Blasts heard in Kabul as Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict continues 

Explosions have been heard in the Afghan capital, Kabul, with Taliban forces saying they opened fire at Pakistani aircraft, as the conflict stretched into its fourth consecutive day.

Afghanistan’s Taliban government said its forces deployed anti-aircraft and missile defence systems against Pakistani jets that entered Afghan airspace early on Sunday morning. This included thwarting an attempted Pakistani strike on Bagram, the former US military base north of Kabul that US President Donald Trump expressed interest in reoccupying last year.

Pakistan has not responded to the claim.

Islamabad has declared that the two countries are in “open war”, and on Sunday, its forces were reported to still be holding a 32-square-kilometre (12-mile) area of Afghan territory in the southern Zhob sector, according to two Pakistani security officials.

Afghanistan’s deputy government spokesman, Hamdullah Fitrat, said Pakistani strikes had killed 55 civilians across multiple provinces since fighting intensified on Thursday, according to the Anadolu news agency.

Among them was a woman and a child, who were killed in a drone strike on Nangarhar province, as well as a civilian whose home was hit by mortar fire in Paktia, eastern Afghanistan.

In Kunar province, a young man named Sajid described losing his brother, who had refused to flee. “He said, ‘I will stay and look after the house,'” Sajid told the AFP news agency. “He was martyred near the mosque while trying to leave.”

Al Jazeera has not been able to verify casualty claims from either side.

Despite the Taliban signalling an openness to negotiations, Pakistan has rejected dialogue. “There won’t be any talks. There’s no dialogue. There’s no negotiation,” said Mosharraf Zaidi, the Pakistani prime minister’s spokesman for foreign media, insisting that Islamabad’s sole demand was an end to what it calls Afghanistan-based “terrorism”.

Tensions between the two neighbours have been running high since late Thursday, when Kabul launched “retaliatory operations” along the border after Pakistani air strikes in late February.

The roots of the conflict lie in a long-running and bitter dispute over Pakistan Taliban, known by the acronym TTP, an armed group that Pakistan accuses Kabul of harbouring.

The TTP has dramatically intensified its campaign inside Pakistan, with the last year being the country’s most violent in nearly a decade. Deaths surged by 75 percent from 2024 to 3,413, and overall violent incidents rose by 29 percent, according to the Pakistan Institute for Conflict and Security Studies, an Islamabad-based think tank.

On February 21, a Pakistani air strike targeted what it called TTP hideouts in the Nangarhar and Paktika provinces, along Pakistan’s border. The United Nations said it had credible reports that 13 Afghan civilians were killed.

Kabul calls Pakistan’s actions unprovoked and denies that Afghan soil is used to threaten any neighbouring country.

Militarily, the two sides are deeply mismatched, as Pakistan has vastly superior conventional firepower, aircraft, tanks, and advanced defence systems.

But the Afghan Taliban, hardened by more than two decades of rebel warfare against US-led NATO forces, has deployed drones to strike Pakistani military camps, a cheap and effective tool that is reshaping the battlefield.

International calls for de-escalation are growing, with the European Union, UN, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan all urging restraint.

The group Diplomats Without Borders warned on February 27 that further confrontation risked “broader regional instability” and called on both governments to return to direct dialogue.

Yet, with much of the world’s diplomatic bandwidth consumed by the rapidly escalating US-Israel conflict with Iran, there are fears this war could be left to continue without urgent international attention.

Despite the clashes with Pakistani forces, on Saturday, Afghan government spokesman Abdul Qahar Balkhi took to social media to condemn the attacks on Iran and Iran’s subsequent attacks on countries in the Gulf. He urged all parties to “address their differences through diplomatic means.”

Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a near-identical call for restraint in the Middle East on February 28.

Omar Samad, a former Afghan diplomat, warned that the war conflict involving Iran could distract from efforts to end the fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“Iran and the involvement of the United States and Israel across the board in the Middle East is a much larger, more important, significant event”, Samad said, “and it is taking away bandwidth from anything else happening across the world, including in the neighbourhood of Pakistan, Afghanistan”.