FROM AL JAZEERA
Pakistan has launched yet another round of air raids across the border with Afghanistan, with a minister saying 26 Taliban fighters have been killed. However, the Afghan government says the dead included 13 civilians, most of them children.
Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said in a post on X on Wednesday that the military carried out precision strikes along the border, targeting hideouts and safe havens of the Pakistan Taliban, known by the acronym TTP.
Tarar said 26 fighters were killed and four targets destroyed, including a training centre, an ammunition cache, as well as positions linked to TTP commanders Aleem Khan Khushali and Akhtar Muhammad Jani Khel.
He said the operations were carried out in response to a series of recent attacks, including a strike on a post of the paramilitary Federal Constabulary in Musa Dara on June 9, a vehicle-borne suicide attack on a military post in North Waziristan on June 2 and a suicide bombing at a police station in Bannu in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on May 9.
Tarar described the strikes as “precise and calibrated”, based on what he called credible intelligence.
However, Zabihullah Mujahid, chief spokesman for Afghanistan’s Taliban government, said on X that Pakistan’s attacks on the provinces of Kunar, Khost and Paktika had killed 11 children, one woman and an elderly man. He said 14 other women and children were wounded.
The air raids came a day after suspected TTP fighters attacked a security post in the Hasan Khel area of Pakistan’s northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, bordering Afghanistan. The attack triggered an intense gun battle in which six members of the Federal Constabulary were killed and several others wounded, according to Pakistan’s Ministry of Interior.
