On February 6, 2026, 32 men were slaughtered while praying in a working-class neighborhood on Islamabad’s margins. No cabinet ministers died that day. No generals. No industrialists or feudal landlords. No one whose death would necessitate a state funeral or international condolences. Just working people in Tarlai Kalan, a densely packed suburb where the capital’s carefully manicured facade crumbles into the reality most Pakistanis inhabit.
The Khadijatul Kubra Imambargah sits in a neighborhood the powerful drive through but never stop in. Its congregants were men who work with their hands, who count their rupees, who ride public buses and know the weight of economic precarity. University students from COMSATS Institute trying to study their way out of poverty. A 52-year-old from Gilgit-Baltistan who had migrated seeking survival. Mosque caretakers. Daily wage laborers. Small shopkeepers. The kind of Pakistanis whose names appear in casualty lists but rarely in history books. Tarlai Kalan exists in the shadow geography of Pakistani power. It sprawls on Islamabad’s southeastern periphery where the planned city dissolves into informal settlements housing migrants from Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. These are families of four to eight children crammed into modest dwellings, sustained by irregular employment, small-scale commerce, and the perpetual hustle required when the state offers nothing resembling a safety net.
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