uzma Khan and Noreen Niazi are taken under the same section, after a press conference condemning Aleema’s arrest. Eight family members are held within 24 hours; the children are released after a few hours, according to Aleema’s son Shershah Khan.
5. September 23, 2026: Motorway police close the M-1 and related routes from 11pm.
6. September 25, 2026: Afridi announces the march will now leave Peshawar on October 4.

Supreme Court lawyer Sameer Khosa said the MPO has, in recent years, been used to stop protests and hold political opponents when no other ground of arrest is available, and that the sisters had been outspoken about Khan’s solitary confinement, health and blocked family meetings. Barrister Gohar Khan, PTI’s senior legal voice, said the party had gone to the high courts 25 times and the Supreme Court 19 times, and that 1,500 workers, five parliamentarians and one minister had been abducted in that week alone.

Federal health instructions obtained by reporters told Islamabad hospitals to prepare for a humanitarian crisis and a mass casualty incident. All scheduled elective surgical procedures were postponed indefinitely. Leave for medical, nursing, paramedical, administrative and support staff was cancelled, and staff already on leave were recalled. Stable patients were to be discharged to free beds. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi, citing the high court order, said the government would not leave any loopholes and warned PTI not to harm itself and its workers.

The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan said on September 25 that it deplored the mounting arrests and preventive detention of PTI workers, lawmakers and leaders, and that pre-emptive mass detention and restrictions on freedom of movement cannot be justified as proportionate or necessary. It called repeated blanket use of Section 144 an affront to democratic principles and asked the government to resume a purposeful dialogue and free those arbitrarily detained.

Khan, 73, has been in jail since August 2023 on convictions his party calls political. He is held at Adiala. Afridi said he would be out within half an hour if court orders on treatment and family meetings were followed, and that the Constitution allows peaceful protest when legal routes are ignored.

Shipping Containers Have Been the State’s Roadblock for Decades

The tactic is older than this standoff. In July 1996, then-prime minister Benazir Bhutto used containers to keep Jamaat-e-Islami leader Qazi Hussain Ahmad out of Islamabad. In 2014, Khan and cleric Tahirul Qadri ran a weeks-long sit-in from a container in the capital. By 2024 the city was being nicknamed Containeristan, with steel rented onto every major road, trenches cut into the motorway, and mobile service cut, then the same kit reused days later for a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit that turned short trips into hours and shut restaurants and grocery stores.

In October 2024, idle containers already lining capital verges had been a daily nuisance for residents even when no march was on. A Human Rights Commission of Pakistan fact-finding after the November 2024 protests described another four-day lockdown in which thousands of PTI workers, many from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, were driven out of the city. PTI’s last large protest on that scale ended in deadly clashes with security forces. The high court’s 37-page reasons, from a bench led by Chief Justice Sardar Muhammad Sarfraz Dogar with Justice Muhammad Azam Khan and Justice Muhammad Asif, pointed back to May 2022 and November 2024 as spells when PTI activity in the capital hit security, property, trade, schools and movement.

The petition that produced that ruling was filed by Waqas Ahmed, a citizen and trader who said a long march toward Islamabad could paralyse civic and commercial life. The bench wrote that the question is not whether a political party is entitled to protest, and that it plainly is, subject always to the Constitution and law. It also wrote that no party or office holder may occupy the roads in a way that blocks free movement, trade, business, or access to medical and educational facilities.

Those are the same facilities now clearing beds for a mass-casualty plan, and the same trades waiting on 450 laden trucks. The court’s test cuts both ways. A column that sits on the Srinagar Highway fails it. A government that welds spiked boxes across the M-1, seizes 2,700 goods vehicles and postpones hospital operations fails it too, for as long as the steel stays up after the date on the poster has moved.

Afridi says the column will still leave Peshawar on October 4. Rangers cover runs through October 5. Section 144 in Islamabad has weeks left to run. Until someone orders the boxes off the asphalt, the capital is paying for a march that has not begun.