Terrorists’ stronghold that showcased beheadings now echoes to the gentle sound of leather on willow

For a decade, it was the world’s most impregnable terrorist stronghold, a region so remote and hostile that Osama bin Laden was thought likely to be hiding there. Folded away in the mountains of Pakistan’s tribal belt, North Waziristan was where al-Qaeda and the Taliban operated with near total impunity, protected by towering peaks, fierce tribesmen and a blind eye from officialdom.

Dozens of British militants received training in its lawless capital, Miranshah, and over the years it was linked to several of the most serious terrorist plots ever hatched against Britain and the US.

Now, though, the town once nicknamed “Terrorist Pentagon” no longer echoes to the hum of US Predator drones hunting targets from the skies. Instead, there is the gentle sound of leather on willow as cricket matches replace beheadings as Miranshah’s main source of public entertainment.

“In places where the jihadists used to make people watch public executions, we now have cricket being played again,” said Lt Gen Nazir Ahmed Butt of the Pakistani Army’s 11th Corps, which now claims to be on the point of clearing North Waziristan of militants entirely.

“They play furiously – it’s like Surrey versus South Glamorgan.”

The change in Miranshah’s fortunes is part of a dramatic U-turn in Pakistan’s own war on terror, in which the West has long accused it of playing a double game.

Those criticisms reached fever pitch in 2011, when Bin Laden was caught hiding not in a cave in North Waziristan, but in a house in the Pakistani army garrison town of Abbottabad.

However, in 2014, the Taliban’s habit of biting the hand that allegedly fed it backfired dramatically. Angered by two savage Taliban attacks that followed the collapse of peace talks – including one on an army-run school in which 132 children were massacred – Pakistan’s all-powerful security launched operation Zarb-e-Azb (or “Cutting Strike”). Since then, thousands of militants have been killed or imprisoned.

Human rights groups have questioned the methods, which include secret military-run terrorism courts designed to stop judges from intimidation. But few dispute the short-term results, with terrorist attacks dropping by around half.

This week, The Daily Telegraph became the first Western newspaper to visit Miranshah in possibly a decade, as part of a Pakistani government effort to prove that it is now taking its war on militants seriously.

While the local commander, Maj Gen Hassan Azhar Hayat, said there had been no attacks in Miranshah for the past six months, tight security surrounded the visit, with dozens of Pakistani soldiers fanning out as we toured bomb-flattened streets.

“The militants made this area notorious,” said one bearded elder in Miranshah’s main bazaar, now rebuilt in new white brick as part of an armyled reconstruction effort. “We’d see people lying in dead here in the bazaar, with pieces of paper put on them saying they were spies.”

A short walk from the bazaar, the army has built a Test match-fit cricket stadium, which is now used almost daily for games. Previously, commanders said, the country’s favourite sport had been banned by the militants, who felt that sport of any kind “was a waste of time”.

More in line with their idea of productive activity was a bombmaking factory located in a village on Miranshah’s outskirts. Equipped with industrial blenders and cauldrons, it churned out explosives on a massive scale.

An insight into the role Miranshah played in global terror came in a US court case in 2012, when two men who admitted planning a July 7-style attack on the New York subway told how they travelled to Miranshah to meet Rashid Rauf, a British-Pakistani militant raised in Birmingham.

Rauf, who was accused of helping to mastermind the 2006 “liquid bomb” plot to blow up transatlantic airliners, was later killed in a drone strike. The men said they were also shown a martyrdom video recorded by Mohammed Siddique Khan, one of the July 7 bombers, which their contacts in Miranshah boasted was “one of their operations”.

In a now-demolished bunker in Miranshah, Pakistani troops also found a “TV studio” where volunteers for suicide bombings would record martyrdom videos, as well as special isolation rooms painted with images of Paradise, where they lived their final days alone. Gen Hassan says the reality of suicide bomber- recruitment was anything but glorious.

“The militants would find the poorest local families and recruit a boy from them, then feed him well while grooming him,” he said. “Then they’d isolate him, so that nobody could make him think again.”

The progress in Miranshah has come at a high price. Since the offensive in North Waziristan began, 872 Pakistani troops have been killed, and terrorism still remains a serious threat. Only last month, 88 people died in an Isil-linked bombing at a Sufi shrine, which the Pakistani military blamed on Isis militants now holed up in neighbouring Afghanistan. Islamabad has accused Kabul of not doing enough to stop them – a criticism that used to be flung mainly the other way.

Nor is it guaranteed that the hardwon security gains made in places like Miranshah will last. To that end, Gen Hassan is encouraging Waziristan’s tribes to soften their ultra-traditional religious outlook, which allowed the extremists a foothold in the first place. In an area where only 30 per cent of boys learnt to read and girls often went completely uneducated, he has built new schools for both sexes, decked out with posters pointedly declaring that the “pen is mightier than the sword”.

“I was educated by missionaries so I know the importance of learning,” he said. “The next generation here will use chemistry charts for education, not bombs.”

‘We’d see people lying dead here in the bazaar, with pieces of paper stuck to them saying they were spies’ ‘The militants would find the poorest families and recruit a boy, then feed him while grooming him’