Pakistan bombs Kabul and Taliban strongholds

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Pakistan launched air strikes on Afghanistan early on Friday as tensions between the neighbours threatened to interrupt out into open warfare. 

The bombardment included intensive air strikes and artillery fireplace focusing on main city areas, together with the capital Kabul and Kandahar, the place Taliban supreme chief Hibatullah Akhundzada relies. 

The assault got here in response to an Afghan Taliban assault in a single day on Pakistani border posts, officers in Islamabad stated. That adopted air strikes on the weekend by Pakistan on what it stated have been militant positions in east Afghanistan.

This week’s preventing has been the worst for a number of months as a fragile ceasefire seems to have damaged down. Relations between Pakistan and the Taliban have deteriorated over the previous 12 months, as Islamabad battles two more and more violent insurgencies in border areas that it claims obtain help from Kabul.

Pakistani defence minister Khawaja Asif, a civilian official who has restricted energy because of the navy’s dominance over policymaking, wrote on X that “it’s now open warfare” between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

He additionally accused the Taliban of being “a proxy for India”, a reference to warming ties between the Islamist group and Islamabad’s arch-rival India.

Islamabad stated on Friday it had killed 133 Afghan Taliban fighters, occupied 9 Taliban navy positions and destroyed dozens of bases, depots, tanks and artillery weapons in Afghanistan.

The Taliban reported it had killed 55 Pakistani troopers, retrieving a few of their our bodies, and seized 19 posts in cross-border raids. Islamabad and Kabul have denied one another’s claims and neither aspect has acknowledged any losses.

Afterward Friday morning, the Taliban used drones to assault three military installations in north-western Pakistan, together with close to Abbottabad, dwelling to the nation’s premier navy academy, in line with Pakistani and Afghan officers.

All have been shot down with no casualties, in line with Pakistan’s info minister Attaullah Tarar.

Zabihullah Mujahid, the Islamist group’s spokesperson, stated on Thursday night time that the Taliban had launched its “offensive operations” towards “Pakistani military centres and services” in response to final weekend’s air strikes, which the UN says killed at the very least 13 civilians.

Pakistan stated the Taliban assault was “unprovoked” and claimed the strikes over the weekend focused hideouts belonging to Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, a militant group that’s formally separate from the Afghan Taliban, and an area department of Isis. The latter had claimed accountability for a suicide bombing this month in Islamabad that killed greater than 30 individuals.

“By increasing its focusing on from TTP militant services to the Taliban regime itself, Pakistan is signalling its willingness to take its battle on to the Afghan state,” stated Michael Kugelman, a senior fellow for South Asia on the Atlantic Council think-tank in Washington.

“The Taliban, in the meantime, is messaging its intent to launch a sustained marketing campaign towards Pakistan,” he added. “Diplomatic efforts . . . have failed to deal with the basis causes of the disaster.”

The Taliban deny internet hosting militant teams that concentrate on Pakistan, however worldwide observers disagree.

Hamid Karzai, the previous president of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the Nato-backed authorities that was deposed by the Taliban in 2021, wrote on X: “The Afghans will defend their beloved homeland with full unity in all circumstances.”

Pakistan “should change its personal coverage and select the trail of fine neighbourliness, respect and civilized relations with Afghanistan”, Karzai added.

Since October, negotiators for Islamabad and the Taliban have held 4 rounds of talks in Doha, Istanbul and Riyadh geared toward sustaining a fragile truce. These newest tit-for-tat assaults come regardless of the Taliban releasing three Pakistani troopers final week below a Saudi Arabia-brokered deal.