Pakistan rejects Taliban claim that drug rehab strike qualifies as deliberate disinformation

Pakistan has rejected Afghanistan’s claims that the country struck a rehabilitation hospital in Kabul, killing 400 people and injuring 250 others.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MoIB) lashed out at

The ministry thus rejected Afghanistan’s claims as “false and misleading”, adding that on the night of March 16, “Pakistan precisely targeted military installations and infrastructure supporting terrorism, including the storage of technical equipment and the storage of ammunition of the Afghan Taliban and Fitna al-Khawarij in Kabul and Nangarhar.”

The MoIB added: “The post-strike detonation of the stored munitions used by Master Terror Proxy also completely contradicts this false claim. »

Read: Precision strikes hit Taliban-linked sites in Kabul and Nangarhar

According to Hamdullah Fitrat, deputy spokesperson for the Taliban, the airstrike took place at 9 p.m. Monday, targeting the Omid drug treatment hospital.

Fitrat wrote that “large sections” of the 2,000-bed facility had been destroyed, with “serious concerns about the high number of casualties.” The spokesperson said the death toll stood at 400 and 250 injured, adding that rescue teams were working to bring the fire under control and recover the remaining bodies.

The MoIB, in response, tweeted that Omid Hospital was in fact several kilometers from Camp Phoenix, “the terrorist munitions and military equipment storage site precisely targeted last night.” The ministry added: “It can also be clearly seen that the hospital itself is a multi-story structure,” comparing it to the “actually targeted military/terrorist infrastructure.”

“The difference and the lie are obvious,” wrote the MoIB. Furthermore, he questioned, “Why would a so-called drug rehab center be co-located with a lethal munitions storage site at a military camp?” »

Fitrat tweeted a photo of a crowd, saying: “Innocent civilians and drug addicts who were mostly killed last night in the 2,000-bed hospital due to shelling by (Pakistani military circles).”

The Ministry of Information responded by tweeting that the claim “circulated by the Afghan Taliban spokesperson using an old image to allege recent casualties is a clear case of deliberate disinformation.”

This, he adds, was intended to mislead public perception. The MoIB added that the featured image dates from May 2023 and was shared by the Afghan Taliban’s Interior Ministry at the time. This, he says, reveals the falsity of current claims.

Read also: China to continue mediation efforts between Pakistan and Afghanistan

“Recycling outdated visuals to support current claims reflects a calculated attempt to fabricate a misleading narrative and create confusion about the actual events,” the MoIB wrote. He added that such actions “undermine credibility and highlight a pattern of information manipulation through misrepresentation of archival materials as current evidence.”

The ministry concluded the tweet by stating that the Taliban regime’s claims are “rejected as false and misleading, intended to distort facts, mislead the public and serve propaganda purposes by projecting a fabricated version of events.”

In another tweet, the Information Ministry attached photos of the “Afghan official handle” deleting the first official post claiming a drug rehab had been hit. He questioned whether the visuals had been generated or whether an AI had failed to withstand fact-checking.

The development comes as Operation Ghazab Lil Haq, launched last month, continues following renewed clashes along the Pakistan-Afghan border. It was launched after Afghan Taliban forces fired on several locations, prompting rapid military retaliation from Pakistan.

Since then, neighboring countries have engaged in an escalation of hostilities along the border. The clashes intensified after Afghanistan launched a border offensive in response to previous Pakistani airstrikes targeting terrorist positions.