LAHORE, Pakistan — On Jan. 13, the police in Karachi, Pakistan, claimed to have killed four militants suspected of having links to the Islamic State. Rao Anwar, the officer leading the operation, said that the men had opened fire on the police and were killed in the gunfight.

Pictures of the dead circulated on social media and were broadcast on Pakistani television networks. Family members watching television news recognized one of the dead: Naqeebullah Mehsud, 27, from Waziristan, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas on the border with Afghanistan. He had been arrested by the police 10 days earlier.

Mr. Mehsud, who is survived by his wife, a son and two daughters, had worked various jobs in the city and recently decided to set up a clothing store with help from his brother. He was also an aspiring fashion model, posing rakishly in bright clothes and sporting a manicured beard in photographs on his Facebook page.

Image Naqeebullah Mehsud was an aspiring fashion model. Credit... Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

On that night in January, a photograph of Mr. Mehsud’s bloodied corpse in a bare room appeared on my Facebook feed. I shivered with a mixture of dread, anger and hopelessness. He wasn’t very different from me: a young Pashtun man who had escaped the pitiless war consuming our home in Waziristan, a poor, isolated place that became an epicenter of the so-called war on terrorism and would be referred to as “the most dangerous place in the world.”