KABUL, OCTOBER 1: Pakistan carried out a fresh round of airstrikes inside Afghanistan overnight, hitting locations in Kunar and Helmand provinces as Islamabad and Kabul offered sharply conflicting accounts of who was killed in the attacks.
Afghanistan’s Taliban government said the strikes hit civilian homes in Shultan district of Kunar and Garmser district of Helmand, destroying three houses.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said ten civilians, including women and children, were killed and another 11 wounded. Afghanistan’s Safir TV identified the locations more specifically as Chogam village in Shultan and the Safar area of Garmser.
Later Thursday, AFP cited Taliban deputy spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat as putting the civilian death toll at 10. The discrepancy between the two Afghan government figures had not been resolved at the time of publication.
Images and videos emerging from the affected areas show badly damaged residential structures, residents searching through rubble and apparent civilian casualties. One widely circulated image shows what appears to be a child recovered from debris.
The visual material is consistent with significant destruction at residential structures, but the identities of those shown and the circumstances of individual deaths cannot be established from the imagery alone.
Pakistan has acknowledged carrying out the strikes but presented a fundamentally different account.
Its Information Ministry said the attacks were “planned and calibrated” operations against militant hideouts and camps based on intelligence. Islamabad said initial assessments indicated that 22 militants had been killed and that weapons and ammunition had been destroyed.
Pakistan also said precautions were taken to avoid civilian casualties.
Neither side’s casualty claims have been independently verified.
A family home in Garmser
Accounts emerging from Helmand provide a more detailed picture of one of the strike sites.
A local resident interviewed in Garmser said those killed at the location were civilians with no affiliation to an armed organisation. Video from the scene shows the man standing amid the remains of a heavily damaged building as other residents gather behind him.
He called for human rights organisations to investigate the attack and send representatives to the site.
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The claim that the victims were unaffiliated civilians remains the resident’s account rather than an independently established finding.
AFP separately interviewed two Helmand residents who said three strikes hit their village, providing independent reporting that strikes occurred in the area.
The footage and witness testimony are nevertheless important because Pakistan’s official account maintains that the targets were militant facilities rather than civilian residences.
That contradiction now sits at the centre of the dispute.
Islamabad says intelligence identified militant hideouts and that its aircraft struck them precisely. Kabul says three civilian homes were destroyed. Residents shown at one of the locations say the dead were civilians.
Independent access to the strike sites and identification of the casualties will be necessary to determine which account is supported by the evidence.
Another round of strikes in less than two weeks
The latest attacks are not an isolated episode.
They come during a renewed cycle of Pakistani strikes inside Afghanistan after relations between Islamabad and the Taliban government deteriorated sharply.
Reuters reported last week that the two former allies have increasingly become adversaries over Pakistan’s allegations that Afghanistan provides sanctuary to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and other armed groups carrying out attacks inside Pakistan.
Kabul denies providing such sanctuary and argues that Pakistan’s militancy problem is primarily an internal issue.
The dispute has increasingly moved beyond accusations and border skirmishes to direct military action.
Pakistan has conducted several rounds of strikes on Afghan territory in recent weeks. Afghan authorities said earlier attacks in Kandahar, Paktia and Khost on September 24 killed four civilians, while three people were reported killed in strikes in Kunar and Paktika three days earlier.
The latest operation therefore represents at least the third reported round of Pakistani cross-border strikes in roughly 10 days.
The frequency matters.
What was once largely a dispute over militant sanctuaries and border management is increasingly taking the form of recurring direct military action inside Afghanistan.
Islamabad says the targets are militant sanctuaries
Pakistan maintains that the operations are a response to armed groups using Afghan territory to attack Pakistan.
Islamabad has repeatedly accused the Taliban government of harbouring the TTP and allied organisations. Pakistani officials say Kabul has failed to prevent those groups from organising, training and operating from Afghan territory.
The Taliban government rejects the allegation.
Pakistan’s latest statement said the two targets were selected using credible intelligence and described the operation as part of its campaign against militant infrastructure.
According to Islamabad’s preliminary account, 22 militants were killed.
Reuters and AP said they could not independently verify either Pakistan’s militant casualty figure or Afghanistan’s civilian casualty claims.
That uncertainty is important because the two governments are effectively describing two different events.
Pakistan says it destroyed militant hideouts.
Afghanistan says Pakistan destroyed civilian homes.
The physical destruction visible in footage establishes that buildings were hit. It does not independently establish who was inside them.
Civilian toll becoming a wider concern
The dispute comes against a much larger civilian cost from fighting along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier.
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said last week that it had documented more than 1,100 civilian deaths and injuries in Afghanistan from cross-border violence during 2026, according to AP.
That figure places the latest casualties within a broader deterioration in security along the frontier.
The two countries were once closely aligned.
Pakistan supported the Afghan Taliban during much of its insurgency against the Western-backed government in Kabul, and Islamabad initially expected the Taliban’s return to power in 2021 to improve Pakistan’s security position.
Instead, the relationship has deteriorated.
The TTP’s resurgence became the central fault line. The Pakistani Taliban shares ideological and historical ties with the Afghan Taliban but operates separately and primarily targets the Pakistani state.
Reuters reported that the groups have overlapping historical networks and that TTP attacks inside Pakistan have become a central source of hostility between Islamabad and Kabul. Reuters
Repeated negotiations, border arrangements and Chinese-mediated efforts have failed to produce a durable settlement.
Domestic politics enters the narrative
The escalation is also becoming entangled with Pakistan’s domestic political crisis.
Some Pakistani and Afghan social-media accounts have claimed that Army chief Asim Munir is escalating confrontation with Afghanistan to divert attention from domestic political pressure, including opposition mobilisation and other challenges confronting the government.
That is a political interpretation, not an established explanation for the strikes.
Afghanistan’s government has, however, now publicly advanced a similar accusation. Mujahid accused Pakistan of using attacks on Afghanistan to divert attention from its domestic political and economic problems, according to India’s Akashvani News.
Islamabad says its motive is security rather than domestic politics and describes the strikes as counter-terrorism operations against groups attacking Pakistan.
There is currently no independently established evidence demonstrating that Pakistan ordered the latest strikes to divert attention from internal political developments.
The more firmly established explanation is the worsening security confrontation between the two countries over the TTP and other militant groups.
From proxy dispute to direct confrontation
The larger significance of the latest attacks lies in their frequency.
Pakistan and Afghanistan are no longer simply exchanging accusations about militants operating along a porous frontier. Pakistani aircraft are repeatedly striking targets inside Afghan territory, while Kabul is publicly accusing Islamabad of aggression and civilian killings.
The Taliban government condemned Wednesday night’s strikes as a violation of Afghan sovereignty and international norms.
Pakistan, meanwhile, argues that Kabul’s failure to act against militant sanctuaries leaves Islamabad with the need to protect itself.
Those positions leave increasingly little room between counter-terrorism operations as described by Pakistan and violations of sovereignty as described by Afghanistan.
The civilian question could make that confrontation still more volatile.
If independent investigation confirms that family homes rather than militant facilities were struck in Garmser or Shultan, Islamabad will face questions about the intelligence behind the operation and the precautions it says were taken to protect civilians.
If Pakistan produces verifiable evidence that those locations housed militants, Kabul’s description of the victims will face corresponding scrutiny.
For now, neither case has been independently established.
What is no longer disputed is the central fact: Pakistan again used military force inside Afghanistan, striking locations hundreds of kilometres apart in Kunar and Helmand.
The latest raids show how far relations between the former allies have deteriorated. A dispute once fought largely through proxies, accusations and border posts is increasingly becoming a direct confrontation in which Pakistani aircraft cross into Afghanistan, Afghan civilians are reported among the dead, and each new strike creates the conditions for retaliation.
With three reported rounds of Pakistani strikes in roughly 10 days, the question is no longer whether tensions between Islamabad and Kabul are escalating.
It is whether either side still has an effective mechanism to prevent the next escalation from becoming larger than the last.
