In Islamabad, where politics often arrives with the thunder of convoy engines and the scrape of steel on asphalt, two boys scramble up the rusted corner of a shipping container stamped with the word “EVERGREEN” in blocky white letters. They kick into handstands, legs locked, arms steady, as if the ground beneath them were a gymnasium floor rather than a barricade sealing off the capital’s arteries. Traffic rushes past behind them; no one looks up. The 27-second clip, shared on Instagram, is cut to a verse from Cheema Y’s Punjabi track “Police,” a song about smuggled containers crossing borders that nobody can account for. The container under the boys’ feet, however, carries nothing at all. It is one of an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 heavy steel boxes that have turned Islamabad into what 26-year-old callisthenics and parkour athlete Mujaddad Asrar cheerfully calls “Containerabad.” Asrar has been staging shoots on Islamabad’s containers for years; this particular video went out from a friend’s account because the friend has a larger following. For him, the arrival of these containers is as predictable as the changing seasons. “It’s like clockwork every year,” he says. “One lot of containers or another comes right on time, like it’s part of the calendar. It’s basically a fifth season.” The containers have been in place for nearly four weeks, part of the government’s effort to block a planned march on the capital by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), the party of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan. The march, postponed from September 27 to October 4 for “strategic reasons,” is PTI’s latest attempt to pressure the government into releasing Khan, who has been behind bars for more than three years and remains, according to polls, the country’s most popular political figure. This is not new. In August 2024, as PTI petitioned the Islamabad High Court over a cancelled rally permit, then-Chief Justice Aamer Farooq remarked that authorities had turned the capital into a “container city.” The phrase stuck, and now the city is once again locked in steel.
The government insists this is not overreach but standard practice. State Minister for Interior Talal Chaudhry says security preparations are based on intelligence assessments and anticipated threats, not simply on the date a political event is formally announced. “Islamabad is the federal capital,” he says, “so precautionary security arrangements are often put in place well in advance.” But the precautions come with a price tag, and no one agrees on what it is. Local media initially reported that Islamabad police sought roughly 820 million rupees, about $2.9 million, for a week of security around PTI’s planned march. With the march delayed a week, officials now expect the final bill to top 1 billion rupees, or $3.6 million. Container rental sits at the centre of that budget: one estimate puts the daily rental for more than 1,500 containers at 46.5 million rupees, about $167,000. Transporters, however, say they have not been paid a single rupee. Chaudhry disputes this. “What I can say with certainty is that legitimate container rentals are documented and paid through the proper process,” he says. Yet when Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi disclosed in a written reply to the National Assembly in March 2025 that the government had spent 1.35 billion rupees, about $4.9 million, on law-and-order deployments in Islamabad over five years, the word “container” did not appear anywhere in the response. The reply itemised personnel movement, housing, meals and, in one year, anti-riot equipment, but it excluded the period covering the 2024 PTI protest. Chaudhry rejects the idea that this was an omission. “Container rentals are not necessarily recorded as a separate political-protest expenditure category,” he says. “They are processed through the established administrative and contractual mechanism. Every container hired is recorded, and the corresponding payment is traceable through official accounts.” But for the men whose livelihoods are welded to those containers, official accounts are abstract; the reality is a truck parked on a dusty roadside, earning nothing, while the government’s promises remain just out of reach.
The containers themselves fall into two categories. Some are trucks with containers welded onto their chassis, owned by individual transporters. Others are containers owned by foreign shipping lines, sitting on someone else’s vehicle. Transporters’ associations estimate that roughly 2,000 vehicles and containers are held across Islamabad, Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, though they admit the figure is an estimate rather than a definitive count. Muhammad Owais Chaudhry, a lawyer who heads the All Pakistan Goods Transport Owners Association, represents owners in the first category. He says the combined loss for each truck-container combination is 30,000 to 40,000 rupees a day, about $108 to $144, while the vehicle sits idle. “Not a single rupee has been given,” he says. “No procedure has ever been worked out for how it would be paid. In our history, no transporter has ever received money for any past protests.” Talal Chaudhry disputes this entirely. “That is simply not consistent with our records,” he says. “Containers are hired through a proper contractual mechanism at market rates, and payments are made through official accounts. We have a complete container-by-container record, including payments made in previous years. If there is any legitimate outstanding claim, it will be settled.” Owais Chaudhry has also pressed officials to buy a fleet of containers outright rather than renting them for every sit-in, noting that a container costs between 400,000 and 500,000 rupees, about $1,444 to $1,805. Talal Chaudhry calls that a question of policy, not principle. “The government already has an established rental mechanism that allows containers to be deployed when required without permanently bearing the cost of purchasing, storing and maintaining them,” he says. One of the seized vehicles belongs to Haji Atlas Khan, provincial general secretary of the All-Pakhtunkhwa Goods Federation. He was at home in Nowshera district in early September when his driver rang to say police had impounded his lorry minutes after it entered Islamabad. “We didn’t know, and the police didn’t know either, under what authority these vehicles were being seized,” Khan says. In the following days, three more of his trucks joined the first at police stations across the capital. Owais Chaudhry has watched containers seized for sit-ins since 2018; Haji Atlas Khan, in his early 50s, has been in the business for 26 years and has seen his vehicles impounded through several protests. But neither has ever waited this long to retrieve a vehicle, and both insist they have never been paid for their losses. Owais says association officials have met Islamabad’s police leadership and the minister since the crackdown began, but came out with “empty promises.” “Everyone says you’ll get everything,” he says. “But we ask, how, and when?” Asked about a compensation timeline, Talal Chaudhry says the process concerns “the hiring or temporary use of containers, not an indefinite seizure of vehicles.” Loaded vehicles, he says, were returned immediately, while empty containers taken for security arrangements fall under “the rental arrangement,” with release “coordinated with the relevant authorities.” None of the drivers or transporters Al Jazeera spoke to recognised that arrangement, received anything in writing, or knew when they might get their vehicles back.
The human cost is written on the faces of the men waiting by their trucks. On a strip of open ground near Islamabad’s fruit and vegetable market, Muhammad Naseer and a handful of others sit out the days on a mat laid beside their parked vehicles. Naseer, 48, from Mianwali, was hauling an empty container back towards Karachi when police stopped him as he was leaving Islamabad. “Our container belongs to a shipping line,” he says. There is a 10-day window to return it, after which “a claim will come.” Nearby, Muhammad Saleem Jaffar, a driver for Haji Atlas Khan, recalls the night his truck was stopped: 3am, at a checkpoint near a wholesale market. He had just dropped off his shipment when police pulled him over. Like the others, he has not been told when he might leave. “No one has ever asked how we are,” he says of the police who come and go from the holding area. “Whether anyone of us is sick, what the loss has been. No one has asked anything at all.” Conditions have become more difficult. Farooq Khan, 22, says the single washroom at a nearby fuel pump now draws an hour-long queue, and there has been nowhere to bathe since his container was seized. The uncertainty extends to when it all ends. Jaffar says a fellow driver walked to the nearby police post to ask about release, and was first told October 4. Days later, the police told him the date had changed to October 16, with no guarantee attached. “It could go beyond that too,” Jaffar says. Asked if he had ever thought about simply walking away from the job, Naseer points first to the truck he is minding, worth close to 15 million rupees, about $54,000, entrusted to him by an owner in Karachi. But he frames it as more than a question of money or debt. “How can we become disloyal to him, and abandon the vehicle over a little hardship?” he asks. The truck is not just steel; it is a promise, a responsibility, a thread connecting him to an owner who trusted him with something precious. To walk away would be to break that trust, and for Naseer, that is unthinkable, even as the days stretch on and the containers gather dust.
The cost of sealing off the capital, however, extends far beyond the men who own and drive the trucks. Sajid Amin Javed, deputy executive director for research at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, says the full cost goes well beyond container rental. “When we close a hotel and cancel all bookings, it is not the room rent that the hotel loses,” he says. “It is the signalling it sends to investors, businesses, tourists. Every pillar of state, society bears that cost.” The impact is not limited to Islamabad. Danyal Adam Khan, an Islamabad-based researcher and urban governance specialist, notes that the capital forms a metropolitan area with Rawalpindi that is the third-largest in the country, and that people from distant provinces are deeply integrated into the city’s socioeconomic fabric. “When you shut down the capital like this, you cut everyone off,” he says. The containers are not just a political statement; they are a physical disruption of daily life, blocking commuters, delaying deliveries, forcing businesses to close, and sending a message that the city is not open for normalcy. Yet for some, the containers have become a kind of backdrop, even a playground. Asrar says the response to his friends’ video online has mostly been good-natured. “Some people call it showing off,” he says. “Some call it political. We try to stay neutral about it.” He recalls one police officer who figured they were not damaging anything and stayed to watch. “They were just impressed by it,” he says, speaking of his stunts. For a brief moment, the containers cease to be instruments of state power and become props in a performance, a way of reclaiming space, of turning a symbol of lockdown into a stage for agility and youth. But that is a luxury, and Asrar knows it. The same containers that make for striking Instagram videos are, for others, a source of mounting anxiety, lost income, and a deepening sense of abandonment.
In the end, the containers remain where they have always ended up: half barricade, half backdrop, caught between the state’s need for control and the people’s need to live. The boys who handstand on them may see a playground, and the police who guard them may see a security measure, but for the transporters and drivers, the containers are a trap. They have been seized without explanation, held without compensation, and released without a timeline. The government says the process is legal, documented, and fair; the transporters say they have never seen a document, never received a rupee, and never met an official who could tell them when this will end. The minister insists that legitimate claims will be settled, that every container is recorded, that payments are traceable through official accounts. But the men sitting by the roadside, watching their trucks rust in the Islamabad sun, have heard such assurances before. They have lived through the protests of 2018, the sit-ins, the marches, and the promises. They have learned that the containers always come, and the compensation never does. “This is such a government that it doesn’t listen to anyone’s request, anyone’s plea, anyone’s complaint,” says Haji Atlas Khan, the truck owner from Nowshera. “There’s simply no one we can go to who will hear us.” The containers, meanwhile, remain in place, waiting for the march that may or may not come, waiting for the political crisis to resolve, waiting for someone to remember that behind every barricade is a person, and behind every container is a life. The boys may have moved on to their next stunt, the police may have moved on to their next shift, but the drivers are still there, sitting on their mats, watching the road, waiting for an answer that never seems to arrive. And in Islamabad, the fifth season continues, as predictable as the changing leaves, as inevitable as the next protest, and as indifferent as the steel that blocks the way.