Mubarak Hussain Azad was at the Press Club when word came that a crowd had gathered at Yadgar Chowk in Gilgit. It was 1st Muharram, 2023, and a religious clash was unfolding in real time a few minutes away. He grabbed his camera and went.
What he found was not a protest he could stand back and film. It was a scene he had to survive.
“A group pointed a pistol at me and said: ‘Give us the camera,'” Azad recalls. “For a moment I realized that my life was about to end. Still, I said: ‘Take my life, but you won’t get the camera.'” The men, masked, took the camera anyway and made him delete the footage in front of them. One of them kicked it back into his hands and told him to get lost. Azad moved toward the chowk, and walked straight into gunfire. “There was a hail of bullets. Right in front of me, two young men were shot,” he says. He crawled toward safety on his knees and elbows, filing a live update as he went. “I said that the situation was normal, even though the sounds of gunfire were contradicting me,” he says. “After about an hour, the firing stopped, and I was given a new life.”
Three years later, on 1 May 2026, it happened again. Covering a violent protest outside the Gilgit office of United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP), Azad took out his phone, and the crowd turned on him. “For a moment I thought this was my last day,” he says. Two bystanders pulled him free and pushed him toward police, who were then attacked in turn. “It feels like when we leave home, we don’t know whether we will return or not,” Azad says. “In Gilgit-Baltistan, journalism, especially field reporting and protest coverage, is extremely difficult and life threatening.”
Azad’s account is not an outlier. It is close to the median experience described by the journalists, union leaders and rights advocates interviewed for this investigation, people who have spent years watching the region’s press corps absorb risks that no institution has stepped in to reduce.
It Isn’t One Bad Day. It’s the Job.
Khalid Hussain has run the GB Union of Journalists for years, and has his own record of injuries to show for two decades in the field. “In 2007, I was attacked while performing my professional duties,” he says. “Again, in 2011, I was subjected to police violence, leaving me injured and requiring hospitalization.” He is careful to note that his case is not exceptional either. Manzar Shigri and Sharafuddin Faryad, two senior journalists in the region, have reportedly faced similar police violence and intimidation over the years.
By Hussain’s count, more than 200 journalists currently work across Gilgit-Baltistan in print, electronic and digital media. A meaningful share of them, he says, are dealing with “security threats, professional pressures, and various forms of harassment” as an ordinary condition of the work, not an occasional hazard. Some of that pressure comes from police, he says; some comes from political or influential groups who don’t like what’s being reported.
Underneath both is a structural problem that predates any single incident: Gilgit-Baltistan still has no effectively implemented Right to Information law. That gap has nothing to do with why a pistol was pointed at Azad’s head at Yadgar Chowk, or why Iqbal Salik, whose case is detailed further below, was beaten in front of police in Rondu — an RTI law neither hinders nor helps a reporter caught in a riot or a rally, and Hussain treats it as a separate front from physical safety. Where it matters, he says, is in the reporting GB’s press corps struggles to do at all: coverage of corruption, administrative lawlessness, or misuse of public funds, the kind of accountability journalism that depends on official records rather than street access. “Without timely access to official information, journalists often struggle to verify facts and report accurately on issues of public interest,” Hussain says. “This lack of transparency not only affects the quality of journalism but also creates unnecessary barriers to accountability.”
Hussain wants the GB Assembly to close that gap directly: comprehensive legislation guaranteeing press freedom, guaranteed access to public information, and real protection for journalists, modeled, he says, on legislation Pakistan’s National Assembly and Senate have already passed federally to protect journalists from violence and intimidation. “Similar legal protections should be extended and effectively implemented in Gilgit-Baltistan,” he says, “to ensure that journalists enjoy the same level of security and legal support.”
The Cases Nobody Publishes
If Azad and Hussain describe what happens on the worst days, Israr Uddin Israr, GB representative of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), describes how much of it never gets counted at all. “On average, 5 to 10 such cases are reported annually as per our observation,” he says, “but the actual number is likely much higher.”
He lists recent examples without having to search for them: a cameraman pushed during a ruling federal party’s election campaign event; Iqbal Salik, a journalist from Skardu, “brutally beaten and injured in Rondu while covering the election campaign”; a digital media journalist “booked on fabricated charges” who spent nearly three months in police custody and jail before release. Salik’s own account of that day, gathered directly for this investigation, follows below. Behind all three cases sits the same structural gap Hussain names: no access to information law in GB, unlike every other province in Pakistan, which Israr says compounds the difficulty of reporting on anything sensitive in the first place.
The real number, in his telling, lives in the space between what unions track and what gets published. “The GB Journalists Union claims there are up to 20 cases of intimidation, threats, violence, and fake FIRs against journalists each year,” he says. “However, these figures are not published in any mainstream newspaper for reference.” Freedom Network’s local chapter and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan’s 2025 annual report have documented some of these cases, he says, but “most incidents go unreported in the national media,” and there is still no systematic, ongoing documentation effort capturing the full pattern.
His conclusion is less a complaint than a demand. “As frontline defenders of freedom of expression and the right to information, both fundamental human rights guaranteed by the Constitution of Pakistan, journalists deserve legal protection and institutional support,” Israr says. “The government must take concrete steps to ensure the safety and security of journalists in GB.”
One Case in Full: Iqbal Salik, Skardu
Israr’s list of unpublished cases includes one name this investigation was able to reach directly. Iqbal Salik is a Skardu-based journalist who was on assignment for Geo News covering a campaign visit by federal leader Amir Muqam to his constituency when, he says, he was ambushed twice in a single morning — first by a mob on the road, then again by the same men outside the police station where he had gone to report it.
Salik left home at 8 a.m. Because the village roads run single-lane, he found his route blocked by a Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) rally of five or six vehicles. He waited ten to fifteen minutes, then decided to appeal directly to the man leading the rally, explaining that he was already behind schedule — the main public gathering he needed to reach was roughly an hour’s drive away, and he still had to file footage and updates to his organization.
“He understood my problem very well and told me with great respect and honor, ‘We will make a way for you. You are covering our rally,'” Salik says. He thanked the man and turned back toward his car. That is when, he says, “some people attacked me, which you can see in the video.” About ten people he recognized, backed by a larger crowd, joined in before others from the rally intervened to break it up.
Salik drove on to the police station to file a First Information Report (FIR). He says the same men followed him for the entire ten-to-fifteen-minute drive in a Toyota, trying to overtake his car and force him off the road. When he arrived, he says, they attacked him again, “right in front of the police,” leaving him bleeding from the nose and ears and with an eye injury — the injuries visible in the photograph he shared documenting the incident, below.
Even after reaching the police, Salik says the system offered little protection. He got an FIR registered, but calls it deliberately weak: the local Station House Officer released his attackers on personal surety within twenty-four hours. “Right now, my life is in danger; I cannot go to my ancestral village, and they are roaming around freely, still not presented before a court,” he says. “I am facing a severe threat to my life from this group.”
Salik’s case is not hypothetical for Israr and the Human Rights Council of Pakistan; it is one of the incidents he cites by name, and one of the roughly 20 a year the GB Journalists Union says never reach a newsroom outside Gilgit-Baltistan. In Salik’s telling, it is also unresolved: an FIR that produced no prosecutions, attackers free on surety, and a reporter still weighing whether it is safe to go home.
The Regional Story Is the National Story
None of this sits in isolation. Gilgit-Baltistan’s press freedom strain is a sharper, more local version of a decline playing out across the country. Reporters Without Borders’ 2026 World Press Freedom Index ranked Pakistan 153rd of 180 countries amid rising state pressure, content restrictions, and growing efforts to control media narratives, describing it as one of the country’s most severe media crises in recent history. Globally, the index recorded its bleakest picture in 25 years, with 52.2% of the 180 countries assessed now rated “difficult” or “very serious” for journalism. Pakistan’s own trajectory has been sliding for years: RSF data shows the country’s lowest recorded press freedom score came in 2025, at 29.62, down from a high of 56.76 in 2018.
Freedom Network’s national tracking lines up closely with what Israr and Hussain describe on the ground. Its May 2026 threat analysis recorded five cases involving journalists and digital media practitioners across the country that month alone: arrests, terrorism-related FIRs, cybercrime proceedings, prolonged detention, and a death threat against a television cameraman, with incidents reported in Balochistan, Punjab, Sindh, and Gilgit-Baltistan. A separate Freedom Network assessment of Gilgit-Baltistan specifically, launched in Gilgit in mid-2025, found that many journalists in the region are unpaid or minimally compensated, a precarity the report says discourages new entrants to the profession, and that national outlets that do keep correspondents in Gilgit-Baltistan tend to focus coverage on tourism rather than its deeper socio-political and economic issues, leaving real gaps in coverage. The same report named businesses, politicians, bureaucrats and state-owned enterprises among the region’s potential threat actors, and noted that ethnic and sectarian pressure adds further risk, with some journalists targeted over ethnicity or religious background.
What Would Actually Help
Strip away the individual stories and a short, unglamorous list of fixes keeps surfacing. Hussain wants GB-specific legislation mirroring the federal protections already passed for journalists elsewhere in Pakistan. Israr wants an access-to-information law, the one piece of infrastructure every other province in the country already has, and a real, ongoing system for documenting attacks on journalists instead of a rough annual estimate. Salik’s case adds a narrower, more procedural demand: FIRs that hold, and attackers who stay in custody long enough to be prosecuted rather than released on surety within a day. Both Hussain and Israr want the roughly 20 cases the union already tracks each year to actually reach a newsroom outside Gilgit-Baltistan, instead of disappearing into advocacy reports that rarely make national front pages.
None of this is exotic. It is the baseline that reporters in most of the rest of the country already, at least on paper, have.
The Assignment Doesn’t Change
What Azad, Hussain, Israr and Salik describe, from four different vantage points — the reporter in the crowd, the union president counting his own scars, the rights advocate keeping a tally no one else will publish, and the correspondent who was beaten twice in one morning and still went back to work — is a press corps that keeps showing up anyway. Every account here ends the same way: not with an incident that stopped someone from reporting, but with a return to the field for the next assignment, protections or no protections.
The question this investigation leaves open is whether Gilgit-Baltistan’s institutions will build something that makes that return less of a gamble, or whether reporters there will keep deciding, camera in hand, that the story is worth it regardless.
