Islamabad/Karachi: Pakistan and Afghanistan traded claims of heavy battlefield losses early Friday as cross-border fighting intensified along their shared frontier, marking the most serious escalation in hostilities between the bitter neighbors in recent months.
The fighting follows Pakistani airstrikes earlier this week targeting what Islamabad said were Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Daesh militant camps inside Afghanistan. Pakistan said those strikes killed more than 100 militants, while Kabul said women and children were killed and condemned the attacks as violations of Afghan sovereignty.
With both governments now announcing retaliatory operations and publishing sharply conflicting casualty figures, the confrontation signals a rapid deterioration in relations between the two countries.
Pakistani officials said the latest strikes were in response to what they described as unprovoked firing by Afghan forces along multiple sectors of the border late Thursday. The Pakistani prime minister’s spokesman Mosharraf Zaidi said at 0345 hours Friday counter-strikes were continuing.
“A total of 133 Afghan Taliban are confirmed killed, more than 200 wounded,” Zaidi said in an X update. “Twenty seven (27) Afghan Taliban posts have been destroyed, and nine (9) have been captured.”
