Explosions heard in Kabul as Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict continues | Conflict news

Explosions were heard in the Afghan capital, Kabul, as Taliban forces said they fired on Pakistani planes as the conflict stretched into a fourth straight day.

Afghanistan’s Taliban government said its forces deployed anti-aircraft and missile defense systems against Pakistani jets that entered Afghan airspace early Sunday. This includes foiling an attempted Pakistani attack on Bagram, a former US military base north of Kabul that US President Donald Trump expressed interest in reoccupying last year.

Pakistan has not responded to this statement.

Islamabad has declared that the two countries are at “open war” and on Sunday, its forces reportedly still held a 32-square-kilometer (12-mile) stretch of Afghan territory in the southern Zhob sector, two Pakistani security officials said.

Hamdullah Fitrat, a spokesman for Afghanistan’s deputy government, said Pakistan’s attacks killed 55 civilians in multiple provinces, according to the Anadolu news agency.

Among them were a woman and a child, killed in a drone attack on Nangarhar province, and a civilian whose home was hit by mortar fire in Paktia, eastern Afghanistan.

In Kunar province, a young man named Sajid described losing his brother who refused to run away. “He said, I will stay and take care of the house,” Sajid told AFP news agency. “He was martyred near the mosque while trying to leave.”

Al Jazeera was unable to verify the accident claims from either side.

Although the Taliban has indicated openness to talks, Pakistan has rejected talks. “No talks. No talks. No talks,” Musharraf Zaidi, the Pakistani prime minister’s spokesman told foreign media, insisting that Islamabad’s only demand was an end to what it called “terrorism” originating in Afghanistan.

A longstanding controversy

Tensions between the two neighbors were rising late on Thursday when Kabul launched “retaliatory operations” across the border following Pakistani airstrikes in late February.

The conflict has its roots in a long-running and bitter dispute over the Pakistani Taliban, known by its acronym TTP, an armed group that Pakistan accuses Kabul of harboring.

The TTP has dramatically intensified its campaign inside Pakistan, with the last year becoming the country’s most violent in nearly a decade. Deaths are up 75 percent to 3,413 from 2024 and overall violent incidents are up 29 percent, according to the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies, an Islamabad-based think tank.

On February 21, Pakistani airstrikes targeted so-called TTP hideouts in Nangarhar and Paktika provinces along the border with Pakistan. The United Nations said there were credible reports that 13 Afghan civilians had died.

Kabul has called Pakistan’s actions unprovoked and denies that Afghan soil is being used to threaten any neighboring country.

Militarily, the two sides are deeply mismatched as Pakistan has vastly superior conventional firepower, aircraft, tanks and advanced defense systems.

But the Afghan Taliban, hardened by more than two decades of insurgency war against US-led NATO forces, have deployed drones to strike Pakistani military camps, a cheap and effective tool that is reshaping the battlefield.

International calls for de-escalation are growing, with the European Union, the UN, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan all urging restraint.

The group Diplomats Without Borders warned on February 27 that further confrontation risks “wider regional instability” and called on both governments to return to direct talks.

Yet, with the rapidly escalating US-Israeli conflict with Iran consuming much of the world’s diplomatic bandwidth, there are fears that the war could continue without urgent international attention.

Despite clashes with Pakistani forces, on Saturday, Afghan government spokesman Abdul Kahar Balkhi took to social media to condemn the attacks on Iran and subsequent attacks by Iran on Gulf states. He urged all parties to resolve their differences through diplomatic means.

Pakistan’s Ministry of External Affairs issued a similar call for restraint in the Middle East on February 28.

Omar Samad, a former diplomat in Afghanistan, warned that a military conflict involving Iran could distract from efforts to end the fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“The involvement of Iran and the United States and Israel in the Middle East is a much bigger, more important, significant event,” Samad said, “and it’s taking away the bandwidth for anything going on around the world, including Pakistan, Afghanistan’s neighborhood”.