ISLAMABAD — Pakistani and Afghan troops exchanged intense fire late Friday at the Chaman–Spin Boldak crossing on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, officials from both countries said Saturday. Overnight fighting came following unsuccessful peace talks in Saudi Arabia and shattered a precarious Qatar-brokered ceasefire with Kabul reporting deadly shelling of civilians, while Islamabad denied there were any casualties Saturday, Dec. 6, 2025.
Officials and residents said the exchange began around 10:30 p.m. local time and lasted about 2 hours, with both sides blaming the other for firing first. The spokesman for Afghanistan’s Taliban government, Zabihullah Mujahid, said that Pakistani forces had “undertaken attacks” aimed at Spin Boldak, and local officials told regional media that four civilians were killed and another four wounded when shells struck houses near the frontier. The government’s spokesman, Mosharraf Zaidi of Pakistan, instead blamed “unprovoked firing” by Afghan forces across the Chaman sector and said there were no confirmed deaths or serious damage on its side (consistent with early assessments carried in an Associated Press report and other outlets that reported injuries but no fatalities).
The governor of Spin Boldak and other Afghan officials said civilians had been hit when mortar fire or artillery from the Pakistani side landed in civilian areas, while Pakistani security sources quoted by Indian and Pakistani media said their troops “responded effectively” to incoming fire from across the line. Reports in regional outlets, like India Today and NDTV, underlined the same scene: a tense but familiar blame game on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border where facts on the ground were difficult to confirm, and casualty figures frequently diverged dramatically from one party to another.
Ceasefire tension develops over the Pakistan-Afghanistan border after Saudi negotiations fall through
Friday’s shootout is the first major breach of a truce that was negotiated in Doha in October and followed a week of cross-border clashes that left dozens dead, among them soldiers as well as suspected militants and civilians, closing key crossings at Chaman and Torkham. A fresh round of talks led by Saudi Arabia over the weekend had not led to any wider agreement, but Pakistani and Afghan officials told Reuters they had committed to maintaining a ceasefire despite deep-seated mistrust.
A day before the latest confrontation, Pakistan said it would permit the United Nations to send food and medical supplies into Afghanistan through Chaman and Torkham while continuing to block most regular trade and travel — as reported in a previous AP story. The corridor is supposed to ease growing humanitarian pressure inside Afghanistan, but Friday’s exchange raises new questions about whether aid convoys can safely traverse an increasingly volatile portion of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Bloody history at Chaman–Spin Boldak
The Chaman–Spin Boldak crossing has flared with violence on and off in recent years, turning the Pakistan-Afghanistan border into a front line for civilians as well as soldiers. In December 2022, an Afghan fire near Chaman killed at least six Pakistani civilians and wounded 17, Pakistan’s military and medical officials told Al Jazeera. Two days later, new clashes in the same area killed one Pakistani civilian and wounded a dozen others, according to local officials and independent media, including Reuters and Dawn, leading to an extended closure of the crossing point and emergency measures in border hospitals.
A deep-dive feature last month in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper charted how repeated skirmishes, frequent impasses and disputed fencing on the Chaman–Spin Boldak corridor had hardened positions on each side of the line to make the Pakistan-Afghanistan border more an object of competing sovereignty claims than cooperation. In the 2022 analysis that appeared in Dawn, that town was described as a “potential tinderbox” where low-level skirmishing can quickly escalate into heavy weapons fire once political contacts collapse.
Those warnings were amplified last month, when pitched battles and retaliatory attacks erupted in multiple sectors of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border that killed dozens of fighters and civilians — as well as shut down all top crossings. Reporting from Reuters, and others showed border posts were destroyed, airstrikes hit targets around Kabul and Kandahar, and a ceasefire was eventually pushed through under Qatari and Saudi mediation. A further 15 civilians were killed and dozens more wounded in Spin Boldak alone, Afghan officials told AFP separately and in a story carried by the Arab News news site, showing how the conflict along the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier is as much a war of words as it is bullets.
Border politics, militants, and the civilians caught between them.
At the root of all these is a festering disagreement over militancy and cross-border safe havens. Islamabad says Afghan-based fighters from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and allied groups are responsible for a spate of attacks taking place inside Pakistan, including a roadside bombing on Wednesday that killed three police officers in Dera Ismail Khan near the border — an attack claimed by the Pakistani Taliban and reported by local and international media. Kabul has denied those allegations, and Taliban officials told the likes of Al Jazeera that Afghanistan isn’t to blame for Pakistan’s internal security situation, and said instead that Islamabad was responsible for numerous air and artillery strikes across the Pak-Afghan border.
The economic stakes are higher, too. Months of closures at Chaman and Torkham since October have trapped thousands of trucks and reduced Pakistan’s exports to its landlocked neighbour, but also on to even more distant destinations — in one recent business report from Arab News, potato prices within Pakistan were reportedly crashing more than 70 per cent because produce can no longer move freely to Afghan and Central Asian markets. For traders, refugees and families separated by the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the recent Chaman–Spin Boldak episodes are another message that without a durable security mechanism and sustained diplomacy, even brief pauses in fighting can precipitate new rounds of gunfire — and disputed casualty figures.
