PESHAWAR - One civilian was killed and five members of the same family were wounded on Tuesday when ordnance fired from across the border struck a house in the Angoor Adda area of South Waziristan, in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistani security sources said. ARY News reported the same toll under the headline 'One killed, five injured in Afghan Taliban shelling in South Waziristan', citing security sources.
Officials and the Pakistan Army reported a swift counterstrike that destroyed multiple Afghan Taliban border check posts in retaliation, according to reporting summarised by Particle News. The military described its response as ongoing and said troops had been placed on high alert to prevent further cross-border strikes.
Local officials reported widespread anger among residents over the targeting of civilians and said the incident had caused trauma and damage to homes in the area, Particle News reported. The victims were not named in the reports, and Awaaz Punjab does not identify them. No response from the Afghan Taliban authorities in Kabul was reported in the sources checked for this story, and neither side's account could be independently verified.
The exchange is the latest in repeated cross-border violence along the porous Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier. It came a day after Pakistan's foreign ministry rejected allegations by Afghanistan's Taliban administration that Pakistani strikes had killed or injured 1,119 Afghan civilians since early 2022 - a figure an Afghan foreign ministry spokesman gave to CNN - and defended its operations as self-defence against militants based in Afghanistan, AnewZ reported. The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said on October 1 it had recorded more than 1,100 civilian deaths and injuries from cross-border violence in Afghanistan during 2026, according to the same report.
Angoor Adda sits on one of the main crossings of the Durand Line, and each exchange between Pakistani forces and the Afghan Taliban raises the risk of a wider flare-up between Islamabad and Kabul, whose relations have deteriorated over Pakistan's charge that Kabul shelters the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan - a charge the Taliban authorities deny. Whether either side moves to de-escalate after Tuesday's shelling had not been announced in the sources checked.