Pakistani-Afghan War Takes Heavy Toll on Civilians

As the sun sets, the sound of gunfire, mortar and airstrikes reverberates across the towering mountains that straddle the rugged border between Afghanistan and Pakistan — two sister nations now engaged in deadly clashes.

While the world is focused on the spiraling war with Iran, another conflict is raging on Iran’s doorstep. Civilian deaths are rising and the fighting between two intertwined neighbors shows no signs of easing.

Pakistan has been pummeling Afghanistan since Feb. 26, beginning with dozens of airstrikes on military installations. But strikes have also hit residential areas, civilian infrastructure and over 20 health care facilities, killing at least 75 civilians and displacing 115,000 others, according to the United Nations.

“It rained bullets,” Basgul, who goes by one name, said on Saturday as she recounted how she fled her village along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border on the conflict’s first day.

Ismail Ahmadzai, a day laborer, took his disabled father by wheelbarrow as they fled another village by the border. “My father kept asking, ‘What’s happening, where are we going?’” Mr. Ahmadzai, 35, recounted. “And I said, ‘War has started, we’re leaving.”

Pakistan’s security apparatus once supported Afghanistan’s Taliban when it was an insurgency. But Pakistan now accuses the Taliban, which seized power in 2021 as U.S. troops withdrew, of harboring an Islamist terrorist group that has over the past several years been staging hundreds of attacks in Pakistan.

Both armies have claimed high casualties inflicted on the other, vowed to keep fighting and ignored calls by China and regional powers to talk, even as many Afghans argue they cannot sustain another crisis in a country where nearly half the population needs humanitarian assistance.

Afghanistan’s army has struck Pakistan with light drone attacks and raids on border posts. On Sunday, four Pakistani civilians were killed after a mortar shell fired from the Afghan side of the border struck a house in a Pakistani village, according to residents and a police official. Still, most of the civilian casualties have been Afghans.

Like hundreds of other families, Basgul’s and Mr. Ahmadzai’s have found refuge in a makeshift roadside camp in eastern Afghanistan with no running water and food coated in dust and soil. “I’m still wearing what I wore that night,” said Basgul, 35, recalling the escape with her nine children.

On Saturday, Pakistan carried out new airstrikes on military infrastructure in Kandahar, the southern city that is home to Afghanistan’s leader, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada. One strike hit a compound occupied by Afghan special forces protecting him, according to a member of the force who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly.

The strikes came shortly after Pakistan said it had shot down two Afghan drones flying near its capital, Islamabad. President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan called the targeting of civilian area a “red line.”

A day earlier, a fuel depot was bombed near Kandahar’s airport. And at least four people were killed and 14 others injured in a strike on a residential area of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, according to the United Nations.

Many residents gathered around a ruined home on Friday called for retaliation.

“We have to answer to their attacks,” said Nematullah Anwari, 20, standing in a room littered with glass shards, his head bandaged and his pale tunic still stained with blood. Mr. Anwari said has been studying biology for a national exam when a strike blew away the house next door and wounded him and his sister.

Strikes have also damaged transit centers where U.N. agencies and Afghan officials process Afghans who have been expelled en masse from Pakistan.

On Saturday near the Torkham border crossing in eastern Afghanistan, shattered windows and shell fragments littered the ground of one of those centers, and the roof of at least one building was torn open.

Inside its empty consultation rooms, medicines sat untouched on the shelves still standing, while air-conditioners hung askew from the walls. Pairs of slippers abandoned on a doorstep were the only signs of recent life.

Hundreds of tents stood empty at a nearby refugee camp recently evacuated amid the fighting. The border market in Torkham was deserted too, parts of it charred by a strike that destroyed more than 150 shops selling car parts and secondhand television screens.

Outnumbered and outgunned, the Afghan military has largely failed to counter the Pakistani airstrikes tearing through the night sky.

But officials and analysts warn that Afghan soldiers, seasoned in guerrilla warfare, could resort to asymmetric tactics to strike back at Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation of 250 million already battling multiple insurgencies and worsening fuel shortages caused by the war in the Middle East.

On a recent morning this month, thousands of mostly young protesters gathered in Kabul in support of the Afghan government, some chanting “Death to the military regime of Pakistan” and vowing to fight.

“I am ready to take my two sons to the border point with me to defend our country,” Rahim Gul Sahar, 45, said at the rally.

Pakistan has accused the Taliban government in Afghanistan of harboring Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the group behind hundreds of attacks in Pakistan in recent years that is also known as the Pakistani Taliban. The Afghan government has denied supporting the militants, who say they want to impose strict Islamic rule in parts of Pakistan. U.N. experts have repeatedly asserted that the Afghan Taliban provides the group with logistical and financial support.

Lt. Gen. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the Pakistani military’s spokesman, said in an interview earlier this year that Pakistan had identified dozens of militant training camps on the Afghan side of the border. “We are saying very clearly that Afghanistan is a ticking bomb,” he said.

A senior Pakistani security official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the fighting, said two weeks of airstrikes had led to a decrease in militant attacks on Pakistani soil, though he acknowledged that the lull could be temporary and that the campaign could ultimately backfire.

Afghanistan and Pakistan have engaged in episodes of fighting since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021, but the latest escalation has been the most severe in years. Afghanistan attacked Pakistani border posts in late February, drawing a fierce Pakistani response that has continued ever since.

Both countries have largely closed their border crossings and suspended trade, squeezing Afghan communities that relied on Pakistani exports of flour, rice, fuel and pharmaceuticals. Until last year, Pakistan was Afghanistan’s largest trade partner.

The fighting has also upended daily life for Pakistani communities.

In Landi Kotal, a Pakistani town roughly three miles from the Torkham crossing, residents said several villages had been struck since late February.

“It feels as though a shell could land at any moment and kill us,” said Hazir Shinwari, whose family now keeps lights off after dark and completes household tasks by the glow of mobile phones to avoid becoming a target.

Earlier this month, Mr. Shinwari joined a protest calling on both governments to end the fighting.

Afghan and Pakistani communities have long shared religious and ethnic ties, often reflected in common family names and tribal bonds.

“Both nations are the same,” said Taj Muhammad Shinwari, an Afghan restaurant owner who recently fled his home.

“We don’t want them to face problems, they don’t want us to face problems,” he said on Saturday from the roadside camp where hundreds of Afghan families had found refuge.

Still, Mr. Shinwari acknowledged that ties had frayed among border communities in recent months, and that the Afghan military had ordered residents not to call relatives across the frontier.

Kiana Hayeri contributed reporting from Torkham, Omar Ataullah from Kandahar and Zia ur-Rehman from Islamabad, Pakistan.

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