Pakistan claims killing 26 Afghan fighters; Taliban says civilians killed
No immediate comment from Pakistan as Taliban says 11 children are among the dead in strikes on border provinces.
Pakistan has launched yet another round of air raids across the border with Afghanistan, with a minister saying 26 Taliban fighters have been killed. However, the Afghan government says the dead included 13 civilians, most of them children.
Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said in a post on X on Wednesday that the military carried out precision strikes along the border, targeting hideouts and safe havens of the Pakistan Taliban, known by the acronym TTP.
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Tarar said 26 fighters were killed and four targets destroyed, including a training centre, an ammunition cache, as well as positions linked to TTP commanders Aleem Khan Khushali and Akhtar Muhammad Jani Khel.
He said the operations were carried out in response to a series of recent attacks, including a strike on a post of the paramilitary Federal Constabulary in Musa Dara on June 9, a vehicle-borne suicide attack on a military post in North Waziristan on June 2 and a suicide bombing at a police station in Bannu in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on May 9.
Tarar described the strikes as “precise and calibrated”, based on what he called credible intelligence.
However, Zabihullah Mujahid, chief spokesman for Afghanistan’s Taliban government, said on X that Pakistan’s attacks on the provinces of Kunar, Khost and Paktika had killed 11 children, one woman and an elderly man. He said 14 other women and children were wounded.
“We strongly condemn this humanitarian crime and act of aggression,” he said.
The attacks late on Tuesday were the deadliest in weeks and followed a period of relative calm at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
An official in the Khost province told the AFP news agency that a house in the Spera district was struck, killing nine people and wounding 10 others. In the neighbouring Paktika province, residents told AFP that an attack killed three civilians in the Barmal district. The air raid hit a home, and those killed were children, one of the residents said.
The air raids came a day after suspected TTP fighters attacked a security post in the Hasan Khel area of Pakistan’s northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, bordering Afghanistan. The attack triggered an intense gun battle in which six members of the Federal Constabulary were killed and several others wounded, according to Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior.
Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have been fraught since the Taliban took power for a second time in 2021, with fighting escalating sharply in late February after Afghanistan launched a cross-border attack on Pakistan in retaliation for its air raids.
Islamabad accuses Kabul of harbouring fighters who carry out deadly attacks in Pakistan, especially the TTP.
Afghan officials deny the charge, countering that Pakistan harbours hostile groups and does not respect its sovereignty.
The United Nations reported in May that cross-border fighting had killed at least 372 Afghan civilians and injured 397 in the first three months of 2026.
A fragile ceasefire deal reached in March collapsed after both sides accused the other of violating it.
