The Government of Pakistan has reported that it has bombed targets in Kabul, the Afghan capital, in the early hours of this Friday and has declared that it has entered into an “open war” with its neighboring country, in an escalation of the conflict that has already become the most serious incident between both countries since the return of the Taliban to power.
The Pakistani Prime Minister’s spokesperson for foreign media, Mosharraf Zaidi, has reported that the Pakistani attacks hit “military targets” in Kabul, Paktia and Kandahar.
For his part, the Taliban’s main spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, has condemned the attacks on the capital and has declared that there have been no casualties: “The cowardly Pakistani army has carried out bombings in some areas of Kabul, Kandahar and Paktia,” he wrote in X.
Mujahid added that Afghanistan has carried out “major retaliation operations against Pakistani military positions in Kandahar and Helmand.”
The forces of the Taliban Government and Pakistan have been maintaining intense night fighting at various points along the border since Thursday after the launch of an operation coordinated by Kabul along the so-called Durand Linewhich comes five days after a series of air raids by Pakistan.
As reported by Zaidi, the Pakistani attacks have caused the death of 133 Taliban and left more than 200 injured.
Pakistan’s Defense Minister, Khawaja Asif, also spoke on the social network “Pakistan has made great efforts to maintain normality directly and through friendly countries. It has engaged in full-fledged diplomacy. But the Taliban has become a representative of India,” Asif justified.
The Pakistani government also reported 27 Afghan posts destroyed and 9 captured.
Hours earlier, the Taliban government had ended its offensive against Pakistan and claimed to have killed 55 Pakistani soldiers, in addition to having captured two bases and 19 posts along the Durand Line.
This confrontation is the result of bombings carried out by Pakistan last week, which caused at least 17 deaths.
Kabul denounced that the victims were civilians, while Islamabad defended that it was an operation against a hundred insurgents from the group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which uses Afghan soil as a base.
Pakistan is experiencing a peak in internal violence, with armed attacks in the border areas with Afghanistan that have been on the rise since the Taliban took Kabul in August 2021.
Islamabad systematically accuses the Afghan regime of harboring terrorist groups on its territory, an accusation that the Taliban routinely rejects while denouncing violations of its sovereignty.
