Welcome to Pakistan’s Wild West, where guns are cheaper than smartphones
Sub-machine guns and Kalashnikovs can be bought as little as US$67 and US$125, respectively, in tribal town known as a hub for criminal activity
Gunfire echoes through a dusty northwest tribal town, the soundtrack to Pakistan’s biggest arms black market, where Kalashnikovs welded from scrap metal are cheaper than smartphones and sold on an industrial scale.
Darra Adamkhel, a town surrounded by hills some 35km south of the city of Peshawar, was a hub of criminal activity for decades. People smugglers and drug runners were common and everything from stolen cars to fake university degrees could be procured.
The workers here are so skilled that they can copy any weapon they are shown. In past 10 years I have sold 10,000 guns, and had zero complaints
This generations-old trade in the illicit boomed in the 1980s: The mujahideen began buying weapons there for Afghanistan’s battle against the Soviets, over the porous border.
Later, the town became a stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban, who enforced their strict rules and parallel system of justice – infamously beheading Polish engineer Piotr Stanczak there in 2009.
Now Darra is clean of all but the arms, yet the gunsmiths in the bazaar say the region’s improved security and authorities’ growing intolerance for illegal weaponry are withering an industry that sustained them for decades.
“[The] Nawaz Sharif government has established checkpoints everywhere, business is stopped,” said Khitab Gul, 45.