Pakistani war planes continued to bomb targets in Afghanistan on February 27 as fears of all out war between the two rose as they trade strikes on each other in their volatile mountain border region following days of escalating tensions boiled over.
Local sources told RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal that three locations in Afghanistan's Paktika province in the early afternoon on February 27, including a Taliban camp in Bermal district, were targeted by fighter jets.
The strikes followed attacks overnight on Kabul, the first time Islamabad has directly targeted its former allies, that came amid a major escalation in hostilities between Afghanistan's Taliban-led government and Islamabad.
Just hours earlier before the attacks on the capital, Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for Afghanistan's Taliban-led government, said Kabul had launched "a large-scale offensive operation against Pakistani military centers and military installations along the Durand Line," a volatile border that cuts through traditional Pashtun and Baloch tribal territories.
The Taliban's Defense Ministry claimed that 55 Pakistani security personnel had been killed, while two bases and 19 posts were captured across the border by its forces.
Islamabad's troops retaliated, Pakistani officials said, with Mosharraf Zaidi, a spokesman for the Pakistani government, saying a total of 133 Afghan Taliban members are "confirmed killed," and more than 200 others wounded.
"Many more casualties estimated in strikes in Kabul, Paktia and Kandahar military targets," he added.
The claims from both sides could not be independently verified, though a local Kabul resident told RFE/RL that a "huge explosion" rocked the city.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said country's forces were ready to "protect the country's security, sovereignty, and territorial integrity."
"The Pakistani military is determined not to allow the country's peace and security to be compromised under any circumstances," he wrote on X.
Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif accused the Taliban government of turning Afghanistan into a base for global terrorists and "a colony of India."
"After the withdrawal of NATO forces, it was expected that there would be peace in Afghanistan and that the Taliban would focus on the interests of the Afghan people and peace in the region. However, the Taliban turned Afghanistan into a colony of India. They gathered all the terrorists of the world in Afghanistan and began exporting terrorism," he wrote in a post on X.
"Our cup of patience has overflowed. Now it is open war between us and you," he added.
The latest wave of attacks came after Pakistani air strikes four days earlier killed at least 18 people in Afghanistan's Nangarhar and Paktika provinces.
Pakistan said it had launched those strikes on seven militant sites inside Afghanistan in a "retributive response" to recent suicide attacks it said were carried out by Afghan-based extremists. Pakistan claimed the strikes killed as many as 80 militants.
Taliban-run Afghan security structures rejected the claim as "false," while government officials also said they were preparing "an appropriate and calculated response."
Afghanistan denies Pakistan's accusations that it is sheltering the Pakistani Taliban, an offshoot of the Afghan Taliban that appears to operate separately.
Tensions have run high between the two countries since Pakistan conducted air strikes on Kabul in October 2025 and followed up with additional attacks on Afghan territory.
Dozens of soldiers from both sides were killed in artillery clashes and heavy gunfire last year before a cease-fire was agreed through Qatari mediation.
However, several rounds of talks mediated by Qatar and Turkey, aimed at easing the tensions along the border, have failed to bring about a long-term breakthrough.
