At least 22 people are dead and over 120 injured across Pakistan after Shiite Muslim demonstrators took to the streets in violent protests over the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, attacking U.S. consulates, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, and United Nations offices in multiple cities. Pakistan imposed a three-day curfew on Monday morning and deployed troops to its northern regions in an attempt to restore order.
The riots tore through Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, Islamabad, and the northern cities of Gilgit and Skardu over the weekend. Officials reported ten deaths in Karachi, eight in Skardu, and two in Islamabad, with dozens of injuries accompanying the carnage. Police urged residents to shelter indoors, citing "deteriorating law and order conditions."
In Islamabad, riot police fired tear gas and swung batons to keep Shiite demonstrators from breaching the U.S. Embassy and the surrounding diplomatic enclave known as the Red Zone. The Pakistani government deployed troops to stabilize Gilgit and Skardu, where thousands of Shiite Muslims had gathered. Fires were reportedly set in parts of a U.N. complex and surrounding public facilities.
What makes this crisis more than a law enforcement story is the Pakistani government's own posture. Rather than condemn the violence or distance itself from the mobs targeting American diplomatic facilities on Pakistani soil, Islamabad's leadership spent the weekend competing to eulogize the dead ayatollah.
According to Breitbart, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari expressed "profound sorrow over the martyrdom of Khamenei" and declared that Pakistan "stands with the Iranian nation in this moment of grief, and shares in their loss." Note the word: martyrdom. Not death. Not killing. Martyrdom. That is not a neutral diplomatic term. It is a theological endorsement.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif matched the tone, calling Khamenei's death a "violation of the norms of international law" and offering this:
We pray for the departed soul. May God Almighty grant patience and strength to the Iranian people to bear this irreparable loss.
Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi, the man ostensibly responsible for restoring order, described Saturday as a "day of mourning for the Muslim Ummah, and for the people of both Iran and Pakistan." He added:
Following the martyrdom of Ayatollah Khamenei, every citizen of Pakistan shares in the grief of the people of Iran.
Every citizen. That is the interior minister speaking on behalf of a nation of over 250 million people, including the roughly 80 percent who are not Shiite, while mobs chanting "revenge against Israel" and "those who side with the U.S. are traitors" ransack diplomatic facilities under his watch.
The contradiction is staggering. Pakistani officials publicly validate the emotional framework of the rioters. They call Khamenei a martyr. They describe the weekend as a day of mourning for all Muslims. They frame U.S. and Israeli military action against Iran as a violation of international law. And then they send riot police and soldiers to suppress the predictable consequences of that rhetoric.
When your president, your prime minister, and your interior minister all publicly grieve the death of a theocratic dictator as a martyrdom, the crowd outside the American embassy hears permission. The tear gas and batons arrive after the signal has already been sent.
One Shiite protester captured the dynamic perfectly in comments to Al Jazeera:
Are we the enemy of the state? We were here to mourn the death of our leader, and we cannot even grieve here? They promised to let us be here and protest, but they violated their commitment?
The protester has a point, though not the one he intended. If the government tells its people that Khamenei's death is a martyrdom that all of Pakistan mourns, why wouldn't demonstrators expect the freedom to act on that grief? The Pakistani government created the emotional permission structure, then acted surprised when people used it.
Pakistan's rhetorical alignment with Iran becomes even more notable against the backdrop of its September 2025 mutual defense pact with Saudi Arabia. Over the same weekend that Pakistani leaders were mourning Khamenei, Saudi Arabia was attacked by Iran. At least one Pakistani national was reportedly killed by an Iranian strike against the United Arab Emirates.
Pakistan is simultaneously:
This is not a balancing act. It is a country trying to occupy every side of a conflict at once, and the seams are splitting open on its own streets.
Shiite Muslims make up about 20 percent of Pakistan's population, in a country of over 250 million. The concentration of violence in specific cities, particularly the northern areas of Gilgit and Skardu, where Shiite populations are dense, illustrates a sectarian fault line that Pakistani leaders have long managed through ambiguity. That ambiguity is now collapsing under the weight of real events.
The question is whether Pakistan can continue to treat its relationship with Iran and its relationship with Saudi Arabia and the West as separate conversations happening in separate rooms. The rioters outside the American embassy in Islamabad have made that impossible. The Pakistani nationals killed by Iranian strikes in the Gulf have made it impossible. The curfew and the troop deployments are band-aids on a strategic contradiction that runs far deeper than weekend unrest.
It is worth dwelling on the fact that U.S. consulates in Karachi, Lahore, and Peshawar were all targeted by demonstrators, and riot police had to physically defend the American embassy in the capital. Pakistan is a major non-NATO ally of the United States. It receives substantial American support. And the government's first instinct after mobs attacked American diplomatic posts was not to condemn the violence against those facilities but to express solidarity with the regime whose supporters carried it out.
That tells you everything about where the relationship actually stands, regardless of what any formal alliance document says.
Twenty-two people are dead. American diplomats sheltered behind riot shields in a country that calls itself an ally. And Pakistan's leaders spent the weekend calling the ayatollah a martyr.