In Kabul, the Afghan Defense Ministry condemned the airstrikes by Pakistan, saying the bombing targeted civilians, including women and children. It said that most of the victims were refugees from the Waziristan region.
| Photo Credit: X/@MoDAfghanistan2

Pakistan in rare airstrikes targeted multiple suspected hideouts of the Pakistani Taliban inside neighboring Afghanistan on Tuesday (December 24, 2024), dismantling a training facility and killing some insurgents, four security officials said.

“The strikes were carried out in a mountainous area in Paktika province bordering Pakistan,” said the officials. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media on the record. It was unclear whether the jets went deep inside Afghanistan, and how the strikes were launched.

No spokesman for Pakistan’s military was immediately available to share further details. But it was the second such attack on alleged hideouts of the Pakistani Taliban since March, when Pakistan said intelligence-based strikes took place in the border regions inside Afghanistan.

In Kabul, the Afghan Defense Ministry condemned the airstrikes by Pakistan, saying the bombing targeted civilians, including women and children. It said that most of the victims were refugees from the Waziristan region.

“The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan considers this a brutal act against all international principles and blatant aggression and strongly condemns it,” the Ministry said.

Local residents said at least eight people, including women and children, were killed in the airstrikes by Pakistan. They said the death toll from the strikes may rise.

In a post on the X platform, the Afghan Defense Ministry said the Pakistani side should know that such unilateral measures are not a solution to any problem.

“The Islamic Emirate will not leave this cowardly act unanswered but rather considers the defense of its territory and territory to be its inalienable right,” it said.

The strikes came hours after Mohammad Sadiq, Pakistan’s special representative for Afghanistan, traveled to Kabul to discuss a range of issues, including how to enhance bilateral trade, and improve ties.

Mr. Sadiq during the visit met with Sirajuddin Haqqani, Afghanistan’s acting interior minister, to offer his condolences over the Dec. 11 killing of his uncle Khalil Haqqani. He was the minister for refugees and repatriation who died in a suicide bombing that was claimed by a regional affiliate of the Islamic State group.

Mr. Sadiq in a post on X said he also met with Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi and he “held wide ranging discussions. Agreed to work together to further strengthen bilateral cooperation as well as for peace and progress in the region.”

A delegation of the pro-Taliban Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam also visited Kabul on Tuesday (December 24, 2024) to convey condolences over the killing of Haqqani’s uncle.

Editorial: Blowback | On Pakistan, Afghanistan and insurgency

Islamabad often claims that the Pakistani Taliban use Afghan soil to launch attacks in Pakistan, a charge Kabul has denied.

Syed Muhammad Ali, an Islamabad-based security expert, said Tuesday’s (December 24, 2024) airstrike “represents a clear and blunt warning to Pakistani Taliban that Pakistan will use all the available means against the terrorist outfit both inside and outside its borders.”

“However, it is not an indiscriminate use of force and due care was taken by Pakistan in ensuring that only the terrorist bases were hit and no civilian loss of life and property took place,” he said.

The Afghan Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021 and the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan has emboldened the Pakistani Taliban, known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, whose leaders and fighters are hiding in Afghanistan.

The TTP has stepped up attacks on Pakistani soldiers and police since November 2022, when it unilaterally ended a cease-fire with the government after the failure of months of talks hosted by Afghanistan’s government in Kabul. The TTP in recent months has killed and wounded dozens of soldiers in attacks inside the country.

Image used for representation purposes.
| Photo Credit: AFP

In Syria, 37 militants affiliated with the extremist Islamic State group and an al-Qaeda-linked group were killed in two strikes, the United States military said Sunday (September 29, 2024). Two of the dead were senior militants, it said.

U.S. Central Command said it struck northwestern Syria on Tuesday (September 24, 2024), targeting a senior militant from the al-Qaeda-linked Hurras al-Deen group and eight others. They say he was responsible for overseeing military operations.

Also Read:U.S. troops attacked in Syria, no initial reports of injuries, official says

They also announced a strike from earlier this month on Sept. 16, where they conducted a “large-scale airstrike” on an Islamic State training camp in a remote undisclosed location in central Syria. That attack killed 28 militants, including “at least four Syrian leaders.”

“The airstrike will disrupt ISIS’ capability to conduct operations against U.S. interests, as well as our allies and partners,” the statement read.

There are some 900 U.S. forces in Syria, along with an undisclosed number of contractors, mostly trying to prevent any comeback by the extremist Islamic State group, which swept through Iraq and Syria in 2014, taking control of large swaths of territory.

U.S. forces advise and assist their key allies in northeastern Syria, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, located not far from strategic areas where Iran-backed militant groups are present, including a key border crossing with Iraq.

As the world’s attention focuses on the deadly war in Gaza, less than 80 miles away scores of Palestinian teens have been killed, shot, and arrested in the West Bank, where the Israeli military has waged a monthslong crackdown.

More than 150 teens and children 17 or younger have been killed in the embattled territory since Hamas’ brutal attack on communities in southern Israel set off the war last October. Most died in nearly daily raids by the Israeli army that Amnesty International says have used disproportionate and unlawful force.

Amjad Hamadneh lost son Mahmoud when the 15-year-old’s school dismissed students at the start of a May raid.

“He didn’t do anything. He didn’t make a single mistake,” says Amjad Hamadneh, whose son, a buzz-cut devotee of computer games, was one of two teens killed that morning by a sniper.

Also Read: Indian-origin Israeli soldier killed amid escalating tensions in West Bank

“If he’d been a freedom fighter or was carrying a weapon, I would not be so emotional,” says his father, an unemployed construction worker. “But he was taken just as easily as water going down your throat. He only had his books and a pencil case.”

It is clear from statements by the Israeli military, insurgents and families in the West Bank that a number of the Palestinian teens killed in recent months were members of militant groups.

Many others were killed during protests or when they or someone nearby threw rocks or homemade explosives at military vehicles. Still others appear to have been random targets. Taken together, the killings raise troubling questions about the devaluation of young lives in pursuit of security and autonomy.

The Israeli army said in a statement to The Associated Press that it has stepped up raids since Oct. 7 to apprehend militants suspected of carrying out attacks in the West Bank and that “the absolute majority of those killed during this period were armed or involved in terrorist activities at the time of the incident.”

On the June afternoon that 17-year-old Issa Jallad was killed, video from a neighbor’s security camera shows, he was on a friend’s motorbike with an Israeli armored vehicle in close pursuit. Days later, a poster outside his family’s home in Jenin showed him cradling an assault rifle and declared him a holy warrior.

But the grainy tape, reviewed by AP days after the raid, and others from nearby cameras do not explain where he fit in the conflict. The Israeli army said that its soldiers had spotted two militants handling a powerful explosive device. When the pair tried to flee, troops opened fire and “neutralized them.”

But an Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, says its review of multiple security camera videos showed Jallad and his friend posed no threat.

“We all expected to be in this situation,” said the teen’s brother, Mousa Jallad. “It could happen to any of us.”

Jenin’s refugee camp has long been notorious as a hotbed of Palestinian militancy, raided repeatedly by Israeli forces who have occupied the West Bank since seizing control in their 1967 war with neighboring Arab States.

The embattled territory was already seeing deadly clashes before the war began. But Israeli forces, which police about 3 million Palestinians while assigned to protect 500,000 Jewish settlers, has significantly stepped up raids in the months since.

Youths represent almost a quarter of the nearly 700 Palestinians slain in the West Bank since the war began, the most since the violent uprising known as the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. More than 20 Israeli civilians and soldiers have been killed in the territory since October.

A military spokesman said the Israeli army makes great efforts to avoid harming civilians during raids and “does not target civilians, period.” He said human rights groups focus on a few outlier cases.

Military operations in the West Bank are fraught because forces are pursuing militants, many in their teens, who often hide among the civilian population, said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani.

“In many cases many of them are 15, 16 years old who are not wearing uniforms and might surprise you with a gun, with a knife,” he said.

Critics say the crackdown is shaped by retribution, not only military strategy.

When sirens erupted at the start of the May raid, Amjad Hamadneh says, he called Mahmoud on his cellphone and was relieved to hear that the brothers had reached their school. But then Mahmoud’s twin brother, Ahmed, called back to say that the principal had dismissed classes. As students poured into the street, the brothers were separated in the chaos.

Four bullets hit Mr. Mahmoud as he fled, and another pierced his skull. He was the third student from his school killed in a raid since the war began.

A former classmate, Osama Hajir, who had dropped out of school to work, was also killed, along with a teacher from a nearby school and a doctor from the hospital down the street.

“Now when I hear the sound of sirens I go to my room and stay there,” says Karam Miazneh, another classmate, who was shot during the raid but survived. “I’m still in fear that they will come to shoot me and kill me.”

Immediately after the May raid, a spokesman for the army said it had carried out the operation with Israeli border police and the country’s internal security agency, destroying an explosive device laboratory and other structures used by militants. But police recently declined to comment, and three weeks after the AP asked the military to answer questions about the May raid, an army spokesman said he was unable to comment until he could confer with police.

When Amjad Hamadneh heard his son had been wounded, he sped through Jenin’s twisting streets, drawing gunfire as he neared the hospital. But Mahmoud was already gone.

Nearby, Osama’s father, Muhamad, broke down as he leaned over his son’s body. Months earlier he’d snapped a photo of the smiling teen beside graffiti touting Jenin as “the factory of men,” tirelessly cranking out fighters in the resistance against Israel. Now, he pressed that same, still-smooth face between his hands.

“Oh, my son. Oh, my son,” he sobbed. “My beautiful son.”

Since Mahmoud Hamadneh was killed, his siblings ask frequently to visit his grave. His younger sister now sleeps in his bed so her surviving brother, Ahmed, will not be in the room alone.

“I feel like I cannot breathe. We used to do everything together,” Ahmed says. His father listens closely, despairing later that such grief could drive the teen into militancy. If the risk is so clear to a Palestinian father, he says, why don’t Israeli soldiers see it?

“They think that if they kill us that people will be afraid and not do anything,” he says. “But when the Israelis kill someone, 10 fighters will be created in his place.”