Pakistan Army Says 30 Militants Killed While Trying To Cross Border From Afghanistan
Pakistan's army killed 30 militants attempting to cross from Afghanistan, days after a suicide bombing killed 16 soldiers in North Waziristan. Violence surges amid rising cross-border tensions.
In a high-stakes confrontation near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the Pakistani military announced on Friday that its forces had eliminated 30 militants attempting to cross over from Afghan territory. The operation comes on the heels of a deadly suicide bombing that killed 16 Pakistani soldiers just days earlier in the same volatile region. According to a statement released by the military, troops displayed “exceptional professionalism and vigilance,” thwarting what could have been another devastating attack. The army praised its personnel for their swift and decisive response, describing the operation as one that averted a "potential catastrophe."
The cross-border tension follows a tragic incident on June 28 in North Waziristan, a district located in Pakistan’s restive Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. In that attack, a suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden vehicle into a military convoy, killing at least 16 soldiers and injuring over two dozen people, including several civilians. “The blast was so powerful it caused the roofs of two nearby houses to collapse, injuring six children,” a police official stationed in the district told AFP. The deadly bombing was claimed by the suicide wing of the Hafiz Gul Bahadur group, a splinter faction of the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), commonly known as the Pakistani Taliban.
#BREAKING Pakistan army says killed 30 militants trying to cross from Afghanistan pic.twitter.com/NL7kbqRjO2
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) July 4, 2025
This latest surge in violence has reignited long-standing tensions between Islamabad and Kabul. Since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021, Pakistan has accused its neighbor of turning a blind eye to militant groups using Afghan soil to launch cross-border attacks — an allegation the Taliban leadership firmly denies. Security analysts say the situation along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier has deteriorated rapidly in recent months.
So far this year, nearly 290 people — most of them security personnel — have been killed in attacks carried out by armed insurgent groups operating in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the southwestern province of Balochistan, according to AFP figures.
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