ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s Defense Minister Khawaja Asif has confirmed for the first time that the country carried out airstrikes inside Afghanistan during a week-long conflict earlier this month, saying the operations targeted militants of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in Kabul and other cities.

The latest crisis began when two explosions rocked central Kabul and an airstrike hit a market in eastern Afghanistan, days after 11 Pakistani soldiers were killed in a TTP attack. The Afghan government blamed Pakistan for the strikes, saying civilians had been killed — a charge Islamabad neither confirmed nor denied — before Kabul launched retaliatory cross-border raids that killed at least 23 Pakistani soldiers.

Pakistan responded last Wednesday with attacks across the border, including airstrikes in Kabul and Kandahar, Afghanistan’s two largest cities. Hours later, both countries entered an initial 48-hour ceasefire to defuse tensions.

When that truce expired on Friday, Afghanistan said new Pakistani airstrikes killed 17 people, including three Afghan cricketers. Pakistan denied killing civilians and said the operations had targeted militants. Throughout the fighting, the Pakistani military did not confirm air raids, saying only that it had responded to attacks by Afghan forces and allied militants on its border posts.

A new ceasefire was announced Sunday after talks in Doha, bringing respite from the worst flare-up of tensions between the neighbors in years.

“They [TTP] are housed over there, nobody can deny that,” Asif told Arab News in an interview on Monday. “And their leadership is there and that is why we went after them when there were strikes in Kabul last week and a couple of other cities.”

His remarks mark the first public acknowledgment by a senior Pakistani official of cross-border airstrikes that Afghanistan has repeatedly condemned as violations of its sovereignty. Until now, Islamabad had referred only to “counter-terrorism operations” or fighting with Afghan forces and affiliated militants like the TTP near the frontier.

Asif said an understanding was reached in Doha that Türkiye and Qatar would act as guarantors to ensure the TTP no longer used Afghan soil for attacks in Pakistan. The two sides are scheduled to meet again in Istanbul on Oct. 25 for follow-up discussions.

“The mechanism of this arrangement will be decided over there, how to monitor the activities of the TTP in Afghanistan,” Asif said.

Pakistan is grappling with a renewed wave of militancy since 2021, when the Afghan Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan and attacks by the TTP and its affiliates sharply increased. 

Islamabad has been demanding that Kabul rein in militants it says operate from havens in Afghanistan. The government in Afghanistan denies this.