• Pakistani diplomat handed strong protest note; special envoy continues meetings with top Afghan Taliban officials
• Banned groups attempt to ‘debunk’ claims of militant casualties, post videos purportedly showing ‘slain men’ alive and well

PESHAWAR: The Afghan Taliban regime on Wednesday lodged a strong protest with Islamabad over an air strike, carried out by Pakistani jets near the Pak-Afghan border the previous day, warning that Afghanistan’s territorial sovereignty was the red line for the ruling Islamic Emirate, Kabul’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.

“The foreign ministry of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan summoned Pakistan’s charge d’affaires in the afternoon and handed a strong protest note over Pakistani military planes bombings in district Bermal in Paktika province near the border just across Durand Line,” the statement said.

It condemned “aggression by Pakistani military” at a time when an emissary of the country’s government was in Kabul for talks with officials of the Afghan government. The killing of common citizens by “certain quarters” was an attempt to create distrust in relations between the two countries, it added.

The statement from the foreign ministry followed a relatively stronger-worded statement from its defence ministry, which claimed that most of those killed and wounded included common citizens, as well as refugees from Pakistan’s Waziristan tribal region.

Pakistan’s Foreign Office or the military’s media arm, Inter Services Public Relations, has so far offered no formal word on the air strikes in Paktika, which sits across the Durand Line from the volatile tribal districts of North and South Waziristan.

However, the AFP news agency quoted a senior Pakistan security official as saying that the strikes were launched against “terrorist hideouts” using jets and drones, claiming that at least 20 militants were killed in the attack.

The strikes came the day Pakistan’s special emissary, Ambassador Muhammad Sadiq and his team, met interim Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani and Foreign Minister Muhammad Muttaqi to discuss bilateral matters, including Pakistan’s security concerns regarding terror groups operating from Afghan soil.

The visit, which came after a year-long hiatus, was widely seen an attempt to revive diplomatic engagements bet­ween the two countries that are at odds over the outlawed Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), whose presence in Afghanistan has been a bone of contention between Islamabad and Kabul.

In a positive sign that the bombing incident did not impact Ambassador Sadiq’s visit to Kabul, the visiting Pakistani diplomat met Deputy Prime minister Maulavi Muhammad Kabir and Commerce Minister Nooruddin Azizi on Wednesday to discuss bilateral issues involving peace, security, economy and trade between the two countries.

The latest escalation followed Saturday’s deadly attack by TTP in South Waziristan, which resulted in the martyrdom of 16 men of the paramilitary force, Frontier Corps. This was immediately followed by a visit to South Waziristan’s regional headquarters, Wana, by Chief of Army Staff Gen Asim Munir, on Sunday.

According to AFP, a Pakistani security official said the recent attack in South Waziristan “was a significant trigger” for Tuesday’s strikes, “but not the only one”.

Reports quoting Pakistani security sources claimed the airstrikes targeted camps run by Pakistani militant commanders and a centre of the TTP’s media arm, Umar Media. They claimed that the attack left more than 60 members of the banned outfit dead or injured.

Although the Afghan Taliban acknowledged that some of the dead included “refugees from Waziristan”, which is being seen in Pakistan as a euphemism for the TTP militants, they insisted that the victims included “innocent women and children”.

Meanwhile, TTP-linked social media accounts tried to debunk the claims of Pakistani security officials altogether, maintaining that all their commanders as well as the head of its media cell were alive and unharmed.

Umar Media even posted a video of its head, Chaudry Muneebur Rehman Jatt, to prove that he was still alive. However, the authenticity or currency of these posts could not be independently verified.

Published in Dawn, December 26th, 2024