Afghan claims that Pakistani air strikes killed three people in Kunar province increase the danger of a return to the cross-border clashes that flared earlier this year. Provincial authorities say the attack struck Nurgal district around 4am local time on Monday, 23:30 GMT on Sunday, hitting at least one house and leaving four people wounded.
Taliban deputy spokesperson Hamdullah Fitrat posted on X that the victims came from the same household and reported additional strikes in neighbouring Paktika. He wrote, "In the Barmal district of Paktika province, two locations were bombarded, destroying one shop and one unoccupied house, with no casualties reported."
There was no immediate public response from Pakistan to the Afghan allegations. The reported raids follow almost three months of relative calm after clashes earlier in the year, and they risk reopening a wider confrontation that has been active since February.
The incidents come in the wake of a deadly assault in northwestern Pakistan. A Pakistan Taliban faction said it carried out a bombing at a mosque inside a police facility in Kohat, and Pakistani officials said the blast and a later gun battle killed at least 21 people, mostly police officers. Pakistan's Ministry of Information warned on Saturday that the country could strike fighters inside Afghanistan in response, and the ministry blamed the Kohat attack on fighters it said were based in Afghanistan.
Those public warnings, combined with the reported civilian deaths and property damage, raise the immediate prospect of retaliatory operations on both sides of the border. The differing claims of responsibility and the Taliban government's rejection of Islamabad's earlier charge that armed groups in Afghanistan attack Pakistan leave attribution contested and diplomatic avenues for de-escalation limited.
With Islamabad yet to comment publicly on the latest Afghan account, the short-term outlook is for heightened tension and the possibility of further military activity along the frontier. How both governments respond in the coming days will determine whether the incidents remain isolated or mark a renewed phase of cross-border confrontation.
