Pakistani airstrikes devastate Afghan civilians

Funeral for civilian victims of Pakistani airstrikes in Khost on June 11. Photo: Mohammad Zaman Nazari.

In the village of Mana, located in Afghanistan’s Khost province near the Pakistani border, men who normally spend their days farming spent the morning of June 10 digging new graves for their murdered relatives and neighbors.

The previous evening, shortly after midnight, Pakistani drones and warplanes razed the neighboring homes of two brothers, Siraj and Babri. Nine members of the same family were killed, most of them women and children.

The houses of the two brothers were next to each other in Mana. Neighbors worked through the night to pull the dead and injured from the rubble. In the two homes, ten other people were injured, several of them in critical condition. The survivors were first rushed to a small district hospital, before being transferred to the larger provincial hospital in Khost.

A doctor at the hospital, who asked to remain anonymous because medical staff were warned not to speak to journalists, told Drop Site that 11 bodies were brought in after the strike, including women, children and men, all civilians. Among the injured survivors were three children.

These are not isolated tragedies: These are the latest episodes in a campaign that Drop Site has been documenting along the border since winter, a campaign in which Pakistan, while presenting itself to Washington and Tehran as an indispensable peacemaker, bombed Afghan villages, hospitals, schools and markets, emptied entire districts along the border and blocked roads until clinics ran out of medicine.

According to conservative United Nations calculations, Pakistani operations had already killed hundreds of Afghan civilians this year before the June 10 strikes. What is played out in the conference rooms of Islamabad as “anti-terrorist operations” appears, from Khost and Paktika, as indiscriminate punishment against Afghans living along the border demarcation line.

As of April 1, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) had verified at least 372 civilian deaths from Pakistani operations in Afghanistan, although the actual death toll in an area largely closed to independent observers is likely higher.

The Mana attack was not the only deadly incident in the area that night. Pakistani jets also struck a series of buildings in neighboring Paktika province. In total, the bombings of Khost and Paktika killed or injured at least 23 civilians in a few hours, according to residents.

The next morning, in Mana, the bodies were washed, wrapped and carried into the open for a mass funeral. At the ceremony, hundreds of people gathered to chant “Allahu Akbar” as they prepared to bury the victims, the majority of whom were children and women.

The crowd was furious. Mourners called on international human rights organizations to open an impartial investigation into the killings and demanded that those responsible be brought to justice.

Noor Badshah Khan, a tribal elder from the region, addressed the crowd and lambasted Pakistan for waging a ruthless campaign against ordinary Afghans.

“When will these crimes stop? When will they stop slaughtering the children of this soil?” he asked.

The Paktika attack killed three other children: Nazam Khan, 10, her younger sister Khadeja and their cousin Mozdalafa.

The three men had spent the evening counting stars and bickering over the number before falling asleep in the open, family members told Drop Site.

The explosion destroyed the house, killed the family’s livestock and threw the children’s father, Sher Mast, about 20 meters into the air. He and his wife survived the attack that claimed the lives of their children, although they were both seriously injured.

A neighbor who reached the rubble in less than half an hour gathered what remained of the three children by the light of a torch. The next day, they were lowered into three small graves dug side by side, the eldest’s shroud still wet with blood.

Along this part of the border, the drones that fly over day and night have their own nickname. Villagers call them “bangana,” the Pashtun word for a buzzing wasp. For the children of Khost and Paktika, this sound has become part of their daily lives.

War has become a tragic constant of life in the region. The same valleys were bombed during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and then during the two decades of war and occupation led by the United States. Now the hostile planes flying over them are operated by a Pakistani regime with close ties to Washington.

Drones inflict a special type of psychological torment on residents of the region. Residents describe a feeling of helplessness: They can hear the machines, but never reach them, and their own government has no capacity to stop them.

Grief over recent attacks in Khost and Paktika has eroded the region’s long-standing cultural traditions. According to custom, after a death, neighbors cook for a bereaved family for three days. This time, according to the villagers, no one could bring themselves to eat after the massacres.

Without a responsive government or international media attention, many Afghans have taken to social media in a desperate attempt to inform the world of their plight and demand accountability.

Afghans in Khost prepare to bury victims of Pakistani strikes on June 10. Photo: Mohammad Zaman Nazari.

In the hours following the strikes, Afghans filled online platforms with calls for the United Nations and the international community to hold the Pakistani military to account, describing the bombing as a direct attack on Afghanistan’s national sovereignty.

While Pakistan has justified its attacks as a response to terrorist attacks on its soil blamed on the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), locals say these justifications are an attempt to mask the true motivations for the ongoing attacks in a long-disputed border area between the two countries.

“This is indeed a continuation of the war against terrorism in Afghanistan,” said Mohammad Zaher, a resident of Khost. “It was clear that this would not stop after the reappearance of the first drones after the American withdrawal. »

Islamabad tells a different story about its attacks. Pakistan’s Information Minister Attaullah Tarar called the operation “precise and calibrated”, saying the air force destroyed four militant targets and killed 26 TTP fighters. The discrepancy between the reported casualties, with Kabul recording 13 civilian deaths, and Pakistan claiming double that number killed, all terrorists, has now become a familiar feature of the information warfare that accompanies armed conflict.

Local residents who spoke to Drop Site rejected the Pakistani version of the strikes, saying none of the victims had links to armed groups.

Pakistan’s escalation of attacks on its neighbor comes as the country adopts a new international identity as a peacemaker mediating the war between Iran and the United States. Field Marshal Asim Munir, Pakistan’s army chief of staff, has become a close ally of President Donald Trump, who has praised Munir as an “exceptional human being” while ignoring his brutal crackdown on dissent inside Pakistan, as well as his escalation of killings of Afghan civilians.

Trump’s praise of Munir as a mediator stands in stark contrast to the brutal reality of Pakistan’s military campaign against its neighbor.

Islamabad declared “open war” against the Afghan Taliban government in February after a suicide attack on a Shiite mosque in Islamabad blamed on the TTP. Since then, Pakistani airstrikes have shifted from rural border areas to attacks on Kabul itself, including the bombing of a rehabilitation clinic in the heart of the capital that killed hundreds in March.

Residents described attacks on local roads and transport infrastructure as a de facto siege, depriving markets and clinics of basic goods like flour and medicine. Residents of the region told Drop Site that they believed the aim of Pakistan’s operations was to depopulate the border and create a buffer zone, with the terror caused by recent bombings in Khost and Paktika helping to achieve the same goal by encouraging flight from the region.

While the new phase of the war between the two neighbors has been justified as a counter-terrorism operation, Afghans note that Pakistan’s animosity towards Kabul has continued under many different regimes over the decades – with nationalist, communist, democratic and Islamist governments all targeted by Islamabad in a bid to ensure its neighbor remains too weak and unstable to assert its own territorial claims.

“It’s a never-ending cycle and you don’t need an educated analyst, military expert or historian to understand it,” said Ali Khan, a Kabul resident and former soldier in the U.S.-backed Afghan army that collapsed in 2021. “You just need to talk to people who have been affected by these policies for decades. »

The confrontation between Pakistan and the Afghans is increasingly taking place on both sides of the border. After years of hosting a large refugee population, hundreds of thousands of Afghans have recently been deported from Pakistan to Afghanistan, placing them in many cases in the same villages and border provinces that are currently under attack by Pakistani drones and aircraft.

“Afghans are a population that must be managed, exploited and eliminated, never quite a population,” Ali Khan said. Due to his own affiliation with the former Afghan Republic Army, he himself fled to Pakistan and then Iran over the past four years, before finally returning home to Kabul earlier this year.

“It is better for me to hide in Kabul, see my family and live with some dignity than to be beaten and expelled by our neighboring countries,” he said.

Afghanistan-based journalists Fazelminallah Qazizai and Mohammad Zaman Nazari contributed to this report.

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