Story by Fazelminallah Qazizai
GARDEZ, Afghanistan—Dr. Amanullah Aman, medical director of Paktia Central Hospital in Afghanistan, was asleep at home with his children when he received a phone call in the early morning hours of June 29.
On the other end was Dr. Masoom Sahak, the physician on duty at the hospital that night. The news was urgent: a Pakistani airstrike had struck the Samkani district and dozens of people were believed to be wounded or killed. The local hospital was already overwhelmed with patients being transported via ambulances with traumatic injuries.
The attack on Samkani was part of a wider Pakistani operation across the eastern Afghan provinces of Paktia, Paktika, and Kunar that night. Pakistan said the strikes targeted camps belonging to the militant group Jamaat-ul-Ahrar and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), claiming that 25 militants were killed.
According to Islamabad, the operation was launched in response to TTP attacks inside Pakistan, including an assault on a regional headquarters of the paramilitary Rangers in Karachi the previous day. Pakistan has been faced with an increasing number of militant attacks in recent months, including ambushes and attacks on police stations near its border with Afghanistan, raising domestic pressure to suppress the attacks.
But Afghan authorities said that residential areas in Samkani were struck by Pakistani aircraft, and that the victims included women and children. According to locals, the first Pakistani jet struck the area shortly before midnight, killing a child and burying others in the debris of what had been their home.
As the loudspeakers of the village’s mosques called out across the area to alert others to what had happened, neighbors rushed to the scene of the bombing with shovels and bare hands to dig through the debris. It was then that the second bomb fell.
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan later confirmed that two successive strikes had hit the residential area in Samkani. Its initial investigation documented at least 22 civilians killed and 47 wounded, including women and children, although it warned that those figures were preliminary. A subsequent UN account said that five children were among the dead and that most of the casualties occurred during the second strike, while local people were trying to rescue victims from the rubble.
On the night of the attacks, Dr. Aman had rushed through the corridors to organize his staff. He instructed the entrance team on how to direct and park the incoming vehicles, then waited in front of the emergency gate for their arrival. At 3:30 in the morning, as the first call to prayer echoed across the city, the caravan of wounded began arriving at Paktia Central Hospital. They came in local cars, not professional ambulances.
“Some of the wounded were transferred with their intestines exposed. Some were bleeding or burned by flames,” Dr. Aman later recalled. Among them were children, women, and old men.
The hospital declared an emergency and patients who had just undergone operations hours earlier were sent home to make space. The emergency room, recovery wards, and even hallways quickly filled with the wounded. Additional beds were ordered for every room and corridor, and stretchers were brought in to accommodate the overwhelming numbers.
Dr. Aman and his team worked without rest and some of his nurses and orthopaedic specialists performed as many as nineteen surgeries without a single break. They had no breakfast, no lunch—pushing themselves to the brink of exhaustion.
“We called on doctors from the private hospital to help,” said Dr. Aman. “The corridors were covered in blood. The cleaners worked just to clean the blood. Even the guards were busy cleaning.” Of the critically wounded, 20 were sent to Kabul by helicopter, and four others by road ambulance.
In total, 74 wounded reached the hospital, according to Dr. Aman. Twenty-five required operations—cases of blunt trauma, broken limbs, and head injuries. Four of them died at the hospital.
Dr. M. Farooq Samimi, another doctor on duty, later said: “I saw patients that I had never seen before—they were all [braindead], deadly injured or beyond repair. When I saw them, it was heartbreaking.”
Dr. Aman credits the mass casualty management training provided by the World Health Organization for helping his team cope. “We were trained for natural and human-made disasters,” he said. “That training helped us a lot.”
The doctors also worked with the ever-present dread that the hospital itself may be targeted at any moment by Pakistani jets. “My staff were worried. There were rumors that the hospital would be bombed next,” Dr. Amanullah said. The doctors and nurses worked through the fear.
The Samkani attack was just one episode in a conflict that has been escalating for months. Between October 2025 and the end of June 2026, UN investigators documented 499 civilians killed and 1,216 wounded inside Afghanistan during fighting with Pakistan.
Pakistan has disputed the UN’s findings, maintaining that its operations had been directed exclusively at militant hideouts, sanctuaries, and support infrastructure.
Those denials mean little to many Afghans, who accuse Pakistan of waging a war against the Afghan population writ large while using the presence of militants as an excuse to violently settle long-standing territorial disputes between the two neighbors.
The Taliban-led Afghan government has vowed revenge for the attacks, with government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid denouncing the Pakistani campaign as a war of aggression. The Pakistani attacks on its neighbor also come as the country engages in a widening crackdown internally, including mass killings of demonstrators in Kashmir and the ongoing suppression of a nascent insurgency in Balochistan.
In recent weeks the aerial campaign appears to have paused, but Afghan officials have accused Pakistan of launching armed incursions into the country aimed at exacerbating local tribal conflicts, a charge that the Pakistani government has denied.
The Pakistani attacks on Afghanistan have taken a toll on an already war-weary population still recovering from the legacy of a two-decade long U.S.-occupation of their country. On August 23, local news outlets reported that another victim of the double-tap strike in Samkani who had been wounded in the attack had succumbed to their injuries, nearly two months after the bombing.
The report added, “some of the injured are in such difficult financial circumstances that they cannot even afford ordinary povidone iodine for dressing and treating their wounds.”
When Dr. Aman finally returned home to rest after treating the victims of the Samkani attack on the night of the June 29, he tied a cloth around his legs. He had walked too much between the wards, trying to find space for the wounded. “We wanted to cry,” he said, “but we had no time for it.”