Pakistan’s government has kept much of Islamabad sealed behind shipping containers for nearly four weeks, bracing for an opposition march now set for Sunday while truckers and businesses in the capital count their losses by the day.
The barricades are meant to keep supporters of Imran Khan, the jailed former prime minister, from reaching the government district. They are stopping nearly everything else, too. Transporters said the police had impounded about 2,000 freight vehicles ahead of the march, Arab News reported, and the All Pakistan Goods Transport Owners Association estimates losses at roughly 20,000 rupees, about $70, for every container each day.
Al Jazeera described one truck owner who lost a first vehicle to the police, then three more in the following days, all of them parked at police stations across the capital. Dozens of trucks with containers welded to their beds have been held at locations around Islamabad for weeks.
The containers have become scenery. Al Jazeera’s reporter described a 27-second clip making the rounds in which two boys scale the rusted corner of a container marked “EVERGREEN” in white block letters and kick up into handstands, legs steady, as traffic passes behind them. The video is cut to a verse from the rapper Cheema Y’s Punjabi track Police, about containers of smuggled goods crossing the border that nobody can account for.
The nickname came from the street. “Yeah, these containers have now made Islamabad as Containerabad,” one man told Al Jazeera, cheerfully. A Facebook post on Sept. 19 declared the city renamed, and the joke spread fast enough that Agence France-Presse had to debunk an A.I.-generated image that appeared to show the entire capital ringed in steel boxes.
Authorities say they pay rent to the owners of the container trucks they use, but some drivers say the police simply stop them on highways and take the vehicles, the Associated Press reported.
Mr. Khan has been in prison since August 2023 and remains Pakistan’s most prominent opposition figure. He was ousted in 2022 through a no-confidence vote in Parliament. His party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, had called the march on the capital for Sept. 27, then postponed it days beforehand until Oct. 4, according to the Times of India.
The party concedes it has not held a major demonstration outside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province since November 2024. Yet analysts told Al Jazeera the government appears to be treating the march as a far bigger threat than an ordinary protest, at a cost the truckers of Islamabad are paying first. The march is scheduled for Sunday.