Afghanistan's Taliban authorities reported that at least four people were killed and some 70 others wounded in mortar and rocket fire in the eastern Kunar province, with Taliban Deputy Spokesperson Hamdullah Fitrat stating that Pakistani military strikes hit the Sayed Jamaluddin Afghani University in Asadabad, injuring approximately 30 students along with women and children. "We strongly condemn these attacks by the Pakistani military regime, in which ordinary people, academic, and educational institutions were targeted, and declare them unforgivable war crimes," Fitrat said. Pakistan's information ministry flatly rejected the allegations, calling them "frivolous and fake" and denying that any strike had been carried out on the university.
On the Pakistani side, officials reported at least three civilians injured by gunfire in South Waziristan. A spokesman for Pakistan's border forces described the incident as the most serious clash since the ceasefire was declared. The exchange of fire appears linked, according to Afghan media outlet TOLOnews, to the reported shooting of a child by Pakistani military forces near the border city of Spin Boldak on Sunday.
The renewed violence marks the first major breach of a truce agreed last month, mediated by China, during which both sides had committed to avoiding escalation. Earlier this month, tribal elders from eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan's Chitral district also reached a local agreement to reopen border routes in the Nuristan area. Despite those efforts, sporadic violence had already continued: on April 18, three people were killed in Pakistan's Bajaur region following mortar fire attributed to Afghan forces.
The latest flare-up is a grim echo of the broader conflagration that erupted in February 2026, when Pakistan conducted airstrikes on alleged Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Islamic State–Khorasan Province camps in eastern Afghanistan. The Taliban retaliated in force on February 26, launching what they described as "large-scale offensive operations" along the Durand Line. Pakistan subsequently declared "open war" on Afghanistan and launched Operation Ghazab lil Haq. Weeks of intense fighting — including Pakistani airstrikes on Kabul, Kandahar, and scores of other locations — left at least 289 civilian casualties in Afghanistan, with more than 115,000 people displaced, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
A ceasefire brokered during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr in March formally halted the worst of the fighting. Turkey, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia have all joined China in pressing both governments to hold the line. Yet the core dispute remains unresolved: Islamabad insists Kabul shelters the TTP, whose attacks inside Pakistan have surged dramatically since 2021, while Afghan authorities reject the charge and counter that Pakistan fails to respect their sovereignty.
Analysts warn that without a durable political settlement — one that meaningfully addresses Pakistan's security demands while respecting Afghanistan's territorial integrity — the ceasefire will remain little more than a pause. The coming days will test whether diplomacy can once again pull two nuclear-armed neighbours back from the brink.
Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan and Clashes with Pakistan
The roots of the current crisis stretch back to the Taliban's return to power in August 2021 following the withdrawal of NATO forces. Pakistan had long maintained complex ties with the Taliban — a relationship marked by strategic calculation and deep ambivalence. While Islamabad had supported the Afghan Taliban's political process in Doha and hoped the group would bring stability, the new Afghan government's tolerance of the TTP quickly emerged as an explosive point of friction.
Cross-border skirmishes predate the Taliban's second takeover, but they intensified sharply after 2021. TTP attacks inside Pakistan surged, with hundreds killed in 2025 alone. Pakistan launched pre-dawn airstrikes on TTP hideouts in Afghanistan's Khost and Paktika provinces as early as March 2024. By October 2025, some of the deadliest clashes in years erupted after Pakistani strikes on TTP targets in Kabul triggered Taliban retaliation along the 2,640-kilometre Durand Line. A Qatar-and-Turkey-mediated ceasefire in October 2025 halted that round of fighting, but follow-up talks in Doha and Istanbul failed to produce a lasting agreement, and low-level skirmishes continued through year's end.
The structural dispute is as old as the Durand Line itself — a boundary drawn by British colonial administrators in 1893, never fully accepted by Afghan governments of any stripe, and home to Pashtun communities on both sides who freely traverse the frontier. The Taliban, for their part, deny harbouring the TTP while appearing unwilling — or unable — to dismantle a militant network with deep historical and ideological ties to their own movement. For Pakistan, the human cost of inaction has become politically untenable. The result is a cycle of strikes, retaliation, fragile truces, and renewed violence that has now, for the first time in modern history, escalated to a declared state of open war between two Muslim-majority states that were once aligned partners.