Afghan Taliban launch strikes on border with Pakistan as tensions escalate
Afghanistan’s Taliban regime said they launched attacks on targets along the Pakistan border, injuring scores of people in Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province.
The Pakistani military said it had shot down four primitive drones and warned that any further provocations would “receive an appropriate response”. The BBC was unable to independently confirm the attack.
The attacks came after 28 civilians were killed in a Pakistani airstrike in Afghanistan on Sunday, according to the UN.
After months of relative calm, tensions in the region flared up again. The two countries agreed to a ceasefire in October after weeks of deadly clashes.
Pakistan has long accused Afghanistan of harboring terrorists who attack its territory, an allegation the Taliban denies.
Kabul accused Islamabad of carrying out unprovoked attacks that killed civilians. Pakistan says it only targets militants.
Afghanistan said civilians’ houses were hit in Pakistan’s attack on Sunday, raising the number of civilian deaths to 36 and more than 160 people were injured.
He called the attack a “cowardly act” and “atrocity”.
Pakistan said it carried out ground operations along the border and airstrikes targeting militant hideouts in Afghanistan’s Paktia, Pktika and Kunar provinces.
The country’s information minister, Attaullah Tarar, said 29 militants were killed in the operation responding to “recent terrorist attacks against innocent people”.
The BBC has not independently confirmed either side’s figures.
Intermittent border clashes and air strikes in the region in recent months have killed dozens of people, according to officials in both countries.
Dozens of people lost their lives in clashes between the two countries in February. Hundreds of people were killed in a Pakistani attack on a drug rehabilitation center in Kabul in March.
In early June, Pakistan launched deadly air strikes that killed 26 militants. The Afghan Taliban government also announced that 13 people, most of them children, died in the attacks.
