Taliban police command in Nangarhar said Monday that five bodies remained missing more than 24 hours after Pakistani airstrikes struck Behsud district in Nangarhar province.
In a statement, the Taliban police command said 18 civilians were killed and eight others wounded in the overnight strikes. Thirteen bodies had been recovered from the rubble and buried after funeral prayers, the statement said, while five victims were still unaccounted for.
According to the statement, five of the wounded were in Behsud district, two in Khogyani district and one child in Mohmand Dara district.
Pakistani fighter jets carried out the strikes around midnight on Feb. 21, targeting areas in Khogyani, Ghani Khil and Behsud districts of Nangarhar Province, as well as Barmal district in neighboring Paktika province.
The Taliban’s Defense Ministry has condemned the strikes and said it would deliver a “calculated response at an appropriate time.” In a statement, the ministry accused Pakistan of targeting civilian and religious sites and described the attacks as repeated violations that would not conceal what it called Pakistan’s internal security failures.
Pakistani officials have offered a sharply different account, saying the airstrikes targeted hideouts of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the ISKP, and claiming that nearly 70 militants were killed.
Taliban authorities have rejected that assertion, describing the strikes as an attack on civilians and saying that women and children were among the dead.
Pakistan’s Ministry of Information has said the operation was retaliatory, carried out in response to recent suicide and car bomb attacks inside Pakistan, including assaults on a Shiite mosque in Islamabad and attacks in Bajaur and Bannu during Ramadan.
In a separate statement, Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, reiterated that they would not allow anyone to use Afghanistan’s territory against other countries, saying the message had been conveyed “firmly” to TTP and other groups.
