Pakistan launched two airstrikes into Afghanistan on Monday morning that killed at least eight people, Afghan officials said, escalating simmering tensions between the two countries.
The pre-dawn strikes were carried out in the Paktika and Khost Provinces in eastern Afghanistan around 3 a.m., Afghan officials said. Three children were among those killed, according to Taliban officials, who condemned the strikes as a violation of Afghan territory.
The strikes came amid a surge of attacks by militants in Pakistan following the Taliban’s seizure of power in neighboring Afghanistan. Pakistani officials have blamed militants harbored on Afghan soil and protected by the Taliban administration for the attacks. Taliban officials have denied those claims.
Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban administration, said in a statement on X that his country “has a long experience of freedom struggle against the superpowers of the world” and “does not allow anyone to invade its territory.”
“Such incidents can have very bad consequences which will be out of Pakistan’s control,” he added.
The Pakistani action came two days after militants attacked a military post in northwestern Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan. In a statement released Monday evening, the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the country had carried out “intelligence-based antiterrorist operations” inside Afghanistan and accused the Taliban administration of aiding militants operating in Pakistan.
Over the past two years, the statement said, the Pakistani government has “repeatedly urged the Afghan authorities to take concrete and effective action to ensure that the Afghan soil is not used as a staging ground for terrorism against Pakistan.”
