ISLAMABAD – Pakistani troops and Afghanistan’s Taliban forces traded gunfire at multiple points along Pakistan’s northwestern frontier on Saturday. Pakistani security officials and state media reported that artillery-supported forces had destroyed several Taliban positions.
The officials said Pakistani forces also killed an unknown number of Pakistani Taliban militants who were attempting to enter Pakistan from a remote part of eastern Afghanistan during the confrontation.
The clashes continued for several hours in Kurram district, located in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, according to three Pakistani security officials. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.
Afghanistan’s Taliban-led government had not issued an immediate response.
Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan have deteriorated sharply as border confrontations and Pakistani airstrikes inside Afghanistan have continued this year, intensifying a long-running dispute over militant groups operating along the frontier.
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reported in September that it had recorded more than 1,100 civilian deaths and injuries in Afghanistan linked to cross-border violence since the beginning of the year.
Pakistan has also faced a sharp increase in militant attacks in recent months, many of which authorities attribute to the Pakistani Taliban, formally known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP. The group is separate from the Afghan Taliban but maintains close ties with it. Islamabad says TTP commanders and fighters have been sheltered in Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power in 2021, a claim rejected by Kabul.
Pakistani authorities say more than 2,800 militant attacks have taken place across the country since January, killing 3,000 people, with the majority occurring in the northwest and in the southwestern province of Balochistan.
