In the eastern mountains of Afghanistan, silence does not last long.

Morning arrives over Kunar in layers—thin blue mist in the valleys, the first call to prayer drifting through pine-covered ridges, rivers moving cold and silver beneath bridges and broken roads. In Asadabad, students once walked toward classrooms beneath these mountains with books in their hands and dust on their shoes. The hills have always carried echoes here: birdsong, prayer, the rumble of trucks, and sometimes, the harder sounds of war.

This week, the echoes returned.

Mortars and rockets struck eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar province, hitting residential neighborhoods and the grounds of Sayed Jamaluddin Afghani University, killing at least seven people and injuring more than 80, according to Afghan Taliban authorities. Among the wounded were students, professors, women, and children. The attack has placed a fragile truce between Afghanistan and Pakistan under renewed strain, only weeks after peace talks sought to quiet one of the region’s oldest and most uneasy frontiers.

The university became an emblem before the smoke had cleared.

Classrooms were shattered. Windows blown inward. Courtyards, usually crossed by students between lectures, were marked by debris and blood. Afghanistan’s Ministry of Higher Education said around 30 students and faculty members were wounded in the strike, and the campus sustained extensive structural damage. Taliban deputy spokesperson Hamdullah Fitrat called the attack an “unforgivable war crime” against civilians and academic institutions.

Across the border, the language changed.

Pakistan denied responsibility for striking the university, dismissing Afghan reports as false and politically motivated. Islamabad’s Ministry of Information said Pakistan’s operations are “precise and intelligence-based,” though it stopped short of explicitly ruling out attacks inside Afghan territory. In this conflict, truth often arrives fractured—split between capitals, statements, and the smoke still rising from damaged streets.

The ceasefire had already been fragile.

Only weeks ago, delegations from Afghanistan and Pakistan met in the Chinese city of Urumqi in an effort to halt months of escalating violence. The talks were described as “positive” by Afghan officials and cautiously by Pakistan, but no formal agreement emerged. China, with investments and strategic interests on both sides of the border, had hoped to steady the ground. Instead, the earth shifted again.

This is not the first unraveling.

A ceasefire mediated by Qatar and Türkiye in October 2025 collapsed into low-level clashes. A temporary Eid truce in March was quickly disputed after both sides accused one another of violations. The deepest wound came on March 16, when a Pakistani air strike reportedly hit the Omar Hospital in Kabul, an addiction treatment center. Afghan officials said more than 400 people were killed; the United Nations later recorded at least 143 deaths. The numbers themselves became another battlefield.

Beneath the latest exchange lies an older argument.

Pakistan accuses the Afghan Taliban of sheltering Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, the militant group responsible for deadly attacks across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. Kabul denies harboring militants and says Islamabad uses those accusations as justification for cross-border intervention. Between accusation and denial, villages burn, borders close, and civilians become collateral to unresolved grievances.

In Kunar, meanwhile, life bends around the damage.

Families sweep glass from floors. Teachers count the missing. Students gather outside broken gates and stare at walls split by shrapnel. The mountains remain where they have always been—watching, indifferent, ancient. The river still moves beneath the bridges.

But the truce, like so many before it, feels thinner now.

Peace in these valleys has often come not as an agreement, but as an interruption.

A pause between shelling.

A quiet week before another accusation.

A handshake in a distant city before smoke rises again over a university courtyard.

And in eastern Afghanistan, where the mountains keep their own counsel, the echoes of this latest strike may linger longer than the promises made to silence them.

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Sources Al Jazeera Reuters The Guardian Arab News Council on Foreign Relations