Pakistan says border strikes kill 29 militants near Afghan frontier

Pakistan said it killed 29 militants in an intelligence-based ground operation near Bajaur district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, then followed with strikes along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border on Sunday. The action mixed ground forces with what Pakistani officials described as follow-on strikes on militant hideouts and safe havens in the border region.

Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said on X that the operation answered multiple militant attacks across the country, including a deadly assault on a Pakistan Rangers (Sindh) camp in Karachi that killed three Rangers personnel and wounded four others. That attack gave the border action a wider domestic context, linking frontier violence to pressure points far from the border itself.

The Pakistani account did not fully specify the strike method in its initial description, but it said the targets were suspected militant hideouts and safe havens. Some reporting said weapons and ammunition caches were destroyed in the operation, and later accounts identified a militant commander, Khan Farosh, as among those killed. Reporting also placed the fighting in three border-region locations.

There was no immediate response from Afghanistan in AP-linked reporting. The silence followed a period of already strained Pakistan-Afghanistan relations, with Islamabad repeatedly accusing Afghan territory of giving militants room to operate against Pakistan.

The latest operation came amid a recent surge in militant violence and less than three weeks after Pakistan’s military launched earlier airstrikes on alleged militant hideouts in Afghanistan. By combining a ground push near Bajaur with strikes across the border belt, Pakistan signaled a broader campaign against armed groups that it says are using frontier sanctuaries to move, regroup and attack.