Militancy has surged again in the border regions with Afghanistan since the return to power of the Afghan Taliban in Kabul in 2021.

A military convoy was passing through a town in South Waziristan district at around 4am when “armed men opened fire from both sides with heavy weapons”, killing 12 security personnel and wounding four, a local government official said.

A security officer stationed in the area confirmed the death toll and said the attackers had seized the convoy’s weapons.

The Pakistani Taliban, the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP), claimed responsibility for the attack in a message on social media.

The group is separate to but closely linked with the Afghan Taliban.

It was one of the deadliest attacks in months in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where the TTP once controlled swaths of territory until they were pushed back by a military operation that began in 2014.

Islamabad accuses neighbouring Afghanistan of failing to expel rebels using Afghan territory to launch attacks on Pakistan, an accusation that authorities in Kabul deny.

For several weeks, residents of various districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have reported that graffiti bearing the TTP’s name has appeared on buildings.

They say they fear a return to the TTP’s reign over the region during the peak of the US “War on Terror” that spilled across from Afghanistan.

A senior local government official recently told AFP that the number of TTP fighters and attacks had increased.

Nearly 460 people, mostly members of the security forces, have been killed since Jan 1 in attacks carried out by armed groups fighting the state, both in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the southern province of Balochistan, according to an AFP tally.

Last year was Pakistan’s deadliest in nearly a decade, with more than 1,600 deaths, nearly half of them soldiers and police officers, according to the Islamabad-based Center for Research and Security Studies.