UN says 42 killed in continued clashes between Afghanistan and Pakistan

United Nations

Sphinx News: Ahmed Ali

As Islamabad and Kabul enter their seventh day of “open war,” UN says 42 Afghans have so far been killed in a conflict with no sign of de-escalation.

On Thursday, February 26th, Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Asif, said on X that his country will have “open war” with Afghanistan after its patience with the Taliban government had “run out.”

Defense Minister Asif added that after a withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces in 2021, leading to the resurgence of the incumbent Taliban authorities, “it was expected that there would be peace in Afghanistan and the Taliban would focus on the interests of the Afghan people and peace in the region.”

Polemical in his appeals to Kabul, Defense Minister Asif insisted that instead, “the Taliban turned Afghanistan into a colony of India,” alleging the current Afghan authorities of harboring “terrorists from all over the world.”

Defense Minister Asif had equally maintained that the Taliban authorities have “deprived their people of basic human rights” while also taking “away the rights that Islam gives to women.”

The renewed clashes have also come after Pakistan shut all major crossings along its roughly 1,600-mile border with Afghanistan in mid-October 2025, amid clashes along its periphery. Eventually agreeing to a ceasefire then, crossings remain closed to trade in what amounts to the longest border shutdown in living memory, according to locals.

Pakistani officials allege that the primary reason for keeping the border closure has been the Afghan Taliban’s purported safeguarding of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (PTT), the Pakistani faction of the Taliban, who Islamabad says have intensified attacks in northwestern Pakistan since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Pakistan equally suggests that Afghanistan has sanctuaries for the separatist Balochistan Liberation Army, who in January of this year claimed responsibility for an attack in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, killing almost 50 people.

Nonetheless, Kabul has repeatedly denied such claims by Pakistan, where most recently, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid made a statement yesterday denouncing Pakistani claims, saying “security challenges inside Pakistan have no connection to Afghanistan,” insisting that instead of blaming Afghanistan for harboring the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, Pakistan must “solve their own issues.”

Now in the new round of protracted conflict, on Thursday, February 26th, Pakistan carried out strikes in Kabul and Kandahar, the base of Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada, as well as in the eastern border region of Paktia. On Friday, February 27th, the Afghan Ministry of Defense said on X that it had launched retaliatory strikes against military targets “in Islamabad and Abbottabad.”

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in a statement Friday that his country would “crush any aggression,” where Pakistan’s information minister, Attaullah Tarar, added in a statement the same day that “297 members of the Taliban had been killed and more than 450 wounded in strikes.”

Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban government, noted that Pakistan has targeted civilians, adding that if Pakistan chooses war, Afghanistan would “choose annihilation.”

“We possess the power to deliver a decisive blow from which they will never recover,” he said.

While hostilities have intensified over the last week, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA)verified that at least 42 civilians have been killed and 104 wounded in Afghanistan in the fighting between Feb. 26 and March 2, 2026.

The United Nations Secretary-General has been vocal about calls for the cessation of hostilities, where yesterday his Spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, told reporters “our humanitarian colleagues tell us that fighting has killed and injured civilians, forced families to flee, and damaged homes and public buildings in several provinces.”

In just the last seven days of conflict, Dujarric noted that nearly 66,000 people have reportedly been displaced across five eastern and southeastern provinces in Afghanistan.

While Dujarric reports today that United Nations aid workers continue to help “people who need humanitarian aid in the south of the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan,” he notes “that access to areas impacted by the clashes remains limited, so casualty reports cannot yet be independently verified.” With equal concern, Dujarric underscored the apprehensive nature of the continued fighting on the daily lives of civilians, where “schools and markets in several border districts remain closed amid continued instability.”

The issue, as reported by the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM), has been compounded by a growing instability of refugee displacement along the Durand border. Following the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops and NATO forces from Afghanistan in 2021, Pakistan has forced the repatriation of Afghan refugees from inside its borders. The IOM called this “one of the largest returnee-related displacement crises globally, with more than five million returnees recorded over the last two years, including 2.6 million last year alone.”

The displacement crisis has undoubtedly resulted in the exacerbation of local services and raging internal instability within the Afghan state, where Dujarric stated today that large-scale returns have “severely strained” border infrastructure, host communities, and eroded “already limited capacity.”