Pakistan claims 300 Taliban killed in clashes
Reacting to the crisis, Donald Trump said he shares warm ties with Pakistan, praising PM Shehbaz Sharif and General Asim Munir.
The sharp crack of thunder, rolling down from the mountains, is a sound Razaullah knows well. It signals the arrival of spring rains in the Spin Ghar range. But on this Friday evening, the sound that splits the air over his village in Nangarhar province is no thunder. It is the roar of jet engines, followed by the earth-shattering detonations of bombs. For Razaullah, a 58-year-old farmer, the sky has become a source of terror, not sustenance.
“We ran into the cellar, the women and children were screaming,” he says, his voice a dry rasp over a poor phone line. The Pakistani air force was conducting what Islamabad called ‘Operation Ghazab lil Haq’—the Wrath of the Truth—striking what they said were 22 military targets across Afghanistan. For Razaullah, the ‘truth’ is far simpler: his family is caught in a vice between two angry neighbors.
Just a day earlier, on Thursday night, the flashpoint had been a border post, where Afghan forces allegedly retaliated against Pakistani strikes. By Friday, the conflict was no longer a border skirmish. Pakistani jets had hit the outskirts of Kabul, Jalalabad, and Khost. The noise in the capital sent panicked residents scattering for cover, a grim echo of the 1990s civil war that many had hoped was a relic of the past.
In Islamabad, the rhetoric was just as explosive as the bombs. Defence Minister Khawaja Asif stood before the National Assembly, his voice ringing with defiance. “We are at open war,” he declared. “We did not start this, but we will finish it.” The house was informed of a grim toll: at least 12 Pakistani soldiers killed in the initial cross-border attack on their posts, and a staggering 274 “Taliban officials and militants” eliminated in the retaliatory strikes.
By Saturday morning, the numbers had climbed. Information Minister Attaullah Tarar, in a late-night press conference, provided a chillingly precise summary of the military operation. He spoke not of vague victories, but of specific destruction: 89 enemy posts destroyed, 18 captured. He detailed 135 tanks and armoured vehicles turned to burning hulks on the Afghan landscape. “Around 297 combatants of the Afghan Taliban regime have been killed, and over 450 injured,” he stated, his tone clinical. “The air force effectively targeted 29 locations.”
But war is never just a grid of coordinates or a tally of casualties. It is the small, human moments of terror.
In a hospital in Peshawar, a young Pakistani soldier lies in a bed, his leg heavily bandaged. He was at the border post when the attack came on Thursday night. “It was dark, and suddenly there was fire from everywhere,” he whispers, asking not to be named. “We lost friends. Men I had tea with an hour before were gone.” His war is one of survival, not politics.
Across the border, in a village near Khost, a young Afghan woman named Laila sifts through the rubble of what was her uncle’s home. The strike hit a building the Pakistani military claims was a militant hideout. For Laila, it was where her cousins lived. “They tell us we are at war with Pakistan,” she says, clutching a piece of a shattered teapot—a remnant of a life now destroyed. “But my cousins were not soldiers. They were boys who dreamed of going to university. Is that what victory looks like?”
The Taliban-led government in Kabul, which had just spent months consolidating its rule, now faces its most serious external challenge. On Friday evening, a subdued spokesman appeared on state television, not with threats of revenge, but with a plea for “dialogue.” It was a stark contrast to the fiery speeches of the past. The weight of the 274 dead—a figure they have not confirmed—hung heavy in the air.
As Saturday dawns, the silence is more terrifying than the bombs. It is the silence of markets that remain shuttered, of schools where children are kept home. It is the silence of families waiting for news of loved ones who were near the 29 targeted locations. The bravado of “open war” fades against the reality of broken bodies, of farmers like Razaullah who now fear the sky, and of a future where two neighbors, bound by language and history, now seem locked in an embrace of mutual destruction. The only truth left, it seems, is the one that hurts the most: that in war, everyone pays the price, but no one wins.