Pakistan closed border crossings with Afghanistan on Sunday after an exchange of fire between security forces on both sides, officials in Islamabad said, marking a fresh escalation in bilateral tensions.
Afghan troops opened fire on Pakistani border posts late Saturday, with the country’s ministry of defence saying this was in retaliation for Pakistani airstrikes in Afghanistan earlier in the week.
Pakistan said that it had responded with gun and artillery fire. Pakistani security officials said that a number of Afghan border posts were destroyed in retaliatory attacks.
The exchange of fire was mostly over on Sunday morning, Pakistani security officials said. But in Pakistan’s Kurram area, intermittent gunfire continued, according to local officials and residents.
Pakistan’s two main border crossings with Afghanistan, at Torkham and Chaman, were closed on Sunday, local officials said.
At least three minor crossings, at Kharlachi, Angoor Adda and Ghulam Khan, were also closed, local officials said.
There was no immediate comment from Kabul on the closing of the border. Afghanistan’s ministry of defence had previously said that their operation had finished at midnight local time.
“There is no kind of threat in any part of Afghanistan’s territory,” the Taliban administration’s spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said Sunday.
Landlocked Afghanistan has a 2,600-km (1,600-mile) long border with Pakistan.
Islamabad accuses the Taliban administration of harbouring militants who attack Pakistan, a charge that Kabul denies.
The Pakistani airstrikes, not officially acknowledged by Islamabad, had targeted the leader of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militant group in Kabul on Thursday, according to a Pakistani security official. It is unclear if he survived.
The TTP has been fighting to overthrow the Islamabad government and replace it with a strict Islamic-led system of governance. It has had a close relationship with the Afghan Taliban.
(With inputs from Reuters)
