Gunfire erupted between Afghan and Pakistani border troops on Monday after Taliban authorities closed the country’s busiest crossing with its eastern neighbor, officials said.
Relations between the countries have been tested since the Taliban took over Kabul in August 2021, with Islamabad accusing its neighbor of having armed groups carrying out attacks on its soil.
There have been frequent flare-ups along the mountainous border that separates the country – which the Afghan government does not recognize – including sporadic gunfire and the closure of crossings.
Pakistani officials told AFP that the Torkham crossing, which connects Kabul and Islamabad, was closed on Sunday after Pakistani officials turned away travelers accompanying medical patients.
At 7:30 a.m. Afghan time (0300 GMT) “a clash occurred when Pakistani forces opened fire on Afghan forces”, Afghan official Harfat Muhajir told AFP.
“Afghan forces fired in response, but no one was hurt,” he said.
Mohammad Sediq Khalid, the Torkham commissioner on the Afghan side, said that “the gate has been closed on the orders of Kabul officials after complaints that Pakistan has not kept its promises”.
A Pakistani border security source told AFP that the dispute over travelers being denied entry was due to new requirements for medical officers to carry certain documentation.
The government did not respond to AFP’s request for clarification on the new rules.
The border crossing at Torkham – 177 kilometers (110 miles) from each country’s capital – is a major trade route point, where Afghanistan exports truckloads of coal and receives food and other supplies from Pakistan.
Both countries are in dire economic crisis, with Afghanistan reeling from aid after the end of the US-backed occupation, and Pakistan crippled by a domestic crisis and a foreign exchange crisis that is on the brink of default.
In the year-and-a-half of the Taliban government, Pakistan has witnessed a dramatic uptick in attacks on the ground, especially in the border areas of Afghanistan.
In January, a suicide bomber killed more than 80 police officers at a mosque in the northwestern provincial capital of Peshawar.
On Friday, a suicide bomb squad stormed a police headquarters in the southern port city of Karachi, killing five. Both attacks were linked to the Pakistani Taliban, which has deep ties to the Afghan Taliban.
“I think that the Afghan country should send terrorism,” Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari told the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.
“There is an alphabet soup of terrorist organizations that have and still remain out of Afghanistan.”
Late Sunday, Kabul’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Abdul Qahar Balkhi, said Zardari’s “remarks that terrorist groups operate from Afghanistan… are not true”.
“We advise Pakistan to discuss bilateral issues face-to-face with the Afghan government instead of complaining at international conferences,” he said in a statement.