Pakistan has bombed areas in Afghanistan on Friday, after the Afghan Taliban earlier announced a major offensive against Pakistani military posts near the border.
It is the latest escalation of tensions between the neighbouring countries.
Afghanistan’s Taliban government said it had launched an offensive on Pakistani military bases near the border on Thursday night.
Pakistan responded within hours, bombing targets in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and the provinces of Kandahar and Paktika – Afghan provinces close to its 2,600 km (1,615 miles) border.
The bombings are the most significant development in the ongoing tensions between the two countries, which had agreed to a ceasefire last October following a week of deadly clashes.
The first reports began to surface on Thursday, 26 February.
An offensive was launched at 20:00 local time (15:30 GMT) along the border in the provinces of Nangarhar, Nuristan, Kunar, Khost, Paktia and Paktika, according to statements from Taliban officials.
Pakistan quickly retaliated, saying the Taliban had “miscalculated and opened unprovoked fire on multiple locations” across the border in its north-western province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which had been met with an “immediate and effective response” by Islamabad’s security forces.
It then launched a series of bombing raids on Afghanistan in the early hours of Friday morning, striking targets in Kabul and in border provinces.
Further outbreaks of violence were reported near the key Torkham border crossing, which sits between Peshawar and Jalalabad, by AFP journalists at the scene.
Zabihullah Mujahid, the Afghan Taliban spokesman, published – then subsequently deleted – a post on X that the group had launched strikes early on Friday on Pakistani military positions in Kandahar and Helmand, two provinces in Afghanistan.
The Afghan Taliban has said it carried out air strikes on several targets within Pakistan on Friday morning. Sources in the Taliban government told the BBC these were with drones launched from Afghanistan.
A Pakistani military officer confirmed that Afghan Taliban drones targeted three locations – the army’s artillery school in Nowshehra, one near a military academy in Abbottabad, and one that fell near a primary school in Swabi – but said all were destroyed.
These attacks are still unprecedented. Taliban fighters are thought to rely predominantly on commercially available drones carrying improvised explosives, making their range and targeting capabilities limited.
As with previous rounds of hostilities between Pakistani and Afghan forces, each side has accused the other of attacking first – and both claim to have inflicted heavy losses on the other side.
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said his country’s forces were able to “crush” its foes, while its defence minister had declared “open war” on the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The group’s chief spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the offensive had killed “numerous” Pakistani soldiers and captured others – a claim denied by Pakistani authorities.
Mosharraf Zaidi, spokesman for Pakistan’s prime minister, said 133 Afghan Taliban fighters had been killed and more than 200 wounded by Pakistani forces as of 22:50 GMT on Thursday. Again, the BBC has not been able to verify these figures.
UN officials have called for an immediate de-escalation of the fighting, while Iran, which shares borders with both nations, has offered to mediate.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi noted it was currently Ramadan, “the month of self-restraint and strengthening of solidarity in the Islamic world”.
China, which counts itself as friendly to both Afghanistan and Pakistan, called for a ceasefire, with foreign ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning urging them to “remain calm and exercise restraint”.
The foreign minister of Pakistan’s ally Saudi Arabia met his Pakistani counterpart to discuss ways to reduce tensions.
