Pakistan–Afghan Border Strikes

• On 28 July the UN mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said it had documented 399 civilian casualties between 1 April and 30 June, made up of 57 people killed and 342 injured. It attributed all of them to Pakistani security forces. The count includes 40 women, six of them killed, and 112 children, 26 of them killed.
• UNAMA named the late-June airstrikes on Paktia, Paktika and Kunar as the deadliest episode of the quarter. Two strikes on a residential building in Paktia's Chamkani district accounted for 22 dead and more than 185 injured; six more died in Paktika, most of them women and girls. Earlier, cross-border shelling in Kunar on 27-29 April caused 99 casualties, 8 killed and 91 injured, and hit the campus of Sayed Jamaluddin Afghani University.
• Across a longer window, 1 October 2025 to 30 June 2026, UNAMA counted 499 civilians killed and 1,216 injured.
• On 31 July Pakistan's military spokesman, Lieutenant General Ahmad Sharif Chaudhry, rejected the report as "baseless," said those killed were militants, and called the human-rights reporting "double standards."
• The Afghan rights group Rawadari separately says that over 18 months at least 472 civilians were killed and 715 injured in Pakistani attacks, with more than 29,000 families displaced across 50 recorded incidents. That figure comes from one Afghan organisation and is not independently confirmed.
• The accusation now runs both ways. On 9 August Pakistan's information ministry called a Taliban claim that weapons are smuggled from Pakistan into Afghanistan "frivolous, baseless and contrary to established facts," pointing to the roughly $7.2 billion in equipment left behind by US and coalition forces.
• The deportations continue. On 10 July Khyber Pakhtunkhwa said it was ready for what it called the final phase, moving about 20,000 Afghan nationals from Peshawar through a transit centre at Nasir Bagh to the Torkham crossing. Separately, 325 Afghans released from Pakistani detention returned home on 6 August, 156 through Torkham and 169 through Spin Boldak.
• No new airstrike exchange has been reported since 1 July. What the summer produced instead was a documented casualty count, a formal Pakistani rejection of it, and no restart of talks. The parallel fighting inside Pakistan is covered in [Militant Violence Spikes in Pakistan](/topics/militancy-surge).
• The late-June escalation, for the record. Pakistani airstrikes hit three eastern Afghan provinces. The Afghan Taliban said 36 civilians were killed and about 160 wounded; Pakistan said a ground operation and strikes killed 29 fighters of the Pakistani Taliban, the group it calls "Fitna al-Khawarij." The Taliban called the raids a "cowardly act of aggression." UN Secretary-General António Guterres said he was "deeply concerned," and Russia urged both sides to use diplomacy. UNAMA dates the deadliest strikes to 28 June; Pakistani and wire reports carried them as 29 June.
• On 1 July Pakistan's military said it downed four drones launched from Afghanistan into Balochistan, accusing the Taliban of "patronization and support of terrorist outfits." Afghanistan's defence ministry said its air force had struck what it called Islamic State centres in Pishin district and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. A suspected drone strike on the outskirts of Peshawar killed a woman and injured six. The conflict monitor ACLED has recorded at least a dozen drone launches into Pakistani territory since February 2026.
• The mediation track has stalled repeatedly. A Qatari and Turkish-brokered ceasefire held briefly in October 2025, follow-up talks in Istanbul collapsed twice in November, and Chinese-mediated talks in Urumqi in April 2026 bought roughly two months of quiet before June.

Both sides agree the strikes happened. The fight is over who died and what it was. What changed over the summer is that the argument is no longer two governments contradicting each other in a vacuum. The UN mission in Afghanistan has published a quarterly count with dates, districts and a breakdown by women and children, and Pakistan has answered by rejecting the whole document rather than contesting any part of it. That is a different kind of dispute, and it is worth naming plainly: a government can call a report baseless without ever saying which of the 57 named deaths it disputes. Pakistan's framing still wins the domestic room, where the raids read as precise counter-terror and the drones over Balochistan as proof the Taliban shelter the militants hitting Pakistani cities. The quieter fact is that no airstrike exchange has been reported since 1 July, which means the loud story of the past six weeks is not new violence but a paper fight over old violence. What the loud coverage steps past is the deportation track running alongside it, with about 20,000 people being moved out of Peshawar in what the province calls a final phase, and the mediation record, in which Qatar, Turkey and China have each brokered a pause that lasted weeks. What each government gains from its own version still goes unexamined. The militant label lets Islamabad strike inside a neighbour without owning civilian deaths; the aggression label lets Kabul answer the safe-haven charge without addressing who launches attacks from its soil. The fighting inside Pakistan that all of this is nominally about is tracked separately in [Militant Violence Spikes in Pakistan](/topics/militancy-surge).