Peshawar has become the epicentre of the battle between Pakistan’s government and militants who have killed hundreds of people with bombs.
Here are some facts about the run-down city 105 miles (170 km) northwest of Islamabad with a population of 1.5 million.
GEOGRAPHY
* Peshawar, set in a fertile valley and ringed by mountains, is the capital of the ethnically diverse North West Frontier Province (NWFP) near the Afghan border.
* It is surrounded on several sides by ethnic Pashtun tribal areas, part of what is seen as a hub for global militants.
* For centuries Peshawar was a crossroads of culture and trade between Afghanistan, South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. It is also the gateway to the Khyber Pass, on the way to the Afghan border.
* The British made Peshawar their frontier headquarters and set out a military and administrative district, known as the cantonment, and now used by the Pakistani government and military and under threat from militant attacks.
* During the 1980s, Peshawar became a den of spies and jihadis when the United States and Saudi Arabia covertly funded a mujahideen guerrilla war to expel Soviet troops from Afghanistan. Pakistan also supported the effort. The conflict made Peshawar home to huge numbers of Afghan refugees. At one point it was home to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and other militants who are now some of the most wanted men in the world.
CURRENT TROUBLES
* Peshawar has suffered the most since militants carried out retaliatory bombings since the army launched a major offensive in the Taliban stronghold of South Waziristan, on the Afghan border to the southwest of Peshawar, in October. There has been a range of targets — including policemen, busy markets, a court and an office of Pakistan’s main intelligence agency. Security is extra tight and residents are nervous.
There are checkpoints across the city, where vehicles are searched for bombs and weapons. Sandbags have been placed in commercial areas to protect businesses.
STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE
* An effective crackdown in Peshawar would help disrupt militant networks spreading to bigger cities and attacking commercial areas and strategic sites like the army headquarters recently hit by suicide bombers and gunmen. Such violence could further hurt investor confidence in an economy already in virtual recession.
* Some militants from lawless tribal regions who are hard to capture or kill travel to Peshawar to set up operations and sleeper cells and recruit new members.
That will continue until Taliban fighters are rooted out from forbidding border areas where they have been digging in for years. That is not expected any time soon, leaving Peshawar vulnerable.