Pakistan air strikes kill 8; Afghanistan retaliates

Eight civilians were killed yesterday in “reckless” air strikes by Pakistan’s military on Afghanistan’s border, prompting Afghan forces to retaliate against Pakistani military outposts, Taliban officials said.

Border tensions between the two countries have escalated since the Taliban government seized power in 2021, with Islamabad claiming militant groups are carrying out regular attacks from Afghanistan.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said Pakistani aircraft “bombed civilian homes” in Khost and Paktika provinces near the border with Pakistan at around 3am, adding that all the dead were women and children.

Afghanistan’s defence ministry said its border forces retaliated in response to the air strikes, targeting Pakistan’s military posts along the disputed border with “heavy weapons”.

Cross-border skirmishes in the region were reported by both sides yesterday, the latest in a string of incidents on the disputed frontier.

The Taliban government “strongly condemns these attacks and calls this reckless action a violation of Afghanistan’s sovereignty”, Mujahid said, adding: “Such incidents can have very bad consequences which will be out (of) Pakistan’s control.”

Pakistan confirms strikes

The Pakistani foreign ministry confirmed yesterday evening it had carried out “anti-terrorist operations in the border regions inside Afghanistan”. It said it was targeting the Hafiz Gul Bahadur group, a faction of the home-grown Pakistani Taliban, Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), responsible for a surge in border violence.

Malak Noor Khan, a tribal elder in the Sperah district of Khost, said he saw at least four explosives dropped from drones and jets. “When the drone came first, we all, including women and children, left our homes and went into the trees on the mountainside,” he said.

Cross-border skirmishes in the region were reported by both sides yesterday, the latest in a string of incidents on the disputed frontier.