By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: Pakistani and Afghan authorities accused each other on Monday of deliberately striking civilians along their volatile shared border, even as Islamabad pressed forward with military operations against Taliban-linked militants and Kabul reported fresh deaths from Pakistani shelling.
The dueling claims showed a sharp escalation in fighting that erupted late last month and has since featured artillery barrages, drone strikes and airstrikes across the rugged frontier. Pakistani officials said their forces destroyed key militant hideouts and infrastructure inside Afghanistan over the weekend, while Afghan authorities charged that Pakistani fire killed four civilians in eastern Afghanistan overnight between Sunday and Monday, according to reports from the international news agency AFP.
The latest violence started on Feb. 26, when Afghan forces targeted Pakistani border posts — an action Islamabad described as retaliation for earlier Pakistani strikes on militant camps inside Afghanistan. Pakistan has long maintained that Afghanistan’s Taliban government provides safe haven to groups such as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which it blames for cross-border attacks; Kabul has consistently denied the allegation.
On Monday, the information ministry said Afghan Taliban forces deliberately shelled a civilian area in the Salarzai region of Bajaur district in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Sunday afternoon. The ministry identified the targeted spot as Tabesta Letai and said the attack occurred around 3:30 p.m. local time on March 15. “Four innocent civilians have embraced shahadat while one five-year-old child is seriously injured in the attack,” the ministry statement said
Information Minister Attaullah Tarar later confirmed the civilian toll, attributing it to Afghan artillery and mortar fire aimed at populated areas. The same day, security sources in Pakistan said the military conducted precision strikes inside Afghanistan’s Kandahar province overnight Sunday, destroying a “technical support infrastructure” and an equipment storage facility belonging to militants. Tarar added that a tunnel used by terrorists was also demolished in the operation.
As those actions continued, security forces operating in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa targeted and destroyed significant Afghan Taliban and TTP hideouts in the Kurram sector on Monday. “During these operations, several khawarij were killed while the rest managed to escape,” one security official said, employing the government’s preferred term — Fitna al-Khawarij — for the banned TTP. In the adjacent Bajaur sector, the military also struck Afghan Taliban posts directly across the border, using guided missiles to neutralize the positions, according to the security sources. Officials vowed that Operation Ghazab lil-Haq would persist “until all objectives are met.”
Elsewhere in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, at least two civilians were abducted and later killed in suspected militant-related incidents in Bannu district, local sources reported. In the first case, armed men seized Malik Nabiullah — described as a well-known local figure — along with three companions in Domel tehsil. The three others were released, but Nabiullah was taken to an undisclosed location, shot and killed; his body was later recovered in the area.
In a second incident late Sunday in the Bakakhel area near the Tochi Bridge, unidentified gunmen abducted a young man identified as Shazeb Khan from his village. His body was found dumped along the roadside the following day. Authorities said investigations into both killings were underway.
In a separate development in Bannu, police said they foiled a suspected militant assault on the Fatah Khel police post after officers spotted suspicious movement on thermal cameras and opened fire, forcing the attackers to flee. “The vigilance and timely response of the personnel prevented a potentially major attack,” police officials said.
Bannu has endured a string of such incidents in recent months. On Friday, one attacker was killed and a police constable wounded when militants assaulted a checkpost guarding a camp for internally displaced persons in Bakakhel. Last month, gunmen raided a mosque and abducted three brothers — two of them police officers — who were later killed.
The cumulative toll of the border fighting and domestic militant activity has heightened fears of wider instability in Pakistan’s northwest, where security forces have conducted repeated operations against TTP remnants and Afghan Taliban elements in recent years. Pakistani authorities have repeatedly pressed Kabul to act against the groups they say operate from Afghan soil, while Afghan officials have countered that Islamabad’s cross-border strikes risk inflaming an already fragile relationship.
Copyright © 2021 Independent Pakistan | All rights reserved
