Pakistan says airstrikes killed 29 militants after Karachi attack

Pakistan said its security forces killed 29 fighters in intelligence-based ground operations and airstrikes along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border on Sunday, a day after a bomb-and-gun assault on a Sindh Rangers facility in Karachi killed three personnel and wounded four. Officials said the latest raids were aimed at hideouts and safe havens used by the Pakistan Taliban, known as TTP, and that three targets in Paktia, Paktika and Kunar were destroyed.

Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said the operation was carried out in response to recent terrorist attacks against innocent people. He tied the border strikes to the Karachi attack and to what he described as a surge in militant violence across Pakistan. Pakistani authorities also said one of the wounded attackers in Karachi was an Afghan national. Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, a breakaway faction of the TTP, claimed responsibility for the Karachi assault.

The strikes carried a heavier cost on the Afghan side of the frontier, where Taliban authorities said Pakistani airstrikes in eastern Afghanistan killed civilians. Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban government spokesman in Kabul, condemned the attack as a humanitarian crime and an act of aggression. Local accounts in Afghanistan said residential areas were hit in Khost, Paktika and Kunar, underscoring how quickly the fighting has reached populated border communities already living under the threat of repeated raids and retaliation.

The latest exchange comes less than three weeks after Pakistan’s military launched earlier strikes inside Afghanistan on June 10, 2026, and after Afghanistan carried out a strike inside Pakistan on June 19, 2026. Pakistan has long accused the TTP of using Afghan soil to plan attacks inside Pakistan, while the Afghan Taliban, which returned to power in 2021, remain separate from the TTP but allied with it. The back-and-forth has turned the border into a widening security front, with Islamabad increasingly using intelligence-led ground action and air power beyond its frontier and Kabul answering with its own cross-border strikes.