Pakistan, Afghan Taliban trade accusations over ‘unprovoked’ attacks

Washington — Editor's note: this story was translated from the original VOA Dari article.

Pakistani officials and the Afghan Taliban blamed each other this week for what they described as “unprovoked” attacks at a border crossing.

A Pakistani official in South Waziristan Lower, in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, said Tuesday that one person was killed and five others were injured when a mortar fired by the Taliban struck civilian homes and shops in the border town of Angoor Adda.

Calling the Taliban attack "unprovoked," the local official said in a post on X that Pakistani forces responded, “effectively and heavily.”

The Afghan Taliban said that Pakistani forces, however, carried out four drone strikes in the southeastern Afghan province of Paktika “without any provocation” in Angoor Adda and the provincial commissioner’s office.

Angoor Adda is an important town that serves as a trade and transit crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The crossing has been closed since October 2025, after Pakistani forces and the Afghan Taliban clashed along the border. Because of the border closure, crossings between Afghanistan and Pakistan and trade between the two countries has declined by some 95% in the past year.

The United Nations Mission in Afghanistan said in September that it had documented more than 1,100 civilian deaths and injuries from cross-border attacks in Afghanistan so far in 2026.

Pakistan accuses the Taliban of sheltering the militant group Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, which has taken responsibility for attacks inside Pakistan.

The Afghan Taliban publicly deny harboring any militant group, but a U.N. report, released in August, said that the Taliban continue to support TTP.

A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department told VOA in an email statement in July that Pakistan has the “right to defend against terrorist attacks.”

“The Pakistani people have suffered greatly at the hands of terrorists,” the unnamed spokesperson said at the time.

The U.N. said that the Pakistani Taliban’s attacks inside Pakistan have increased.

Pakistan has said that the attacks inside Pakistan have resulted in more than 3,500 casualties so far in 2026.

Ismail Khan, an editor at Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, told VOA that relations between the two countries have deteriorated.

He said that although China, Turkey and Qatar tried to mediate between Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban, their efforts have not yielded results, and that tensions between the two countries are likely to remain high.