Pakistan has launched airstrikes on Afghanistan’s capital Kabul and other cities, as clashes intensify along the two countries’ shared border.
On Friday, Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Asif said Islamabad’s patience with Taliban authorities in Afghanistan had run out and declared that Pakistan will now fight an “open war.”
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The statement came hours after Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said Afghanistan was carrying out “large-scale offensive operations” against the Pakistani military along the Durand Line, which separates the two countries.
This comes after weeks of fighting along the countries’ shared border, in which both sides say dozens of people have been killed.
The hostilities are taking place against a backdrop of escalating tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities since the latter’s return to power in 2021.
Here’s what we know so far:
What has happened?
On Friday, Pakistani officials said Afghan forces had attacked military positions near the border, prompting Islamabad to launch airstrikes against targets inside Afghanistan, including the capital Kabul and other cities.
The first Pakistani attack occurred around 01:50 local time on Friday (21:20 GMT Thursday), Al Jazeera correspondent Nasser Shadid reported, and Afghan forces responded with anti-aircraft fire.
“Our patience has run out. Now there is an open war between us and you,” Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Asif said in X.
Pakistan called this Operation Ghazab lil Haq, which translates as “righteous fury.”
What areas of Afghanistan have been affected by Pakistan?
Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar wrote in
Afghan government spokesman Mujahid also confirmed in an X publication that these three provinces had been affected.
The Associated Press reported that the strikes had destroyed two brigade bases in Afghanistan, citing two senior Pakistani security officials who spoke to the agency on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
Pakistani state media Pakistan TV claimed in a report that the country’s forces had “destroyed” several Taliban sites within a few hours.
According to the outlet, the locations attacked in Afghanistan included a Taliban brigade headquarters and an ammunition depot in Kandahar, as well as Taliban posts in the Wali Khan sector, near the Shawal sector, in the Bajaur sector and in Angoor Adda.
Pakistan’s Information Ministry said it was also attacking Afghan Taliban forces in several districts of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province: Chitral, Khyber, Mohmand, Kurram and Bajaur.
Later on Friday, shooting and shelling were reported near the key Torkham border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad, and the AFP news agency reported that shelling had been heard near the crossing in the morning.
The AFP reported that Afghan soldiers were heading towards the border.
The Torkham crossing has remained open for Afghans returning en masse from Pakistan, even though the land border has been largely closed since clashes between the neighbors in October.
What do we know about the victims?
Reports from each side are contradictory.
Mosharraf Zaidi, spokesman for Pakistan’s prime minister, wrote in X early Friday that in the Friday morning attack, 133 members of the Afghan Taliban forces were killed and more than 200 wounded.
He added that 27 Afghan Taliban posts had been destroyed and nine had been captured. More than 80 “tanks, artillery pieces and armed troop transport vehicles have been destroyed,” he wrote.
Pakistani media outlet Dawn reported that two Pakistani servicemen had been killed in the ongoing clashes.
Al Jazeera could not independently verify the casualty figures released by Pakistan.
The Taliban government, however, said only eight Taliban fighters were killed and 11 wounded.
Afghanistan said its military had launched its attack on Pakistani military bases and outposts along the border early Friday in retaliation for Pakistani attacks across the Afghan border on Sunday. He claimed that his forces had killed 55 Pakistani soldiers and captured two military bases and 19 military posts. Pakistan has dismissed this claim.
For its part, Pakistan claimed that its airstrikes last Sunday killed at least 70 “militants,” a claim dismissed by Mujahid, according to the media. Mujahid, on the other hand, wrote in X that the attacks “killed and injured dozens, including women and children.”
The provincial director of the Afghan Red Crescent in Nangarhar province, Mawlawi Fazl Rahman Fayyaz, said 18 people were killed and several more injured on Sunday.
Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who holds no official position but remains an influential political figure, said the country “will defend its beloved homeland with complete unity under all circumstances and respond to aggression with courage.”
“Pakistan cannot free itself from violence and shelling – those problems that it has created – but it must change its own policy and choose the path of good neighborliness, respect and civilized relations with Afghanistan,” he wrote in an X post on Friday.
Why are Pakistan and Afghanistan fighting?
The current outbreak of violence between the two countries is the culmination of months of tension.
In October 2025, Afghanistan and Pakistan agreed to an immediate ceasefire during talks mediated by Qatar and Turkiye following a week of fierce and deadly clashes along their border.
The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is called the Durand Line and extends for 2,611 kilometers (1,622 miles). Afghanistan does not formally recognize this border, so it was an imposed colonial demarcation that illegitimately divided ethnic Pashtun areas between the two countries.
The neighbors have been embroiled in frequent clashes since the Taliban took power in 2021. Sami Omari, an expert on strategic and security affairs in Central and South Asia, told Al Jazeera that there have been 75 clashes between Afghan and Pakistani forces since 2021, the same year US and NATO forces withdrew from Afghanistan.
In particular, Pakistan wants the Taliban to control armed groups like the Pakistan Taliban, known by their acronym TTP, which it says Afghanistan is harboring. The TTP emerged in Pakistan in 2007 and is separate from the Taliban in Afghanistan, but shares deep ideological, social and linguistic ties with the group.
Armed attacks in Pakistan by the TTP and the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), which operates in the resource-rich Balochistan province, have increased in recent years. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, which border Afghanistan, have been hardest hit by the violence.
“The Afghan Taliban, however, appear unwilling to crack down on the TTP, partly due to previous affinities between the two groups, but also out of fear that TTP militants will defect to their main rival, the Islamic State of Khorasan province,” Pearl Pandya, senior South Asia analyst at Armed Conflict Location & Event Data (ACLED), an independent and impartial conflict monitor, told Al Jazeera. based in the United States.
Pandya added that a serious escalation is “inevitable” if the Taliban in Afghanistan does not crack down on the TTP.
Elizabeth Threlkeld, director of the South Asia program at the Stimson Center think tank in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera that the latest clashes are not surprising, as they arise from months of “fraying” tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
“It’s significant insofar as it perhaps represents a change in strategy,” Threlkeld said, highlighting Pakistan’s “more aggressive kinetic attacks.”
“But since then, we’ve seen a couple of terrorist attacks inside Pakistan that were quite significant. So no, I’m not surprised that after those cumulative attacks, tensions have frayed and things have gone in this direction again, unfortunately.”
How has the world reacted?
“India strongly condemns Pakistan’s airstrikes on Afghan territory that have resulted in civilian casualties, including women and children, during the holy month of Ramadan,” Indian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said.
“It is another attempt by Pakistan to externalize its internal failures,” he said.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has promised both sides to respect international law, according to a statement from his spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has called on Afghanistan and Pakistan to resolve their differences through dialogue and principles of good neighborliness.
“In the blessed month of Ramadan, the month of self-restraint and strengthening solidarity in the world of Islam, it is appropriate for Afghanistan and Pakistan to manage and resolve their existing differences within the framework of good neighborliness and through the path of dialogue,” Araghchi wrote in an X post.
Russia has invited the warring parties to immediately stop cross-border attacks and resolve their differences through diplomatic means, the RIA news agency reported on Friday, citing the Foreign Ministry. Russia has also offered to mediate.
