As Taliban forces hit back at Islamabad over alleged air raids inside Afghan territory, waves of refugees returning from Pakistan are struggling to rebuild their lives in Taliban-run Afghanistan.

By the end of the meeting, Field Marshal Munir reportedly left his commanders with a grim warning: the army must “regain control and restore strategic depth before it’s too late.”

The Taliban government has confirmed that it attacked Pakistani troops in multiple mountainous locations on the northern border. Casualties are not yet clear in what the Taliban called "retaliatory operations", after it said Pakistan violated Afghan airspace and bombed a market inside its border on Thursday.

In a major setback following coordinated attacks by Afghan Taliban fighters on military posts along the Durand Line, Pakistan’s army chief, General Asim Munir, held an emergency meeting at GHQ Rawalpindi and demanded an intelligence report.

A full-blown conflict between Afghanistan’s Taliban and neighboring Pakistan seemed unthinkable when the hard-line Islamist group, a longtime ally of Islamabad, seized power in 2021 as international troops withdrew and the government their supported collapsed.

Pakistan uprooted the Taliban with U.S. help in the 2010s. But the insurgency has resurfaced with assistance from the Afghan Taliban.

A suspected attack by militants on a polio vaccine team in northwestern Pakistan has left one police guard dead

The Taliban government accuses Pakistan of bombing Kabul and a market in eastern Afghanistan. A blast occurred Thursday night in Kabul near key government buildings.

Taliban fighters allegedly hung the trousers and rifles of captured Pakistani soldiers in city centres following recent clashes. A purported image has gone viral on social media, showing the pants and weapons of Pakistani soldiers displayed in an Afghan city.

What began as airstrikes by Pakistan on Afghan territory has spiralled into a full-blown military clash, exposing the collapse of Islamabad’s once-vaunted control over the Taliban.