PESHAWAR: At least one Pakistani paramilitary soldier was killed and seven others wounded in cross-border exchanges of fire with Afghan forces, a security source told AFP on Saturday.
Sporadic clashes, including with heavy weaponry, erupted overnight between border forces on the frontier between Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan and Khost province in Afghanistan, officials from both countries said. The exchanges of fire come after Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities accused Pakistan of killing 46 people, mainly women and children, in air strikes near the border this week.
“One frontier corps (FC) soldier has been reported dead, and seven others have been injured,” a senior security source at the border told AFP, adding clashes took place in at least two locations in Pakistan’s border district of Kurram.
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The Afghan defense ministry said on X that “several points” across the border with Pakistan “where the attacks in Afghanistan were organized… were targeted in retaliation”.
A provincial official in Khost told AFP the clashes in the early hours of Saturday forced residents to flee the area, but that there were no reports of casualties among Afghan forces. The strikes were the latest spike in hostilities on the frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan, with border tensions between the two countries escalating since the Taliban seized power in 2021.
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