⚡️🇵🇰 Pakistan has launched AIRSTRIKES on 10 locations across Afghanistan, targeting terrorist hideouts and support infrastructure, including drone launch and storage sites linked to attacks on Pakistan.

The strikes targeted facilities in areas under Afghan Taliban control. pic.twitter.com/k2E3G80i97

— Zard si Gana (@ZardSi) September 24, 2026

'Precise, Calibrated and Proportionate'

In a statement posted on X, Tarar said the strikes were conducted under Operation Ghazab lil-Haq and described them as "deliberate, precise, calibrated and proportionate." He stated that the targets were limited to militant infrastructure directly tied to cross-border attacks.

The strikes targeted facilities in areas under Afghan Taliban control, including locations in Kandahar, Paktia, and Khost provinces. According to security sources, the operation destroyed 10 sites comprising terrorist hideouts, drone launch pads, and storage facilities.

Response to Drone Incursions

The airstrikes followed the interception of multiple drones launched from Afghan territory into Pakistani airspace on September 23. According to security officials, Pakistan's air defences detected, tracked, and neutralised eight drones — four near the Torkham border and four in the hills near Kohat.

Minister Tarar stated that the strikes were a direct response to these incursions and warned that "any further provocation will invite a resolute response."

Taliban Denies Responsibility, Claims Civilian Casualties

Afghan Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid denied that the group launched drones toward Pakistan and condemned the strikes as a "flagrant violation" of Afghan sovereignty. He claimed that four civilians were killed in the bombing across Kandahar, Paktia, and Khost provinces, and vowed an "appropriate response."

A resident of Kandahar city told AFP he heard the sound of a jet followed by a large explosion and saw fire in the city centre. Kandahar is the spiritual heartland of the Taliban movement and the seat of its supreme leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada.

Second Strike in Four Days

This marks the second Pakistani airstrike inside Afghanistan in four days. On September 21, Pakistan targeted what it described as militant camps and suicide-bomb training facilities in eastern Afghanistan, claiming 28 militants were killed. That operation came in the wake of a suicide attack on the Kohat Police Lines mosque, which killed at least 16 people, including five police officers.

Pakistan has repeatedly accused the Afghan Taliban government of harbouring and facilitating the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and allied groups. Kabul denies these allegations and has summoned Pakistan's envoy in protest.

Regional Implications

The strikes risk further destabilising already fragile relations between Islamabad and Kabul. Talks between the two sides in Doha reportedly failed to produce results, with Taliban officials saying Pakistan demanded the Taliban take responsibility for Pakistan's internal security — a demand Kabul rejected.

In the eyes of Rawalpindi, every single tear has become the Nullah Lai

اکھ دی راولپنڈی دے وِچ اکّ اکّ اتھرو نالہ لئی اے

—Master Altaf Bahrawana, Punjabi poet

It was 6:30am on the first of September in Gawalmandi and Shazia’s mother was making breakfast in the courtyard. Her feet were immersed, her clothes were soaked but she persisted with the fire even though the wood was so damp it barely responded. Shazia, 40, was sitting at the doorway, keeping one eye on the drainage pipe that opened into Nullah Lai. Their house sat on the banks of this tributary of the Soan River that functions more like a stormwater drain for Rawalpindi. Shazia kept her other eye on the tree, which served as a marker for rising water levels as it rained.

They and the other families by the banks had been hoping it would not get bad. But sure enough, the water inched up past the mark (nishani) to rise over 20 feet, and the nullah started to top its banks and begin pooling into the houses.

“Shazia, bachyan nu utte chuk ke lai ja,” her mother hollered. Take the children upstairs now.

They moved the children to the roof first, then the parents, and then the precious mattresses, charpai and, most importantly, the fridge.

Shazia and her family have lived here for six decades, so they know the nullah’s moods, its sounds, and the signs by which it warns them. They are also familiar with the accompanying drumbeat in their veins as adrenaline and anxiety flood their bodies in response to the monsoon.

Nullah Lai drains a catchment of about 235 square kilometres, roughly three-fifths of it in Islamabad, before cutting through Rawalpindi’s most crowded neighbourhoods on its way to the Soan River. A funding proposal to the UN’s Adaptation Fund counted 19 floods in the nullah over 59 years and estimated that some 400,000 people in the city suffer every year.

The worst came on July 23, 2001, when 620mm fell on the twin cities in roughly half a day. A study of that disaster put the death toll at 74 (64 of them in Rawalpindi), and found that nine in ten surveyed households had lost property, often down to their pots and pans.

But the record cannot show what decades of living beside Nullah Lai have taught these women: not simply how to survive a flood, but how to make a life around its return.

Master Altaf’s verse, ‘In the eyes of Rawalpindi, every single tear has become the Nullah Lai’ reads like reportage. It is the story of the lives of the women of Gawalmandi and Arya Mohallah, repeated year after year and resurrecting their coping mechanisms each late summer.

From the roof, Shazia’s mind turned to a neighbour who was pregnant and alone. She called out but got no answer. So she went down, reached the woman, helped her to safety and stayed with her until the water fell.

When it finally did, there was no drinking water and nothing to eat. The wood was soaked, the open-air stove useless, everything covered in muck. The mattresses were left to dry on the roof and the family came downstairs to begin the clean-up on empty stomachs. Eventually, food and water was sent by the youngest daughter from her home.

As always, the floodwater brought its own cargo. Snakes are common, and one night Shazia’s mother felt something crawling on her back. She swatted it and found a large centipede. “This is not the first time we have seen this,” Shazia says. “I have been seeing it since I was young.”

Then she offers something that sounds less a complaint and more a law of physics: “When the water has to come, it comes. It makes its own way. No one can stop it.”

Nullah Lai knows the address

Rukhsana, 58, came to Gawalmandi as a bride. She measures the floods against one that predates her own memory, a flood her in-laws said had not been matched in two decades. Across the water in Arya Mohallah, Ambreen, 49, who also moved there after her marriage, counts the floods by year: 2001, then 2010. “And after that, we saw even heavier rains,” she says. Each flood settles on top of the last, bigger than before.

Ambreen laughs when she recalls what people tell them: “Log humain kehte hain…people say we have encroached on the Lai. We tell them we have lived here since the time of our forefathers. We and the Lai go back a long time, our bond old as time. Lai was here before, during the time of our fathers and forefathers but now it seems to have memorized our address year after year, it turns up at our door, as if to pay respect to our elders at their graves.”

The nullah has become part of their history. “Ab hum Lai ki auratein hain,” she says. We are now the women of Lai.

Ready before the rain

Pre-monsoon prep for the people living around Lai is in place before any official warning is issued.

“During the last flood, the deep freezer was too heavy to carry upstairs,” explains Nusrat, who is not spared damage even though she lives a kilometre away. “So this year we women decided to find a solution and raised it on the bricks.”

Sewage flows back into kitchen drains and toilets when their exits are flooded. The solution is to keep toilets covered. At the doors, barricades are improvised with wooden planks and sandbags. “We have to create barriers because there isn’t any proper system,” Nusrat says. When the rain is at its heaviest, the women work the drains by hand. “We try to make a path for the water to move out. When we use the wiper, the dirt moves with the water towards the drains. That helps a little.” Houses often stock up on good wipers, mops and toilet-cleaning acid as the season approaches.

The women prepare for the possibility that staying home will no longer be safe. Neighbours alert one another when levels turn critical, while families call relatives to higher ground if they need to leave. For Saima, 23, of Arya Mohallah, one precaution proved especially important. “Thank God I had kept a bag with sanitary pads, underwear, a chaddar and a spare shalwar kameez. Otherwise, it would have been very difficult because I had my period the day before. Our house was flooded with 12 feet of water.”

Rukhsana cuts straight to the heart of the matter: “Things can be replaced. But a life lost cannot be.” Ambereen’s circle of care extends even further. In every flood, before saving her belongings, she carries her birds and cats to safety. “Now we don’t panic as much,” Shazia says, “because we know what work has to be done.”

A solidarity has developed especially between the women. “When floods like this happen, everyone becomes one,” Shazia says. “People check on each other. They ask, ‘Is everything okay? Do you need anything?”

Managing life next to a nullah that floods is labour, even if no one calls it that. The women joke that the flood doesn’t wait for a time when the men would be at home. Inevitably it’s the women who are at home when it happens and even when the waters recede. They are the ones cleaning out the diapers, waste, sanitary pads, and rubbish. “I took a shower today, after five days,” says Shazia. “And I saw bruises and marks all over my body. Something hit me here, something else hit me there.”

Power and gas supplies take days to return. Ambereen’s household spent four days without electricity after its meter was damaged.

In Master Altaf’s verse, the eye is where the flood gathers. In Rukhsana’s answer, it is also where the strength to face it is found.

Why the water keeps coming

In the opinion of town planner Abida Parveen of Shehersaaz there is no single fix here, least of all widening the drain which can’t solve a problem built into an entire catchment. “Open and permeable land has been replaced by roads, rooftops, concrete surfaces and other impervious areas,” she says. “Even if we widen the channel, we are still dealing with a much larger and faster flow of stormwater entering the system.”

Rain that runs off the capital’s roads and rooftops ends up at the doorsteps of Gawalmandi. The channel carries more than rain: about 600 cusecs of sewage flow into it every day, which is why what comes up through Nusrat’s kitchen pipe is never just water but contamination, the possibility of disease, both acute and chronic.

That detail is where the story refuses a simple villain. Officials point to encroachments and to garbage and debris dumped into the channel, and they are not entirely wrong: residents of some neighbourhoods along the banks have been photographed dumping waste there in defiance of bans. But Parveen cautions against letting that diagnosis harden into a verdict on the people who live there.

“Calling a settlement an encroachment may describe its legal status, but it does not automatically solve the housing problem of the people living there,” she says. “The objective should not be simply to remove people from the nullah. The objective should be to reduce flood risk while ensuring that vulnerable households are not made homeless or pushed into another unsafe settlement.”

Danyal Chaudhry, the member of the National Assembly for NA-57, does not dispute that response has outrun prevention. He calls for a shift “from a purely reactive approach — responding after water levels rise — to a preventive approach based on risk mapping, preparedness and timely evacuation.” For him women should not only be treated as beneficiaries of disaster-response programmes; they should also be partners in designing them. “Their experience at the household and community level can significantly improve the effectiveness of official preparedness plans.”

While it sounds like the right diagnosis, for now it is also a description of something that has not yet happened. In the women’s own accounts, the early-warning system is a marked tree; the relief operation is a relative arriving with food and water; the evacuation plan is a bag packed by the door.

The fear that stays

Shazia’s mother no longer sleeps properly when it rains. She lies down, drifts off, and just as sleep begins to take hold, wakes and reaches for the floor to check if it is wet. Nusrat copes differently, “Haha, I have gone crazy, I keep washing the dishes again and again.”

For Saima, the fear is tied to the uncertainty of what might happen to the house and the family. “Thunder, the sound of water hitting the pavement grips me with fear…I can’t help but tremble…because the memories come flooding back, the anxiety to face it all once again…it’s like life imprisonment.“

Rukhsana’s answer suggests an anxiety that has found a home in the marrow: “We stay scared and alert. That fear has never really left us.” For these women, eco-anxiety is not an abstract fear of a distant climate future.

Where the tears meet the Lai

The harder question is whether resilience is simply the name given to the labour people perform when the systems fail them. “There isn’t any proper arrangement to stop it,” says Ambereen. “There isn’t really a solution. If the water rises, it will come inside anyway, no matter what we do.” What they ask for is smaller than an expressway, and harder to argue with. “How can we make ourselves safe when we cannot afford the cost?” she asks. “If the government wants us to move, then give us money or land and let us build somewhere safe.”

When the next heavy rain comes, the sequence will begin again in Gawalmandi and Arya Mohallah: the tree, the dash for higher ground, the children first and the mattresses after them, the toilets covered, the bag sent upstairs, the cleaning begun before the smell has settled.

“We know this can happen again,” Shazia says. “We have learned how to deal with it because we have been facing it for years. We carry on. Life goes on.”

All photos by authors

“Like almost everyone else, he seemed to like calling the poorly and inaccurately named artificial intelligence to a far more accurate and important name: super intelligence. That would be ‘super!’ Everyone last night agreed, also,” he wrote.

The lavish state summit at the White House appeared heavy on symbolism but light on substance, with no sign of major breakthroughs between the world’s biggest economies.

Still, Trump highlighted progress under a bilateral trade mechanism, citing what he described as increased market access for US farmers and ranchers, while both leaders identified artificial intelligence as an area for cooperation.

Trump would follow up his summit with Xi by taking the Chinese leader to the US National Archives, where they were expected to stress views about the history and direction of ties between their countries.

Trump said in remarks welcoming Xi that they would see some of the greatest treasures of US history at the National Archives, including the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

They would also see “artifacts testifying to the long and cherished relationship” between China and the United States and their “cultural exchanges”, he said.

“Just as our ancestors reached across the ocean centuries ago to trade, to learn, and to build a better world, our two countries do really the same thing, and we’re very proud of it and the relationship,” Trump said.

China has not commented on the visit to the archives, but analysts say Xi may be keen to see records relating to the US switch of recognition to communist China from Taiwan in 1979.

China presses on Taiwan

Xi has long sought to persuade Trump to state publicly that the United States opposes Taiwan’s independence, rather than saying only that it does not support independence, which has been Washington’s formulation for decades.

He is also keen to get the US to halt arms sales to the island.

As expected, Xi pressed Trump on Taiwan on Thursday, saying he hoped the United States would “handle the Taiwan question with prudence.” China’s state news agency also reported that Xi “hopes the US side will adhere to the correct position of opposing ‘Taiwan independence’.”

While the United States, like most countries, has no formal diplomatic relations with Taipei, Washington is its most important international backer and is bound by US law to provide it with the means to defend itself.

America’s Asian allies will watch closely to see how Trump talks about Taiwan following Xi’s visit.

After his May summit with Xi, Trump, whose administration in December approved an $11 billion arms sale package to Taiwan, said he was holding a second package, worth some $14bn, in abeyance and described it as a “very good negotiating chip.” Craig Singleton of the Foundation for Defence of Democracies think tank said Beijing may believe it has established a new baseline on Taiwan with Trump.

He said Xi’s use of the word “adhere” was revealing because “it implies Beijing believes Washington is already behaving in ways it wants.”

“In the context of the current stand-down on Taiwan arms sales, China may increasingly view that restraint as a new baseline rather than a temporary pause,” he said.

“Beijing’s objective is to get Trump to absorb Chinese red lines into his own definition of a stable relationship.”

On Thursday, Senate Democrats criticised the summit, saying Trump had failed to secure meaningful concessions from Beijing on trade, security, artificial intelligence or human rights.

They also criticised Trump for failing to publicly address China’s military pressure on Taiwan and called for the immediate delivery of approved military aid and arms sales to the island.

The FO statement noted that the tripartite agreement, signed on Aug 7, stipulated that an attack against any one of its parties should be considered an attack against all parties.

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Ishaq Dar from Pakistan, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan bin Abdullah and Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan held a discussion on the defence pact on the sidelines of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Earlier, Saudi Foreign Ministry also posted on X that the three member states condemned the recent Houthi attacks against Saudi Arabia and discussed arrangements to convene an “urgent meeting of the chiefs of staff of the three countries” to support the Gulf state within the pact.

Later, Turkiye’s Defence Ministry said its Chief of General Staff General Selcuk Bayraktaroglu will travel to Saudi Arabia to meet his Saudi and Pakistani counterparts as part of the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement.

In their New York meeting, the foreign ministers condemned in the “strongest terms the heinous attacks targeting the holy city of Makkah and civilian and economic facilities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”, the FO statement said.

At the same time, it added, the ministers “commended the vigilance of the Saudi armed forces and their ability to defend the kingdom’s security”.

“They reaffirmed the kingdom’s right to take such measures as it deems appropriate to defend its security, in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter.”

They further discussed the current situation in the region, underscoring the importance of upholding the principles of international law, good neighbourliness, mutual respect for the sovereignty of states, and non-interference in their internal affairs, as well as ensuring the security and freedom of navigation, the statement said.

Moreover, they reiterated their determination to work together towards achieving sustainable peace and stability in the region, support efforts towards de-escalation and encourage peaceful resolution to crises.

During the meeting, the ministers also reviewed progress made towards establishing the general secretariat and committees and working groups under the Makkah agreement, as well as preparations for the commencement of their work, the FO statement said.

Earlier in the day, Dar also posted on X: “Under the framework of the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement (MJDA), we reviewed progress towards establishing the institutional structures under the agreement and exchanged views on regional and international security issues.”

The Makkah Defence Alliance’s inaugural meeting was held on Aug 31, where officials from all member states met in Istanbul to establish the institutional structure of the alliance, and Pakistan was picked to head its secretariat in Riyadh. Retired Lieutenant General Nauman Mahmood has been appointed as the first secretary general.

The latest meeting in New York in relevance to the defence pact took place against the backdrop of Riyadh being dragged into fresh fighting between the Houthis and the Yemeni government, with the former declaring a maritime blockade on the kingdom and targeting its ships in the Red Sea. In recent weeks, Houthis have also carried out attacks in Saudi Arabia.

A day earlier, Saudi Arabia intercepted six ballistic missiles fired by the Houthis after issuing warnings for several regions, including Makkah. This was the second time that a warning was issued for the holy city in the last two weeks.

As Yemen’s Houthi rebels continue to attack Saudi Arabia, Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) Director General Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry on Sept 18 said that Pakistan would go to “any extent” to defend Saudi Arabia, adding that Islamabad’s commitment to the kingdom’s security was “unconditional”.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had also vowed to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with Saudi Arabia in safeguarding its sovereignty and security.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman this week denounced the Houthis as a “terrorist militia” in a rare statement. He condemned the Houthi attempt “to target Makkah”, calling it “a provocation to Muslims around the world”, according to the official Saudi news agency.

Additional input from Reuters.