KABUL — A residential drug rehabilitation facility in the western outskirts of Kabul was struck by at least two munitions late Tuesday night in an aerial attack that Afghan health authorities and multiple witnesses attributed to Pakistani military forces, killing a minimum of 19 people and wounding dozens more in what has rapidly become a focal point of sharply escalating tensions between Islamabad and the Taliban administration that governs Afghanistan.
The facility, the Rahmat Recovery Centre, housed approximately 80 patients at the time of the strike, most of them adult men in various stages of treatment for opioid dependency, according to staff members who were present during the attack or arrived shortly afterward. The munitions destroyed the facility’s main residential dormitory wing and a dining structure immediately adjacent to it, collapsing the roofs of both buildings and trapping patients under debris. Rescue operations continued through Wednesday morning.
Pakistan’s military issued a statement Wednesday that said it had conducted “precision strikes against terrorist infrastructure” in provinces along the Afghan frontier in direct response to cross-border attacks it said were launched from Afghan soil and had killed Pakistani soldiers and civilians in the preceding 72 hours. The statement did not address the Rahmat facility or the city of Kabul specifically, and Pakistani officials did not respond to requests from international journalists for clarification about whether the Kabul strike was included in the operations described.
Taliban authorities denied that the Rahmat facility had any connection to militant activity and characterized the attack as an act of aggression against civilian health infrastructure. The Taliban’s acting foreign minister summoned Pakistan’s chargé d’affaires in Kabul early Wednesday morning and issued a formal diplomatic protest demanding an explanation, a public apology, and compensation for the families of those killed. State media affiliated with the Taliban administration broadcast footage of the rubble and interviews with surviving patients throughout the day.
“This was a place where sick people came to heal,” said Dr. Farid Wali, who identified himself as the facility’s medical director and who was not present at the time of the strike. “There were no weapons here. There were no fighters here. There were patients — men trying to recover from addiction, men who had families waiting for them. Whatever justification Pakistan constructs, it cannot justify what happened in that building on Tuesday night.”
Survivors and rescue workers described chaotic and harrowing scenes in the hours immediately following the strike. Patients who retained the physical capacity to do so helped drag those who could not move from the rubble, working by flashlight in the absence of electricity after power to the compound was cut by the blast. Afghan emergency medical services arrived within approximately 40 minutes of initial calls; a field triage station was established in an adjacent street to treat the wounded before ambulances could transport the most critical cases to hospitals in the city center, where trauma wards were described by staff as overwhelmed.
The attack comes amid a significant and accelerating deterioration in Afghan-Pakistani relations that analysts trace to a sequence of events over the past 18 months. Pakistani air and artillery strikes in the Khost and Paktika provinces, which Islamabad justified as targeting a militant organization it holds responsible for bombings in Pakistani cities including Peshawar and Quetta, have drawn repeated Afghan condemnation. Kabul has consistently rejected Pakistani characterizations of those operations as defensive, arguing instead that they constituted violations of Afghan sovereignty and that they killed civilians, including in one incident that Afghan authorities said struck a residential compound in a district that had no documented militant presence.
“What we are watching is a bilateral relationship that has essentially broken down at the diplomatic level and is now being managed almost entirely through military signaling,” said Zara Hussain, a security analyst at a research institution in Islamabad who has spent a decade studying Afghan-Pakistani affairs. “The fundamental problem with that approach is that each escalation creates domestic political pressure on both governments to respond in kind, and there is currently no reliable back channel operating through which either side could step down without appearing to concede. The space for de-escalation is narrowing.”
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan called for an immediate independent investigation into the attack on the rehabilitation facility and urged both parties to “exercise maximum restraint and prioritize the protection of civilian life.” The United States, the European Union, and several Gulf states issued brief statements expressing concern and calling for dialogue, though none attributed direct responsibility for the Kabul strike. A spokesperson for the U.N. Secretary-General said the incident had been brought to the attention of the Security Council.
The official death toll was expected to rise, according to Afghan Ministry of Public Health officials, as rescue and recovery operations at the site continued into Thursday. Several patients remained unaccounted for, and structural engineers assessing the collapsed sections of the dormitory building said portions of the debris field had not yet been safely accessed due to the risk of secondary collapse. International humanitarian organizations with operations in Afghanistan said they were monitoring the situation and stood ready to provide medical support if requested by Afghan authorities.