The deafening roar of rocket launchers and mortar explosions shattered the tranquillity of Kurram, a Pakistani district of majestic peaks, ancient maple forests and fertile fields bordering Afghanistan. People huddled in makeshift bunkers, exchanging desperate volleys as their villages became battlegrounds.
For months, Sunni and Shiite Muslims in the area have been fighting intermittently over land disputes, the latest flare-up in a conflict that has simmered for decades, paralleling two wars in Afghanistan and the rise of terrorist groups in the region.
At least 16 people were killed in clashes on Oct. 12, including an ambush on a convoy that was under paramilitary protection. Since then, warring tribes have blocked roads, causing shortages of food and medicine, residents said. In September, fighting between members of the two communities left 46 people dead; a weeklong battle in July claimed nearly 50 lives.
“It is like a war between two countries, not a dispute between tribes,” said Hussain Ali, 26, a university student from Parachinar, Kurram’s main city. “Innocent people are suffering, and the government doesn’t care.”
The violence has demonstrated the limited reach of Pakistan’s government along the frontier, an area that looks serene but is combustible under the surface. Some Shiite villages are very near Sunni ones, which keeps the tensions high.
Pakistan is mostly Sunni, but Shiites make up about 45 percent of Kurram’s 800,000 people, and they dominate Parachinar.
Mr. Ali, the university student, is from the Turi, the only tribe among the Pashtun, Pakistan’s second-largest ethnic group, that is wholly Shiite. The overwhelming majority of Pashtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan are Sunni.
Shiites and Sunnis have often clashed over the use of agricultural land and forests in Kurram. Much of the land in some bordering districts is communally owned, with no formal records in existence. But ownership of the land in Kurram was partially documented during the British colonial era, and the inconclusive nature of those records has helped to fuel the long-running conflict, according to local elders.
The Pakistani government has been unable to stop the clashes, though the police say they have arrested dozens of people in connection with the recent violence. Previous governments also failed to bring a halt to fighting in the region.
Last year, at least 25 people were killed in a clash over land in Kurram. In a gruesome separate incident, seven Shiite teachers were murdered in a school.
“The administration’s failure to prevent a simple land dispute from escalating into sectarian violence is disgraceful,” said Hameed Hussain, a member of Parliament from Kurram who organized a peace protest in Parachinar.
“When disputes arise, troublemakers spread propaganda through mosque announcements to incite violence along sectarian lines,” he said.
The threat of violence is so ingrained that self-defense has become a way of life. Many people in Kurram learn to use heavy weapons from a young age.
“I hate the violence, but in a region where the government has almost no control, it is compulsory to take up arms to protect ourselves and our land,” said Sharafat Chamkani, 34, a farmer from a Sunni-dominated village who has fought in numerous clashes.
Kurram, sometimes called the Parrot’s Beak because of how it extends into Afghanistan, borders the Afghan provinces of Khost, Paktika and Nangarhar. Parachinar is just 62 miles from Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital.
Shiites and Sunnis in Kurram lived largely in harmony for centuries, despite occasional violence. But the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Iran’s Shiite revolution in 1979 dramatically altered the landscape.
“These events eroded traditional cultural values, fractured once-unified tribes along sectarian and socioeconomic lines, and heightened tensions in Kurram,” said Noreen Naseer, a political science professor at the University of Peshawar.
Kurram’s demographic and sectarian balance changed significantly in the 1980s with an influx of Sunni Afghan refugees and the establishment of mujahedeen groups, backed by Pakistan and the United States to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
“It was a time when Afghan mujahedeen introduced a militant brand of Sunni Islam, while the Shiite population was also being radicalized by the Iranian revolution,” said Dr. Noreen, who is from Kurram.
This led to escalating tensions, resulting in two major episodes of violence in the 1980s that left dozens of people, mostly Shiites, dead. Shiites were forced to flee from the Sunni-dominated town of Sadda to Parachinar.
As the Taliban rose in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, they provided arms and manpower to their fellow Sunnis in Kurram, fueling more clashes that left hundreds dead.
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 introduced a new dynamic. Pakistani Sunnis in areas near Kurram harbored fleeing Taliban and Qaeda militants, but the Shiites of Kurram did not, which earned them the enmity of those groups.
In 2005, Pakistan expelled Afghan refugees from Kurram, generating fears among Sunnis of a restored Shiite dominance. That sparked bloody clashes beginning in April 2007 that led to the expulsion of Sunnis from Parachinar.
In early 2008, the arrival of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or T.T.P., a militant umbrella group formed in nearby tribal districts, further deepened the sectarian violence. A 45-day gun battle devastated Kurram. Hundreds of Shiites and Sunnis, along with Pakistani Taliban militants, were killed, and several villages were burned.
Shiite leaders claimed that the T.T.P. wanted to take control of Parachinar because the Shiites would not let them use their land to attack American troops in Afghanistan. “In fact, T.T.P.’s brutalities united the Shiite tribesmen, enabling them to mount organized resistance,” said Niyaz Muhammad Karbalai, a community elder in Parachinar.
A peace agreement in 2011 finally ended nearly four years of incessant warfare, after almost 2,000 deaths. But sporadic violence persisted.
In early 2015, a group of disgruntled T.T.P. members from Kurram and neighboring regions established the Islamic State Khorasan Province, or ISIS-K, an affiliate of the Islamic State terrorist group. After five suicide attacks in Parachinar in 2017, residents demanded a military checkpoint to prevent outsiders from entering the city.
The conflict in Kurram intensified further with the return of young Shiite residents who had fought in Syria’s civil war to support Bashar al-Assad’s government and protect Shiite shrines from Islamic State bombings.
Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021, tribes in Kurram have obtained advanced American weapons left behind by Afghan troops, which has contributed to the violence.
The decades of strife are deeply etched into the collective memory of Kurram’s people.
“The violence, particularly the wave that began in 2007, has transformed local land disputes into full-scale sectarian clashes, widening the gap between Shiites and Sunnis,” said Mr. Chamkani, the farmer. “I am skeptical that people from the two sects in Kurram will be able to coexist peacefully anytime soon.”
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