The attack came just days after the Taliban pledged to retaliate for Pakistan’s airstrikes in Afghanistan.
Afghan Taliban forces have targeted “multiple points” in neighboring Pakistan, the country’s defense ministry said, days after Pakistani aircraft carried out aerial bombings inside the country.
A Pentagon statement on Saturday did not directly specify that Pakistan had been attacked, but said the attack was carried out across a “hypothetical line.” It is an expression used by Afghan authorities to refer to the country’s long-disputed border with Pakistan. .
“Several points across the imaginary line, which serve as hubs and hideouts for malign elements and their supporters who organized and orchestrated attacks in Afghanistan, have been targeted for reprisals in the south-eastern direction of the country,” the ministry said.
Asked whether the statement referred to Pakistan, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Enayatullah Kowarazmi said: “We cannot confirm the territory because we do not consider it to be Pakistan’s territory, but it was on the other side of an imaginary line.”
Afghanistan has for decades rejected the border known as the Durand Line, drawn by British colonial authorities in the 19th century through the mountainous, lawless tribal lands between present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan.
No details were provided on casualties or specific targeted areas. Spokespeople for the Pakistan Army’s Public Relations Department and the Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Meanwhile, a security source told AFP on Saturday that at least one Pakistani paramilitary soldier was killed and seven others wounded in a cross-border gunfight with Afghan forces.
Sporadic clashes involving heavy weapons broke out overnight on the border between Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and Afghanistan’s Khost province, officials from both countries said.
The incident comes after Afghan Taliban authorities accused Pakistan of killing 46 people, mainly women and children, in airstrikes near the border this week.
Islamabad said it had targeted fighters’ hideouts along the border, and Afghan authorities warned Wednesday they would retaliate.
The neighboring country has strained relations with Pakistan and has said several attacks on its territory have been launched from Afghan soil, a charge denied by the Afghan Taliban.
Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which shares a common ideology with Afghanistan, last week claimed to have raided an army outpost near the Afghan border, in an encounter Pakistan said killed 16 of its soldiers.
“We want good relations with them (Afghanistan), but the TTP must stop killing our innocent people,” Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in a cabinet address on Friday.
“This is our red line.”
