Pakistan

The deaths appear to be the first at the hands of Somali pirates in more than a decade.

Pirates have killed five crew members on board a Palau-flagged oil tanker off the coast of Somalia before security forces rescued the ship, according to Somali authorities.

The deaths on the tanker, the MT Honour 25, were announced on Tuesday.

They appear to be the first deaths at ⁠the hands of Somali pirates in more than a decade and come amid a resurgence of Somali piracy that experts have attributed in part to the effects of the United States and Israel’s war on Iran.

The MT Honour 25, which authorities said was carrying 18,500 barrels of oil, was seized by pirates off Somalia on April 21.

The Information Ministry of Puntland, a semiautonomous region of Somalia, said in a statement that a rescue mission had freed the ship and captured 16 suspected pirates.

“Before the operation began, the pirates on board the ship killed five of the crew,” the statement said. “Among those killed were three from Pakistan, one from Myanmar and one from India.”

Four other crew members, three Pakistanis and one Indian, were injured, it said.

In a post on social media, the Puntland Maritime Police Force said the vessel was “safe” and under the government’s control. It said efforts were continuing to find others involved in the hijacking.

The rescue follows another operation last week in which the maritime police freed the Sibu 1, a tanker sanctioned by the US that Somali pirates had hijacked in August.

But 28 of the 41 pirates arrested in that operation later escaped while being transferred to jail, and several Puntland security officials accused local police of complicity.

At least 15 attacks have been reported off Somalia since April, according to officials.

A previous wave of piracy, from 2008 to 2014, disrupted one of the world’s busiest shipping routes, cost the global economy billions of dollars and resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in ransom payments.

Repeated incidents of organisational failure at the Asian Games have left athletes frustrated, exhausted and disappointed as rain-delayed matches became the latest headache for host nation Japan.

A glitzy opening ceremony did little to overshadow the growing accommodation crisis, logistical gaffes and scheduling issues that have headlined the Games, which opened on September 19 in Aichi-Nagoya.

India’s multiple-Olympic medallist PV Sindhu lamented a badminton schedule that saw her play three matches within 18 hours.

“Three matches in 18 hours. Back at 3am, out again at 8:30am. It took a toll,” Sindhu wrote on social media after her quarterfinal exit on Sunday.

Pakistan’s volleyball team was mistakenly taken to the wrong gymnasium an hour before the start of its preliminary round match, forcing its members to change into their kits on the bus and leaving them without enough time for a warm-up.

“Japan has destroyed the dignity and discipline of the Asian Games,” men’s captain Murad Jehan wrote in a now-deleted video on his Instagram account as the team travelled to their match against Uzbekistan, which they won 3-0. “Really disappointing situation.”

He said athletes would often return from training to find their hotel restaurant closed, leaving them unable to eat. “This situation at Asian Games is not acceptable.”

The South Korean men’s basketball team faced a similar incident when they missed a light practice session hours before their final after their shuttle bus did not show up on time. Team officials said they received no explanation.

It was a repeat of what the men’s football team faced when the bus did not arrive at the team’s hotel. A day earlier, the bus took the athletes to a baseball ground instead of the Mizuho Rugby Stadium, causing a 30-minute delay.

‘Rain has ruined everything’

On Monday, persistent rain became the organisers’ latest headache when it disrupted several competitions, including tennis, surfing and cricket.

Both the men’s cricket quarterfinals between Pakistan-Hong Kong and India-Afghanistan were washed out after the playing field was drenched at Korogi Athletic Park on the outskirts of Nagoya.

With no contingency built into the schedule for rained-off matches, Pakistan and India advanced to the semifinals of the T20 tournament by virtue of their higher rankings.

It was a bitter pill for Afghanistan, who saw the gold medal go to India due to the rankings rule three years ago when their Hangzhou Games final was abandoned due to rain.

“The rain started yesterday, so hard luck for us,” Afghanistan opener Mohammed Akram said.

“We would have been happy to play here with India. Our players are in form.

“But unfortunately the rain has ruined everything.”

Typhoon Surigae lashed southern Japan’s Okinawa prefecture on Monday and was projected to track northeast towards central Japan and the Tokyo region by midweek, raising the prospect of strong winds and heavy rain further disrupting the Games.

Typhoon Dujuan hit the Games early in week one, causing equestrian events in Tokyo to be suspended although most competitions were unaffected.

The continental sporting showpiece is mainly based in the city of Nagoya and Aichi prefecture, but Tokyo is also hosting diving events while Osaka is hosting football matches.

The rain saw several tennis matches scrapped on Sunday and caused match delays on Monday.

Fans hoping to catch Filipino headliner Alex Eala’s opening match against Thai opponent Patcharin Cheapchandej were repeatedly frustrated at the Higashiyama Park Tennis Centre.

Eala, the women’s top seed, had her match shifted off centre court amid the scheduling logjam and wrapped it up in 55 minutes with a 6-1, 6-0 win over Patcharin.

Poor wave conditions saw the surfing called off early at the Long Beach venue southeast of Nagoya with medal finals having already been pushed to Tuesday.

India’s Kishore Kumar Anbarasu was able to complete his heat before it was abandoned, beating China’s Ma Wensong to make it into the quarterfinals on the sport’s Asian Games debut.

“It was not the easiest conditions. It was very hard to find the good waves,” Anbarasu said.

Organisers apologise for logistical chaos at ‘sad’ games

Organisers on Saturday apologised for logistical glitches at the Games that left thousands of athletes with cramped housing conditions and undersized beds that forced several countries to house their athletes elsewhere.

Satoshi Murate, secretary-general of the local organising committee, said a late influx of about 2,000 additional athletes and officials had stretched resources.

“There have been mistakes in accommodation and transport for various reasons,” Murate said.

“Whatever the cause, AINAGOC [the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games and Asian Para Games Organising Committee] is responsible for providing the service, and I frankly apologise for the mistakes.

“Our staff work every day to identify the causes of each mistake and make sure they don’t happen again. I think you can see that accommodation and transport have improved greatly compared with the early days.”

Organisers chose not to build a traditional athletes village in a bid to save money. Competitors instead are staying in hotels, temporary wooden units and on a cruise ship.

India’s multiple badminton medallist HS Prannoy said that made for a disappointing experience.

“It was sad,” the 34-year-old, who won team bronze, said in a YouTube video published by the Badminton Association of India.

“It never felt like we were playing in an Asian Games, to be honest.”

Relations strain further as Afghanistan and Pakistan trade accusations over terrorism and cross-border violence.

Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defence said its forces killed 28 fighters in the eastern province of Nuristan who had crossed the border from Pakistan.

In a statement posted to X, the Taliban’s defence ministry confirmed it had engaged in clashes with the opposing group on Sunday.

The defence ministry alleged that most of the fighters were former Afghan government security personnel recruited by Pakistan’s intelligence services with promises of asylum and well-paid employment in foreign countries.

The defence ministry claimed the fighters included ISIL (ISIS) fighters who were supported by Pakistani militias.

Pakistan’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting rejected the allegations, describing them in a post on X as “frivolous, baseless and devoid of any truth”.

Pakistan denied that its security forces or intelligence agencies were involved in clashes in Nuristan, had recruited or trained former Afghan security personnel, or had facilitated ISIL (ISIS) or other armed groups in Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s information ministry also said the Taliban “should take credible and verifiable action against terrorist organisations operating from its territory” and fulfil its obligation so that “Afghan soil will not be used for terrorism against Pakistan or any other country rather than attempting to deflect responsibility through fabricated accusations”.

Escalating tensions

The clashes follow increasing tension between the two countries.

Last week, Pakistan launched air strikes on 10 locations in Afghanistan it said were used to store and launch drones, some of which were used in cross-border attacks.

The Pakistani air strikes on Thursday killed at least four people, a spokesman for the Afghan Taliban government said while promising to deliver an “appropriate response”.

Pakistan has repeatedly accused Afghanistan of sheltering fighters who attack its territory, a charge Kabul denies.

Sunday’s incident also follows Pakistani air strikes in Afghanistan on September 21 that Islamabad said killed 28 fighters. Afghan officials said civilians were killed and the U.N. mission in Afghanistan confirmed three civilian deaths.

The top seeds defend their Asian Games squash titles, becoming the first players to qualify for the Los Angeles Games.

Malaysia’s Eain Yow Ng and Sivasangari Subramaniam have made history by becoming the first squash players to qualify for the Summer Olympics after winning gold medals at the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan.

The defending champions won the men’s and women’s finals on Sunday and earned a ticket to the 2028 Los Angeles Games, where squash will make its Olympic debut.

Squash is among a handful of sports at Aichi-Nagoya where a gold medal serves as automatic qualification for the next Olympics.

Both Eain and Sivasangari successfully defended their titles without dropping a single game in their campaigns. Their victories gave Malaysia its fifth and sixth gold medals.

World number 18 Eain thrashed India’s Abhay Singh 11-9, 11-5, 11-5 in 33 minutes at the Nagoya Kinjo Futo Arena and became the first Malaysian to qualify for the Olympics.

World number five Sivasangari joined her compatriot soon after when she made quick work of the women’s final against India’s Anahat Singh.

She demolished Singh, ranked 17th in the world, 11-4, 11-4, 11-7 in just 23 minutes to clinch gold.

Earlier, Singh, the world junior champion, produced a stellar comeback in the semifinals from two sets down to overpower Japan’s Satomi Watanabe (9-11, 11-13, 12-10, 11-6, 11-3) on Saturday.

“I think it is the best win of my career,” Singh, 18, said after the match. “She’s number six in the world, and that’s the highest win I’ve ever had in my squash career.”

She made history even before Sunday’s match began when her semifinal victory made her the first Indian woman to reach the singles final at the Asian Games.

Earlier in the day, Pakistan picked up two more bronze medals at the games as third seed Noor Zaman toppled compatriot Ashab Irfan 3-0 in the bronze medal match. Watanabe took a 3-1 win over Hong Kong’s Sin Yuk Chan.

Shehbaz Sharif speaks as Islamabad, Riyadh and Ankara army chiefs meet to discuss Mecca pact, closer military ties.

Pakistan’s prime minister has condemned Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, warning that any “threat to the sanctity” of the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina is a “red line that must never be crossed”.

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Friday, Shehbaz Sharif denounced recent Houthi attacks as “deplorable”.

He added that an attack by the Iran-aligned Yemeni group, which Riyadh says targeted Mecca, “outraged Muslims across the globe”. The Houthis have dismissed the accusations as a “heinous lie”.

Last month, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkiye signed a trilateral defence pact, formally known as the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement. The pact states that an attack on any member will be treated as an attack on all. However, Islamabad and Ankara have refrained from getting involved in Riyadh’s ongoing fight with the Houthis.

The ⁠military ⁠chiefs of all three countries met in Riyadh on Friday and ⁠discussed enhancing intelligence sharing and military ⁠coordination, ‌the Pakistani military said. The chiefs reviewed the security situation and ⁠threats facing Saudi Arabia, ⁠affirmed a commitment to collective defence and ⁠pledged to turn ⁠Mecca Agreement commitments into effective cooperation, the ‌army added.

It is not clear what, if any, support Ankara and Islamabad may provide to Riyadh. In a written interview published by the US media outlet Newsweek on Friday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said support could include “intelligence, logistics or ammunition, with more extensive military assistance possible depending on the scale of the threat”.

Iran and Palestine

In Sharif’s UN address, he also referenced the US-Israeli war that was launched against Iran in late February, as well as Islamabad’s role as a co-mediator.

Pakistan’s efforts culminated in the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, signed by Washington and Tehran, which was intended to help end the conflict.

The accord has since unravelled while regional countries push for a conclusive end to the war, which has caused a global energy crisis and exacerbated tensions across the Middle East.

“Yet amid the roar of missiles, drones and guns, the voice for diplomacy must echo even louder and stronger,” Sharif said.

He added that the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has effectively blockaded, and the Bab al-Mandeb waterway, which is now largely under Houthi control, are “arteries of the global economy” that should remain free and safe.

The Pakistani prime minister also denounced what he described as Israel’s “genocidal agenda” in Palestine, while condemning “Israeli aggression against Lebanon and Syria”. These were sentiments echoed earlier in the day by Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam in his UN General Assembly address.

India, Kashmir, Afghanistan

Closer to home, Sharif’s speech touched on tensions with Pakistan’s neighbours.

Criticising India, he accused New Delhi of weaponising the Indus waters, which both countries have jointly managed for more than six decades. The two neighbours heavily rely on the Himalayan river network.

Sharif warned that “any attempt to stop, impede or divert Pakistan’s share of the waters will be treated as an act of war”.

He also called for what he described as a “just and fair solution” to the Kashmir dispute, which both Pakistan and India claim in its entirety. Sharif alleged that there have been attempts to “alter the legal status” of Kashmir through demographic engineering.

Another pressing issue for Islamabad is the threat posed by the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban. Sharif said groups operate from “sanctuaries inside Afghanistan, with the aim of destabilising Pakistan”, insisting that attacks launched from Afghanistan “must come to a grinding halt”.

This comes as the latest cross-border fighting left several Afghan Taliban fighters dead on Friday.

Pakistani security forces report ongoing cross-border fire in latest escalation in fighting between the neighbours.

Pakistan has foiled an “attempted Afghan aggression” on the Pakistan-Afghan border.

Pakistani security sources said several Afghan members of the Taliban were killed in an intermittent exchange of fire in the Gulistan area of the border on Friday and that fighting was ongoing.

There has been no official confirmation from either country involved.

The Afghan government said on Thursday that it would deliver an “appropriate response” to Pakistani air attacks on 10 locations in Afghanistan earlier in the day.

The strikes were in response to a “deliberate and unlawful incursion into Pakistan by drones” on Wednesday, Pakistani Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said on Thursday.

Tarar said in a post on his X account that Pakistan’s aerial and drone attacks hit “terrorist hideouts and support infrastructure including drone launching and storage sites”.

He also posted a video said to show the military strikes on the Afghan sites.

Afghanistan’s government spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid said the air strikes targeted Kandahar, Paktia and Khost provinces.

Taliban officials denied that their government launched drones against Pakistan on Wednesday.

The air raids on Thursday were carried out amid growing tensions between the former allies over attacks by armed groups in Pakistan, which triggered their worst fighting in years in February.

Islamabad accuses Kabul of harbouring fighters who stage cross-border attacks, but Afghanistan’s government denies harbouring anti-Pakistani armed groups and says the attacks are Pakistan’s internal problem.

The escalation threatens mediation efforts by China, Turkiye, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to broker a lasting peace between the two neighbours.

Islamabad, Pakistan — The motorway linking Pakistan’s capital with Peshawar, about 180km (110 miles) to the northwest, has been closed to all traffic until further notice, according to a police notification.

So have the highway towards Dera Ismail Khan, the Hazara motorway and the Grand Trunk Road at Attock.

Each carries traffic between Islamabad and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the province governed by the party of jailed former Prime Minister Imran Khan, whose supporters plan to march on the capital on Sunday, September 27, demanding his release.

The motorway from Lahore, about 375km (235 miles) to the southeast, remains open.

Inside Islamabad, workers have welded shipping containers together and filled them with gravel and sand so they cannot be pushed aside. Several schools and colleges have been told to shut so police brought in from Punjab and Sindh can be housed there.

Police expect the march to draw between 20,000 and 25,000 people, according to local media reports.

While two of the country’s main opposition parties announced marches on the capital this month, only Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) has faced measures on this scale.

Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), a religious party, also set out for Islamabad last week to protest against rising fuel prices. On Monday, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif telephoned its leader, Hafiz Naeemur Rehman, and by Tuesday afternoon JI had postponed its march, pending a meeting between the two men.

PTI leaders have received no such call.

Instead, Khan’s three sisters, all over the age of 65, have been detained in Lahore and at least six of the party’s legislators in Islamabad, all under a 1960 public order law that allows preventive detention without charge.

PTI says the true figure of those arrested is higher, and that one lawmaker taken from the parliament lodges has not been traced since.

Khan has been in prison since August 2023 and remains Pakistan’s most prominent opposition figure. But his party enters the final stretch before the protest weakened, with no major demonstration outside Khyber Pakhtunkhwa since November 2024, by its own account.

Yet, say analysts, the Pakistani government appears to be treating the protest march as a far bigger threat than a regular political event would warrant.

“While this is undoubtedly a difficult moment for PTI, it is equally exposing the government’s own frustration,” Habib Akram, a Lahore-based political analyst, told Al Jazeera.

“In fact, the government’s conduct suggests something more. It isn’t just afraid of this protest; it has turned this protest into a matter of its own survival.”

A capital behind containers

More than 2,000 containers have been placed across Islamabad and at Attock Bridge, the main crossing between Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab, according to media reports, with 19,000 police officers on their way from Punjab and Sindh, and thousands more deployed at Attock.

Dawn, the country’s leading English-language newspaper, said in an editorial that the government appeared to be preparing “not for a political event but an invasion”.

Talal Chaudhry, the junior interior minister, rejected the suggestion that the government was shutting down the capital itself.

“Normal life in Islamabad is continuing. Hospitals, offices and essential services are functioning. The containers and security arrangements are precautionary measures, not a shutdown,” he told Al Jazeera.

Rana Ihsaan Afzal, a coordinator to the prime minister and a government spokesperson, was more candid.

“In trying to counter the rhetoric PTI has adopted, we do have to take certain measures, and yes, those measures carry their own consequences too, but we have to look at the bigger picture,” he told Al Jazeera.

It is all being mounted during one of the deadliest weeks for Pakistan’s security forces this year.

An attack on a police compound in Kohat, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, killed more than 20 people on September 18, and six soldiers were killed in a gunfight in nearby Hangu two days later.

Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi set those losses against the march in Lahore on Monday.

“The situation in KP [Khyber Pakhtunkhwa] over the past 10 days is before everyone. There was a suicide attack on a mosque, and two or three other attacks. Our captain was killed, our soldiers were killed, our policemen were killed, and these people are preparing to storm a city,” he said.

The government’s case

Government ministers have seized on a remark by Junaid Akbar, PTI’s chief in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, who said protesters would turn Islamabad into Somnath, a Hindu temple in India sacked by Mehmood of Ghazni, an 11th-century invader, to try to paint the upcoming protest as a major law and order threat.

“Peaceful people do not leave their homes carrying nail-studded sticks,” Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said in Kohat on Monday.

But the PTI’s Sohail Afridi, the chief minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, who will lead the September 27 march, answered Tarar in Peshawar on Monday.

“We will go there on nothing but two hands and two feet. There will be nothing else in our hands,” he said.

In a September 18 judgement, the Islamabad High Court ruled that no party could block roads into the capital, and barred provincial governments from using state resources for the march.

Days later came the arrests of Imran Khan’s sisters. Aleema Khan was detained in Lahore on Sunday, and her sisters, Uzma Khan and Noreen Niazi, were taken in a predawn raid on their homes the next day, according to a family statement on September 22.

The Lahore High Court has reserved its decision on whether a petition challenging Aleema’s detention is admissible, after the family’s lawyer argued that the order was issued after the arrest.

Chaudhry said the sisters faced several cases, had led confrontational protests in the past, and were being held as a preventive measure.

PTI says the arrests reach far wider, listing five members of the National Assembly, a senator, provincial legislators and more than 1,500 workers.

“We were peaceful, we are peaceful, and we will remain peaceful. We are being punished for being peaceful,” Gohar Ali Khan, the PTI chairman, said in Peshawar on Monday, noting that four women from Khan’s family, including his wife Bushra Bibi, are now in jail.

‘Long march’ vs ‘permanent plan of action’

But Interior Minister Naqvi suggested that the government is bracing for a confrontation.

“I think this time we will draw up a permanent plan of action. We will not go halfway,” Naqvi said in Lahore on Monday, adding that the matter would be settled “once and for all”.

What he ruled out was a long sit-in of the kind PTI has staged before.

“This time, it will not happen that they come, and the country is shut down for 10 or 20 days. That possibility does not exist,” he said.

Afridi has signalled that he has exactly that in mind.

“The long march is not a T20, it will be a Test match,” he said on Monday, a reference to cricket’s five-day format.

If Naqvi’s comments sound ominous, they also carry a history with them.

On May 9, 2023, after Imran Khan was briefly arrested, his supporters attacked military installations across the country, including burning down a senior commander’s official residence in Lahore. That led to a major crackdown on the PTI’s supporters and leaders, with hundreds placed under arrest for days, and party leaders pressured to leave the group.

Then, on November 26, 2024, a PTI march on Islamabad ended in an overnight crackdown by security forces, in which the party says at least 12 of its supporters were killed. The government denies that, and says four security personnel died — even though Al Jazeera met families of some of the PTI supporters killed.

A contested mandate

PTI was stripped of its electoral symbol before the February 2024 general election, forcing its candidates to run as independents.

They still won 93 seats, more than any other party, but could not form a coalition, and the Pakistan Muslim League – Nawaz took power with other major parties.

A Commonwealth observer group, in its report on the polls released a year later, found that decisions by key institutions had “consistently limited the ability of one particular party” to contest the vote, in a reference to the PTI.

While the Election Commission of Pakistan rejected allegations of rigging, two and a half years on, the popularity scale remains tilted in favour of PTI.

Bilal Gilani, executive director of the pollster Gallup Pakistan, said its unpublished Public Opinion Pulse surveys showed a landscape broadly similar to 2024.

“PTI continues to lead nationally, but faces strong competition from PML-N in Punjab and PPP in Sindh,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that Khan remained the country’s most popular leader.

For Akram, that unresolved argument — over the lack of legitimacy of the 2024 election in the eyes of Pakistanis — is what keeps the pressure on.

“You can hold as much power as you want, but that question never fully goes away. It continues to haunt you, and it continues to be a source of anxiety for the government,” Akram said.

The ‘hard state’

In March 2025, army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir, who now also serves as Pakistan’s chief of defence forces, told a parliamentary security committee that the country must stop acting as a “soft state”.

“How long will we continue to sacrifice countless lives in a manner of a soft state?” he asked, according to state broadcaster PTV.

For Ahmed Ijaz, an Islamabad-based political analyst, the response to the September 27 march is a response to that thinking, rather than the PTI’s strength.

“Behind that confidence lies the thinking of a hard state, one that has decided no one will be granted an unconditional right to protest going forward,” he said.

Akram, however, said that a different factor might also be worrying the government and the military behind it.

The war in the Middle East has pushed petrol to 393.75 rupees ($1.42) a litre ($5.37 per gallon), up about 51 rupees ($0.18) since the start of September. That is what Jamaat-e-Islami was marching against, and it has warned that it will resume its march in October if the prime minister offers no relief.

Akram said the government’s real worry is multiple issues of antigovernment anger — price rises and Imran Khan’s continued incarceration — coming together.

“That merging could then pull other groups out onto the streets too, and that is precisely what worries the government,” he said.

Strikes carried out in southeastern province of Khost cause no casualties, governor’s office says.

Pakistan says it has carried out air strikes on 10 locations in Afghanistan used to store and launch drones, some of which were used in cross-border attacks.

The air strikes on Thursday were carried out as tensions grow between the former allies over attacks by armed groups in Pakistan, which triggered their worst fighting in years in February.

Islamabad accuses Kabul of harbouring fighters who stage cross-border attacks, but Afghanistan’s Taliban government denies harbouring anti-Pakistani armed groups and says the attacks are Pakistan’s internal problem.

The air strikes were “deliberate, precise, calibrated, and proportionate, and strictly limited to identified military objectives directly linked to the attempted attacks against Pakistan”, Pakistani Information Minister Attaullah Tarar wrote on X.

He condemned a “deliberate and unlawful incursion into Pakistan by drones” on Wednesday.

“This constitutes a blatant violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and is a grave and unacceptable act of aggression,” he said.

The Pakistani air strikes were conducted in several areas of Khost province in southeastern Afghanistan, Mustaghfir Gurbaz, spokesperson for the Khost governor, said.

There were no casualties, ⁠he said.

An attack on a police facility in northwestern Pakistan last week that killed at least 21 people has reignited ⁠fighting between the countries after nearly three months of ⁠relative calm. A Pakistan Taliban faction claimed responsibility for the blast and subsequent gun battle.

On Monday, air strikes targeting three locations in northeastern Afghanistan killed three civilians in the Nurgal district of Kunar province, Afghan officials said. Islamabad said it killed 28 “terrorists”.

The escalation threatens mediation efforts by China, Turkiye, Qatar and Saudi Arabia to broker a lasting peace between the two neighbours.

Relations between the former allies have been strained since the fighting in February, the worst for years.

Islamabad, Pakistan – On September 16, a delegation from Powerus, a year-old United States drone company backed by two sons of President Donald Trump, was received by Pakistan’s military chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, at military headquarters in Rawalpindi.

A day later, the company announced it had received a “limited procurement order” from Pakistan’s Ministry of Defence for unmanned aerial systems. It also said it had signed a separate memorandum of understanding (MoU) with senior Pakistani defence officials.

Neither the value of the order nor the systems involved have been disclosed. But for analysts studying Pakistan’s venture in drone technology, even bigger concerns have arisen from information that has since emerged.

Less than three months earlier, the same company had given an Indian defence manufacturer the exclusive right to make and sell its drone interceptor technology in India. And one of the cofounders of Powerus is an Israeli military veteran. Pakistan does not recognise Israel and accuses it of carrying out a genocide in Gaza.

Analysts are questioning why a country that already builds its own drones and buys others from China and Turkiye would turn to a company that was founded only last year – and has links to Israel and sells drones to India too.

“Pakistan technically already makes or is capable of making each of the drones shown by Powerus,” Bilal Khan, founder of the Quwa Group, a Toronto-based defence news and market intelligence platform, told Al Jazeera. “It’s unclear where Powerus fits in the long term [from Pakistan’s perspective].”

What did Pakistan sign?

In its statement on the meeting, Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), the Pakistani military’s media wing, said the two sides discussed cooperation in defence procurement, production and capacity building.

The statement did not mention the MoU.

But Powerus told Al Jazeera which institutions were involved. “The MoU was signed with the Pakistan army. The related procurement order was placed by Pakistan’s Ministry of Defence,” a company spokesperson said.

In its own statement, Powerus said the memorandum was not a definitive agreement, created no purchase obligation and would be subject to US laws and government approvals.

“We are proud to support Pakistan’s Ministry of Defence, and the memorandum gives both sides a strategic framework to build upon,” Brett Velicovich, the company’s cofounder, said in the statement.

According to media reports, Velicovich has also said the company is exploring ways to build technology in Pakistan.

The ISPR, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.

Founded in 2025 and based in Florida, Powerus is set to merge with Aureus Greenway Holdings, a Nasdaq-listed company that owns golf courses in the US state, in a deal expected to close in the final quarter of this year.

Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump, President Trump’s oldest sons, are investors in Powerus through a vehicle called American Ventures, which is expected to hold a 9.9 percent beneficial stake in the combined company, according to US regulatory filings.

A spokesperson for Donald Trump Jr has told media outlets that he is a passive investor with no role in the company’s operations or contracts and had no prior knowledge of the Pakistan deals.

The White House has said there are no conflicts of interest.

The company makes about 3,000 interceptor drones a month, according to media reports, and last month won a US Air Force contract with a ceiling of up to $90m.

Asked how it addresses conflict of interest questions while pursuing government defence work in the US and abroad, Powerus said the Trump brothers played no part in its operations.

“Trump’s sons are not advisers to Powerus and have no involvement in how the company runs its business or structures its defence relationships, domestically or internationally. They hold no corporate-governance role. Our government relationships are pursued on their own merits,” the company told Al Jazeera.

The India question

Powerus’s first deal in South Asia, however, was not in Pakistan.

It was in India, Pakistan’s archrival, with which Pakistan fought a brief but intense conflict in May last year, one in which drones were used by both sides.

In a June 30 filing to India’s stock exchanges, Paras Defence and Space Technologies said Powerus had granted it an exclusive licence to manufacture and sell its Guardian-1 interceptor technology in India.

Mansoor Ahmed, an honorary lecturer at the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, said Washington has long armed rival states.

“The US has previously sold F-16s to Greece and Turkiye and Egypt and Israel and is now selling F-35s to Saudi Arabia, which Israel already operates,” he told Al Jazeera.

A former Pakistani government defence analyst who spoke on condition of anonymity said Pakistani planners had probably known about the Indian deal.

“Pakistan’s defence planners were likely aware of Powerus’s engagement with India,” he told Al Jazeera.

This isn’t the first time that Pakistan and India have ended up buying military equipment from the same company, the defence analyst pointed out. He cited the build-up to the conflict over the Siachen Glacier, where India launched Operation Meghdoot in April 1984 to take control of the heights.

“In 1983, Pakistan ordered high-altitude warfare gear from a London supplier, unaware that the same firm also provided gear to the Indian army, and subsequently, India learnt of it and planned Operation Meghdoot in 1984,” he said.

The analyst said the burden now lies with the company.

“In the present case, the challenge is more for Powerus than Pakistan or India as Powerus’s management must ensure it can manage and meet the requirements of two adversaries without jeopardising either side’s operational security.”

A retired Pakistan air force air marshal who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak publicly said the arrangement carries risks for Pakistan.

“Two adversary countries procuring from the same source has its pitfalls, especially when one of the adversaries has taken the lead as well as has a larger financial capacity,” he told Al Jazeera.

An Israeli link

The company’s leadership also has links to Israel, a country Pakistan does not recognise.

Powerus’s website described one of its cofounders, Ziv Marom, as a veteran of the Israeli military and said he founded Kaizen Aerospace, now a Powerus subsidiary.

Another senior executive, Justin Gans, the company’s vice president for mergers and acquisitions and a former member of the US Navy SEAL special forces, served as a vice president at Elbit Systems of America, the US arm of the Israeli defence company Elbit Systems, from 2018 to 2019.

A retired three-star army Pakistani general who served in senior roles before retiring in 2019 and requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject said such a background would normally draw attention during vetting.

“So under normal circumstances, a cofounder’s service in the Israeli military would be flagged as a sensitivity marker, even if the company itself is American,” he told Al Jazeera.

“In other words, for a serious acquisition, this background would be scrutinised carefully. For a political MoU, it may not have been a decisive factor.”

Quwa’s Khan, however, said Pakistan has long accepted Israeli components inside US or European systems.

“We can see that, generally, as long as there’s a country in the middle, Pakistan does not have qualms being in close proximity to Israel,” he said. “However, the two sides very, very rarely talk to each other.”

What drone technology does Pakistan already have?

Beyond questions over who else Powerus works with, analysts said the more fundamental issue is what Pakistan actually needs from the company.

Pakistan’s air force has publicly displayed Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 and Akinci drones, Chinese-made Wing Loong II drones and the domestically developed Shahpar-II.

China supplied 80 percent of Pakistan’s arms imports from 2021 to 2025, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

This month, the Pakistan air force revealed in a video that it had incorporated into its forces China’s HQ-17AE air defence missile system and Turkiye’s Korkut anti-aircraft gun and Sahin counterdrone system, all built to take on drones and other low-flying threats.

Khan said the state-owned Heavy Industries Taxila was also working with private firms to develop interceptor drones.

“So as it stands, Pakistan is following all the right best practices to build its C-UAS posture,” he said, referring to counterdrone systems.

“For Pakistan, the challenge isn’t whether it can get the designs but whether it can produce or induct these in large enough numbers fast enough.”

An official at a private drone manufacturer in Rawalpindi who requested anonymity because he is not authorised to speak to the media said Pakistan’s drone market has grown well beyond state-run firms.

Dozens of private companies and more than half a dozen state-owned enterprises now make drones besides the army’s own production facilities, he said. According to him, Powerus would have to compete with all of them on the quality of its products.

The retired general offered a different reading of why Pakistan might be interested in a tie-up with a US firm.

“The gap is not drone manufacturing. It is electronics, integration and systems-level capability, which is where American firms traditionally dominate,” he said. “How far this particular company can help in this regard is a million-dollar question.”

Powerus’s Guardian interceptors are small, low-cost drones designed to knock down incoming drones. They are a weapon widely used by both sides in the war in Ukraine.

Hammad Waleed, a research associate at the Islamabad-based Strategic Vision Institute, said such systems fill a cost gap that conventional air defences cannot.

“Traditional air defences use costly missiles against incoming cheaper drones,” he told Al Jazeera. “Interceptor drones are way cheaper and easier to operate than traditional air defences.”

Capability or signalling?

The retired Pakistani general, who has experience with defence production, said a supplier of this kind would normally face financial, technical and security checks as well as a review of its track record.

“A company less than a year old, not yet listed and without a delivery record would not usually clear these checks for a strategic defence partnership,” he said.

“Such firms are typically considered too immature unless the MoU is political signalling rather than a procurement decision.”

Khan agreed that the process has been unusual.

“Yes, the way this deal came about is not generally in line with how the procurement heads of the tri-services typically operate,” he said, referring to the three branches of Pakistan’s military.

The Powerus agreements were made as Munir has built close ties with President Trump, who has called him “my favourite field marshal” and praised him on several occasions during the past 15 months.

In September last year, weeks after Pakistan signed a $500m critical minerals agreement with a US company, Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif met President Trump at the White House, where the Pakistani leaders presented him with samples of Pakistani minerals.

In January, Pakistan also signed an MoU with an affiliate of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s main cryptocurrency business.

Khan said Pakistan’s security establishment needs to ask what it is getting in return for that closeness.

“There was a time when such gains were measured in F-16s and the billions in US financial assistance, yet today, we are seeing more photo ops and supposed pacts that obligate the armed forces, but are they helping the armed forces as a fighting force?”

He also offered what he called a “less cynical take”.

Pakistan has a growing number of drone start-ups that lack the capital to build production facilities, he said, and ties with Powerus could draw US investment into them.

“So there is an argument that building rapport with Powerus and its backers can lead to that capital,” Khan said.

Ahmed said Pakistan is looking beyond a single purchase.

“Pakistan’s primary interest appears to be the acquisition of state-of-the-art drone technologies that also allow for local production and indigenisation,” he said.

What about China and Turkiye?

The retired Pakistani general said bringing in a foreign private company could overlap with Pakistan’s existing Chinese and Turkish partnerships.

“It has the potential of being seen by Turkiye and China as Pakistan hedging politically,” he said.

Khan, however, disagreed.

“There’d be no issue with the Turks as they work with US companies all the time and the drones on offer by Powerus don’t overlap with the ones NASTP is designing with Turkiye,” he said, referring to Pakistan’s National Aerospace Science and Technology Park.

He added that any Powerus designs built cheaply in Pakistan would still rely on Chinese parts.

“With the Chinese, it’d be less of an issue because, ultimately, the only way to make these Powerus designs at a low enough cost for the Pakistani armed forces to induct is to literally import the upstream subassemblies from China.”

Waleed said the deal would not dent Pakistan’s defence ties with Beijing and Ankara.

“Pakistan is prioritising China and Turkiye for the sophisticated and modern combat systems in the drone and counterdrone domain. That relationship is not only unaffected and is going upwards in trajectory,” he said.

For now, Khan said, the real test of the Powerus deal would be what follows it.

“I would not pass judgement on the Powerus deal yet, but we can track whether it’s serious by seeing if the MoD [Ministry of Defence] signs similar deals with other foreign and local vendors in the coming months,” he said.

“Basically, will we see a consistent pattern moving forward, or will this be a one-off?”

Fidan highlights Turkiye’s readiness to assist Saudi Arabia militarily, as Houthi attacks escalate in Yemen.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has said that Saudi Arabia may have unmet military needs from the attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels and that Turkiye would consider how to support the kingdom as part of a trilateral defence pact.

Speaking to Turkish broadcaster NTV on Friday, Fidan said it was unacceptable for Saudi Arabia to be dragged into the US-Iran war, adding that Riyadh had no desire to join the conflict.

He added that proposals had been conveyed to all sides in an effort to end the fighting, without further elaborating.

The Iran-backed Houthi rebels and Saudi Arabia continue trading attacks in an escalating war in Yemen, as the Houthis press gains that have brought large stretches of the Red Sea coast, including the strategic Bab al-Mandeb Strait, under their control.

Pakistan has made a similar pledge to defend Saudi Arabia under the defence pact.

Lieutenant-General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, a spokesperson for Pakistan’s military, told Arab News on Thursday that Islamabad would defend Saudi Arabia “to any extent”, including “physically”, though he did not say whether Riyadh had asked for more Pakistani troops.

Pakistan’s Foreign Office has said no military response is currently under discussion under the pact, adding that Islamabad would act “when time comes”.

The trilateral agreement, known as the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, was signed on August 7 in Mecca by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.

The three countries formally named the arrangement the Mecca Defence Alliance on August 31, after officials meeting in Istanbul agreed to set up a secretariat in Riyadh, to be headed initially by a Pakistani secretary-general.

Its founding principle is that an armed attack against any one of the three states will be treated as an attack against all three.

Fidan said at the time the alliance was built on “respecting the sovereignty of other states, territorial integrity and not intervening in internal affairs”, and remained open to other countries joining.

Analysts have questioned how much substance lies behind the pact so far, noting it lacks the integrated command structure and standing forces that underpin NATO.

Its institutional shape, including how the mutual defence clause would actually be triggered, remains unclear.

The trilateral pact was struck as Gulf states grow increasingly concerned about being pulled into the wider US-Iran war, which has continued for more than six months since Washington and Israel first struck Iran in February.

New Delhi, India – On the morning of August 26, the Himalayan landscape above Nepal’s Rasuwa district changed in minutes.

A mass of ice and rock broke loose high in the mountains and sent a violent surge of water, mud and debris down the Lhende Khola River. The torrent travelled through valleys, swept away settlements and infrastructure and eventually reached the Nepal-China border.

What followed was not simply a flood.

It was a chain reaction.

By mid-September, more than 1,400 people had been reported dead and at least 6,000 remained missing in Nepal and across the border in Tibet. Twelve hydropower plants were destroyed, while roads, bridges and homes were buried or washed away.

The scale of the destruction has left scientists and disaster managers confronting a difficult question: How do you warn communities about a disaster whose trigger may occur high above them, in terrain that is difficult to monitor and where there may be only minutes to react?

Basanta Raj Adhikari, director of the Centre for Disaster Studies at Tribhuvan University in Kathmandu, described the event to Al Jazeera as unprecedented in size, affected area and mechanism. His estimate suggested that the energy involved was greater than that released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb, a comparison intended to illustrate the scale of the physical forces involved rather than suggest that the event was equivalent to a nuclear explosion.

For scientists who study the Himalayas, the disaster demonstrated how quickly an event originating in a remote, high-altitude environment can become a regional catastrophe.

And Nepal is not alone.

The warning problem

A warming climate is altering glaciers, snow cover, permafrost and high-altitude lakes. At the same time, roads, hydropower projects, tourist facilities and settlements have pushed deeper into mountain valleys.

That combination is creating a new risk landscape in which one hazard can trigger another.

An avalanche can block a river. A blocked river can form a temporary lake. A sudden release can become a debris flow. That debris can destroy a road or bridge, block another river and create another flood downstream.

The August disaster in Nepal showed how quickly such a sequence can unfold. It also exposed a weakness in the way early-warning systems are often designed.

Many systems are built around a particular hazard: rainfall, river level or glacial lake outburst flood. But the Himalayas do not always respect those categories.

In July, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, or ICIMOD, warned that a below-normal monsoon should not be interpreted as a safer one.

“The biggest misunderstanding is that less seasonal rainfall means lower flood risk,” said Saswata Sanyal, a disaster risk reduction specialist at ICIMOD.

“A drier monsoon can still be a dangerous monsoon,” he added, warning that seasonal averages cannot capture the cloudbursts capable of producing catastrophic flooding in mountain valleys.

The Nepal disaster went a step further.

The immediate trigger was not simply heavy rainfall.

Scientists have been examining an ice-rock avalanche and other possible processes that temporarily obstructed the river system before releasing a destructive surge. ICIMOD has described the event as an ice avalanche rather than a conventional glacial lake outburst flood, while other scientists have examined the role of local seismic activity and other high-altitude processes.

That distinction matters.

A warning system waiting for rainfall or a rising river may not provide enough time when the real trigger happens several kilometres upstream and above the line of sight of the communities below.

Kashmir’s warning signs

Thousands of kilometres away, scientists studying Kashmir’s Himalayas are seeing another part of the same problem.

A study published in the Journal of Glaciology this year mapped 155 glacial lakes above 2,500 metres (8,200ft) across the Himalayas in Indian-administered Kashmir.

The researchers found that the area of ice-contact proglacial lakes – bodies of water that form directly against the margin of a melting glacier, trapped by moraine ridges, bedrock basins, or ice dams – had increased by 26 percent between 1992 and 2024.

Five lakes were classified as having very high susceptibility to glacial lake outburst floods.

An outburst from those lakes, the researchers found, could threaten several thousand buildings, 15 major bridges, roads and a hydropower project.

More significantly, the study warned that hazards could occur in chains, with an upstream lake outburst potentially triggering secondary events downstream.

For Irfan Rashid, a glaciologist and associate professor at the University of Kashmir who co-authored the study, the implications extend beyond individual lakes.

Rashid recently told Al Jazeera that without action, the melting, thinning, and destabilisation of glaciers, seasonal snow cover, and permafrost along the Hindu Kush-Himalayas system would increase, and water shortages could become a major problem across the Upper Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra basins by the end of the century.

That is why the Nepal disaster resonates in Kashmir.

The landscapes are different, the rivers are different and the individual hazards may differ. But the underlying problem is increasingly similar: Communities living downstream of a rapidly changing high-altitude environment may have little time to respond when something breaks loose above them.

The challenge is particularly acute in places where roads, bridges and hydropower projects occupy narrow valleys.

Once a mountain river begins carrying enormous quantities of rock, ice and mud, infrastructure designed for conventional floods can quickly become irrelevant.

Pakistan has already begun building a warning network

The same concern runs across the western Himalayas and Karakoram ranges.

The Gilgit-Baltistan region in Pakistan-administered Kashmir contains hundreds of glaciers and glacial lakes, while communities and infrastructure sit along valleys exposed to sudden floods and landslides.

Pakistan has responded by expanding early-warning infrastructure.

Under a United Nations-supported programme, early-warning systems, evacuation shelters, disaster-management centres and other protective measures have been established in vulnerable valleys.

But technology alone cannot solve the problem. A sensor can detect a change. Someone still has to receive the message. Someone has to understand what it means. And people downstream have to have a route to safety.

That last part is often the weakest link. A siren is useful only if the people hearing it know where to go. An automatic warning is useful only if it arrives before the flood. A satellite image is useful only if the information can be converted into a decision quickly enough to save lives.

This is why disaster scientists increasingly talk about anticipatory action rather than simply disaster response.

“The era of preparing for a single, predictable hazard is over,” Sanyal said earlier this year. “Anticipatory action and early warning must now be the foundation.”

The infrastructure trap

The Himalayas are also becoming more heavily engineered.

Hydropower is central to Nepal’s economy. Roads are being expanded. Border crossings are growing in importance. Tourism is pushing deeper into remote valleys.

The benefits are obvious. So are the risks.

The August disaster struck an area where hydropower infrastructure was concentrated along the river corridor. At least 900 workers were believed to have been inside tunnels and other facilities in the aftermath, making rescue operations extraordinarily difficult. Two workers were eventually pulled alive from a hydropower tunnel nine days after the disaster.

The question is no longer simply whether infrastructure can withstand a flood. It is whether planners have adequately considered what happens when a flood is carrying an enormous mass of rock and ice, when a river changes course, or when one mountain hazard triggers another.

For decades, engineering risk assessments have often relied on historical records. But history becomes a less reliable guide when the physical conditions producing disasters are changing.

A river that flooded once every several decades may no longer behave according to the same pattern. A glacier that appeared stable from satellite imagery may sit beneath an increasingly unstable slope. A lake that was considered remote may suddenly become a threat to a road, village or power plant hundreds of metres below.

The border problem

There is another complication that no satellite can solve on its own.

Borders.

The Himalayas are divided among countries with different political systems, security concerns and approaches to sharing information. But rivers do not stop at international boundaries. Neither do floods.

The August disaster reached the Nepal-China border and damaged the Gyirong crossing, an important trade and pilgrimage route. The disaster also raised questions about how quickly information about hazards in high mountain areas can move between countries.

This is where regional cooperation becomes more than a diplomatic slogan, experts say. A sensor positioned in one country can provide warning to people in another. A satellite image collected over one mountain range can reveal a developing hazard that threatens a valley downstream. A river gauge can provide critical information before floodwaters reach a settlement.

The technical capability already exists in many cases. The missing piece is often the architecture connecting it.

A 2026 assessment of Himalayan disaster risks has argued for stronger monitoring, early-warning systems and regional coordination because hazards are increasingly interconnected.

The idea is simple: Information about a mountain hazard should not stop at the same line where a political boundary begins.

From Nepal to Sikkim to Kashmir

The August disaster in Nepal isn’t a tragedy belonging to one country, point out experts.

The Kashmir Himalayas study has already identified lakes capable of producing destructive outburst floods and has warned of cascading processes.

Northeast India’s Sikkim provides another example.

After the 2023 South Lhonak glacial lake outburst flood killed dozens and damaged major infrastructure, India expanded monitoring and mitigation efforts.

Today, 40 high-risk glacial lakes have been identified in Sikkim, including 16 placed in the highest-risk category, with authorities working on drainage, flood-retention and other protective measures.

But the lesson from each disaster is broadly the same: Waiting for a disaster to prove the risk is the most expensive form of preparedness.

The Third Pole test

The Himalayas are sometimes called the Third Pole because they contain one of the world’s largest concentrations of snow and ice outside the Arctic and Antarctic.

Major Asian rivers depend on water originating in these mountains. Hundreds of millions of people live downstream.

That makes the changing Himalayas not only an environmental issue but a security, infrastructure and humanitarian one.

The August disaster demonstrated the most frightening version of that future. A mountain can collapse without warning. A river can become a weapon of debris. A hydropower tunnel can become a trap. A border crossing can disappear in minutes. And by the time people downstream understand what is happening, the water may already be there.

It’s a future that a region stretching from northeast India, spanning Tibet, Nepal, Kashmir and Pakistan, can no longer ignore. Yet disaster management remains largely divided by national boundaries. That contradiction is becoming harder to navigate.

The next glacial collapse could begin in Kashmir. It could begin in Pakistan’s high mountains. It could begin in Sikkim, Nepal or Tibet.

Wherever it starts, the same question will follow the mountain downstream: Who knew, how early did they know, and did the warning reach the people in time?

For a region entering an era of increasingly complex mountain hazards, that may be the real measure of whether the Third Pole is prepared.

DEVELOPING STORYDEVELOPING STORY,

Attack not immediately claimed, but an ISIL affiliate and the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) are both active in the region and regularly target troops.

A bomb attack at a mosque in Pakistan’s restive north-west has killed at least 15 people, with more than 50 reported injured.

An explosive-laden car was rammed into the entrance of a mosque at a police headquarters in Kohat, in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa near the Afghan border, as people gathered for Friday prayers.

At least 15 bodies and more than 50 injured people were taken to hospital in the town, Dr Tahir Shah said, according to the dpa news agency. The death toll could rise as several injured people were in a critical condition, he added.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. However, both a regional affiliate of the ISIL armed group and the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) are active in the region and regularly target security forces.

Violence has surged in Pakistan’s remote regions near the Afghan border in recent years. Islamabad accuses Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers of allowing militants who orchestrate attacks in Pakistan to operate from Afghan territory.

Officials in Kabul deny the accusation. However, the issue has seen the pair swap strikes across the border across recent months.

More to come…

Islamabad, Pakistan — More than 16 months after India and Pakistan fought a four-day air war, firing missiles and drones at each other, the South Asian neighbours came the closest since then to a military face-off — this time in the Arabian Sea.

Indian and Pakistani naval vessels collided on Tuesday, setting off tit-for-tat accusations. Pakistan’s government summoned India’s top diplomat in Islamabad on Wednesday, mirroring action New Delhi had taken hours earlier when it summoned Pakistan’s charge d’affaires and lodged a protest of its own over the incident.

The collision is the first direct military encounter between the nuclear-armed neighbours since their four-day conflict in May 2025, when Indian air strikes and Pakistani retaliation brought both countries closer to full-scale war than at any point in decades.

So far, details of what happened remain disputed. Neither government has released video, track data or an independent account – and each statement places the blame on the other’s vessel.

But analysts say it underscored the risks of unintended incidents in the seas that could potentially escalate into broader crises, when India and Pakistan have few military and diplomatic mechanisms left in place to defuse tensions.

Two accounts

According to Pakistan’s Foreign Office statement issued on Wednesday evening, the navy has been conducting its biennial SEASPARK-26 exercise inside its exclusive economic zone since September 1 .

A country’s EEZ extends 200 nautical miles (370km) from its coast. Its territorial waters are only 12 nautical miles (22km) from the coast, with the rest of the EEZ in international waters. While vessels from other countries can pass through a nation’s EEZ in international waters unencumbered, they cannot exploit the waters economically: that right belongs only to the country whose EEZ it is.

Pakistan said that an Indian vessel, identified as the guided-missile destroyer INS Kolkata, had “repeatedly” tried to enter the exercise area since September 7 .

On September 15 , it said, Kolkata made a “dangerous” change of course that brought it into contact with a Pakistani vessel identified in local media as PNS Hunain, an offshore patrol vessel.

“Pakistan strongly rejects this belligerent Indian action,” the Pakistani Foreign Office said, calling it a violation of a 1991 bilateral agreement requiring warships to stay at least three nautical miles (5.5km, 3.4 miles) apart in international waters.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs said the warship was on “routine surveillance” in international waters when a Pakistani vessel approached at high speed and manoeuvred unsafely.

Neither government has named the vessels in its own on-record statement, and India has not confirmed or denied the Kolkata identification.

The two navies last collided in June 2011, when Pakistani frigate PNS Babur brushed against Indian frigate INS Godavari in the Gulf of Aden, while escorting a merchant vessel freed from Somali pirates.

Each side blamed the other then too. That row faded within weeks.

The risks

Retired Vice Admiral Ahmad Saeed of the Pakistan Navy said the pattern — two ships pressing close without a clear intent to collide — was familiar from Cold War-era “bumping” incidents between Soviet and US ships in the Black Sea.

But he argued that India and Pakistan are worse placed to manage similar encounters.

“There’s no bilateral Incidents at Sea agreement, the kind the US and USSR signed in 1972, and no navy-to-navy hotline,” Saeed told Al Jazeera. “Article 10 sets a distance, but it gives no manoeuvring rules and no procedure for investigating an incident afterwards. That gap is exactly why each side can just accuse the other.”

Article 10 of the 1991 confidence-building agreement between the two nations requires warships to stay at least three nautical miles (5.6km, 3.5 miles) apart in international waters.

Saeed said the greater risk was what might follow the collision: sharper tactics such as fire-control radar lock-ons or helicopter overflights and eventually “a contact with actual casualties.”

Muhammad Shareh Qazi, a Lahore-based security and maritime analyst, however, pointed to the same 1991 agreement, which he said requires 30 days’ written notice before a military exercise, as well as international collision regulations that apply to both countries as signatories to the UN maritime convention.

“If this collision really had the potential to escalate militarily, you’d have noticed by now,” Qazi said. “There’s a tool for that, called chaff, fired just above the bow or stern purely to signal you could escalate if needed. Nothing like that happened here.”

Both navies also have their own internal accountability channels, he added, with a captain found to have acted without authorisation facing a court martial process separate from any diplomatic protest.

On fishermen routinely detained for straying across the Sir Creek boundary, which is not demarcated between India and Pakistan further south, Qazi said the link to incidents further out at sea was indirect but real.

“Clear demarcation could help close those ambiguities over time, by reducing the ambiguity around where and how these interactions are expected to occur,” he added.

Saeed was more cautious about how contained an incident like this would remain.

“This hasn’t stayed quiet. Both governments went public with protests within a day of each other,” he said, adding that what made the moment riskier than 2011 was that “both publics are primed after last year’s conflict, which was not the case in 2011.”

Similar close-quarters confrontations have become more frequent between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea.

In the most recent flare-up, on July 24 , Philippine officials said a Chinese vessel came within about seven metres (23 feet) of a Philippine fisheries boat near Scarborough Shoal, the Philippine-claimed reef that China has controlled since 2012, and that Chinese coast guard ships fired water cannon at Philippine vessels.

Whether this week’s collision follows that pattern or fades like the 2011 incident depends less on the ships than on what comes next diplomatically, Qazi said.

“If, in the next 24 to 48 hours, an official statement suggests there was a genuine cause to manufacture an incident for the purpose of escalation, then yes, there may be a real possibility of this happening again,” he added.

Yemen’s Houthi rebels have captured Mocha port and now threaten to control the main waterway of the Bab al-Mandeb strait. They have also attacked several cities in Saudi Arabia, wounding about 70 people, including women and children.

The repeated attacks against Saudi energy, civil, and defence facilities, combined with the maritime blockage by Iran and its Yemeni partner the Houthis, directly raise the question of the Mecca Pact’s operationalisation between Saudi Arabia, Turkiye, and Pakistan.

The Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia can activate the mutual defence agreement. If that happens, what could a Pakistani and Turkish intervention look like?

The answer to this question necessitates some crucial background first.

The US – the main security partner of the Gulf states – has signalled for a while now that it expects regional countries to take primary responsibility for their own defence and deterrence, with US help remaining critical but limited.

That posture is already visible on the ground. Since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran, the US has not been able to provide comprehensive defence for its regional partners. On several occasions, it has even failed to stop attacks on its own bases in the Gulf.

With US presence receding and Washington emphasising regional burden-sharing, Gulf states have had to look into a new defence architecture. In September 2025, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan signed their first mutual defence agreement, which expanded in August this year to include Turkiye and became the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement.

The three countries have since established a joint secretariat, with its headquarters in Riyadh, with Pakistan taking the chairmanship for an initial three-year term.

The pact remains in a gestation period. It does not publicly identify the thresholds or scenarios under which a member would move to direct military intervention. Its organisational and institutional structure, including rules of engagement, mechanisms of consultation, and collective defence and deterrence, are yet to be formally developed.

Now, back to the question of how the pact will be operational if a member state is attacked.

Earlier this week, Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said that an unprovoked aggression against Saudi Arabia, or a spillover of the Yemen conflict into the kingdom, would make the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement operational, adding that “there should be no doubt in this.”

Asif, however, did not share specific details on what shape that operationalisation would take. Last month, Turkiye’s Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan clarified that the Mecca Pact would work the same way as NATO: If a member state is attacked, it must actively request and define the specific type of help it needs.

NATO’s Article 4 allows for a member to call alliance consultations and exchange of information. Article 5 requires mutual assistance from allies, but it leaves each state to decide the nature of that assistance.

In 2012, after Syria shot down a Turkish warplane, Ankara invoked Article 4 for consultation and requested specific defence assistance. Instead of demanding direct military intervention, the Turkish government explicitly asked for Patriot missile defence batteries. NATO approved the request and deployed the systems to protect Turkish airspace.

In this context, if the Mecca Pact is to be operationalised, it would have to be Saudi Arabia that defines the type of military assistance and involvement that it needs. If, for example, Riyadh makes an actual request for Pakistani direct military intervention, beyond materiel and intelligence support, Islamabad would be obliged to comply. But the request, and the scale of the response, would still likely need to be defined and agreed in a consultation meeting.

For now, none of this has been tested as Riyadh has not invoked the pact with either Pakistan or Turkiye.

In the meantime, diplomatic efforts have intensified, with Pakistani Field Marshal Asim Munir and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud talking to Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.

Islamabad has also publicly urged Iran to rein in the Houthis from attacking Saudi Arabia and threatening the Bab al-Mandeb, and has reminded Tehran of Pakistan’s commitment to Riyadh’s defence through the pact. Ankara would likely play its own part in diplomatically restraining the Houthis and Iran.

If diplomacy fails and Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia or the Bab al-Mandeb continue, Turkiye and Pakistan would likely expand the air and technological support they already provide. Islamabad already has an air squadron of about 16 JF-17 Thunder multirole aircraft, defence systems, and thousands of troops deployed in Saudi Arabia.

But a direct military operation by Pakistani forces inside Yemen remains unlikely at the moment. Given the disastrous and lasting impacts of its participation in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union on behalf of the US, Pakistan would be far more wary of joining a war against Iran and its allies, for fear of spillover into its western border provinces’ economy, domestic security, sectarian balance, and societal harmony. Pakistani leaders would find it hard to build domestic consensus for direct attacks on the Houthis or a fight with Iran.

The likely scenario is that Pakistan would increase joint diplomatic pressure on Iran to restrain the Houthis, further augment its support for Saudi defence, and push for a multinational naval coalition to secure the Bab al-Mandeb. Adopting this restraint would still keep the essence of the Mecca Pact intact, while putting more weight behind regional de-escalation.

The new security architecture that agreements like the Mecca Pact are setting up will take years to mature. Until the mechanisms and rules of collective response develop, Pakistan’s existing bilateral defence relationships with Saudi Arabia and other Arab partners will continue to focus on defence needs.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

England overcome early tremors to win ⁠third Test against Pakistan by eight wickets, clinching a series whitewash.

Joe Root led from the front as England survived a major wobble to beat Pakistan by eight wickets in the third Test at Edgbaston on Saturday, sealing a 3-0 series whitewash.

The home team, chasing just 130 to win, were in deep trouble when openers Ben Duckett and Emilio Gay were dismissed in the first over, bowled by Mohammad Abbas.

Root, England’s record runscorer, edged his first ball, bowled by Razaullah, through the slips for four in a nervy start but settled and scored quickly to take the sting out of the situation.

The skipper was given a huge reprieve when he chopped onto the stumps off Mohammad Ali, only for the umpire to signal a no-ball, leaving the bowler distraught.

Root, with Jordan Cox at the other end, had another let-off when he edged an Abbas delivery between first and second slip, with neither fielder moving.

But he reached his half-century off 57 balls with a cut for four, and Cox matched him shortly afterwards.

England reached their target in the 25th over, with Root unbeaten on 62 and Cox 59 not out.

Root, in his second spell as England skipper after the departure of Ben Stokes, admitted his team were not the finished article but said he was delighted with their series win.

“The amount of uncertainty, noise and I guess chaos there was coming into the series, the way the guys have dealt with that – being so clinical with what we’ve had in front of us – and be stood here with a 3-0 win is really pleasing,” Root told Sky Sports.

“It sets us up nicely looking ahead to the start of a new era with (new head coach) Stephen Fleming coming in.”

Pakistan woes

It is England’s first Test series win since 2024, while Pakistan have now lost 16 of their last 21 games and are bottom of the World Test Championship table.

Root’s men had appeared set for a quickfire win inside three days on Friday before debutant fast bowler Razaullah launched an audacious assault with the bat, clubbing nine sixes as he raced to 81 off 63 balls.

The 21-year-old number nine, who also took four wickets in England’s first innings, put on 121 for the ninth wicket with fellow paceman Abbas (42) as England floundered.

“We had a little bit of pushback yesterday which, in a strange way, was quite a good thing for the group,” said Root.

“Fair play to Razaullah; he made things difficult for us. He played some wonderful shots and made it very difficult to set fields to. He struck the ball nicely – I don’t know how he didn’t pull a muscle, swinging the bat that hard.”

Razaullah’s heroics have changed the mood music, but they came too little, too late for Pakistan, who have endured a miserable series, losing the first Test by an innings and 103 runs and the second by 194 runs.

The tourists sent seven players home after their crushing defeat in the second Test at Lord’s and brought in seven replacements, with Razaullah among them.

They also sacked head coach Sarfaraz Ahmed and assistant Umar Gul as their tour plunged into chaos.

Pakistan made four changes to their side for the third Test, and they put up a fight despite being dismissed for a paltry 133 in their first innings.

Captain Babar Azam admitted his team would have to take stock after a one-sided series.

“Before we came here, we had to think about different things and to decide our team,” he said.

“We had a couple of changes after losing two matches. Playing in England is very difficult. We were trying to do our best in the third match.

“We need to sit down and look hard at our mistakes, decide our playing XI.”

The 3-0 whitewash is a huge tonic for England, who were in turmoil just weeks ago following a series loss to New Zealand and the exits of head coach Brendon McCullum and captain Stokes.

But tougher challenges lie ahead, starting with a Test series in South Africa in December and January, while a home Ashes looms next year.

Captain Joe Root and Jordan Cox helped England fight back from an early scare as the hosts recovered from 2-2, to successfully chase down 130 and wrap up an eight-wicket win and a 3-0 series clean sweep against Pakistan at Edgbaston.

READ MORE: England survive scare to sweep Pakistan series

Available to UK users only.

BIRMINGHAM, England: Rain prevented England from putting Pakistan in a deeper hole than 52-2 and 268 runs behind on day two of the Edgbaston cricket test on Thursday.

Pakistan walked out after tea 320 runs behind to begin its second innings in gloomy, lights-on conditions perfectly suited for England’s four-man pace attack which has dominated the series.

Pakistan has yet to crack a 200 total, and Ollie Robinson was the man of the moment again.

Robinson got Saim Ayub to nick to the slips off the first ball and became only the fifth bowler in test history to twice take a wicket with the first ball of an innings in a series. The last person was Zaheer Khan for India against Bangladesh in 2007. Bill Voce was the only previous Englishman in 1937 against Australia.

Ayub was playing Twenty20s in the Caribbean 10 days ago but was summoned in mid-series in a panic call by the Pakistan Cricket Board to play his first test in 20 months. He bagged a pair.

Robinson struck again with his fourth ball, nicking off Abdullah Shafique.

That made Pakistan start 0-2 for the sixth time ever in tests and the second time against England. The other was at the same ground in 1982. The bowler was Ian Botham.

From 0-2, Azan Awais and Shan Masood dug out Pakistan to 52-2 in 12 overs. Awais had 29 and Masood 21 after being dropped on 13 by Ben Duckett off the luckless Gus Atkinson.

Wet weather came sooner than forecast and guaranteed Pakistan lived to fight at least one more day in a three-test series already lost. England, up 2-0, should complete the sweep on Saturday with no test going the distance.

Fifties and no hundreds again

England began the day already in front with a lead of 23 at 156-4.

In two sessions, 50 overs, they added 297 runs at a pacy 5.9, its fastest rate on any day all summer. Three more batters scored fifties to add to Emilio Gay’s gritty 60 and Harry Brook’s unbeaten 52 on Wednesday but the effort looked nothing like Bazball.

However, Brook, Dan Lawrence, Jamie Smith and less so Robinson would have thought a century was at their mercy.

The former trio spent more than two hours at the crease, three hours in Brook’s case, but all fell tamely and showed obvious frustration to miss out on a century on a fair pitch against a popgun attack.

Brook ran himself out on 75, Lawrence dragged on on 65, and Smith chipped back to fast bowler Razaullah Khan on 69.

Robinson’s breezy 50 from 47 balls highlighted the merciless contribution from the tailenders of 116 runs and 15 boundaries.

Brook resumed on a restrained 52 and Dan Lawrence on 5, and in sunny conditions they plundered seven runs per over in the first hour.

Brook then mistakenly took on Shan Masood at midwicket and has now been involved in five run outs in tests — only Virat Kohli (6) has been in more. Brook has gone 11 tests without a century but was still averaging more than 40.

Lawrence, filling Ben Stokes’ old spot, had in hand his third fifty in three tests when he chopped on. He gave up an agonizing “No” and Mohammad Imran’s first test wicket.

“Bitterly disappointed to get out in the 60s,” Lawrence said. “Something I’ve prided myself on this season is kicking on. I really wanted a big hundred today.

Pakistan still went to lunch with an air of resignation as Smith collected an unbeaten 47 of the 143 runs in the session.

Smith got his third 50 of the summer straight after lunch by crashing Razaullah through the covers, but Razaullah got him caught and bowled on 69.

No. 9 batter Robinson greeted the new ball by lofting Mohammad Abbas for six over cow corner and got his second 50 of the season from 46 balls. The entertainment was ended by a good catch from Masood in the covers.

Demoralised tourists reach 52-2 before rain ends play early on day two, needing 268 runs to make England bat again.

Ollie Robinson continued his outstanding summer with two wickets in his opening over as England pushed Pakistan towards ⁠defeat in the third Test ⁠at Edgbaston.

Robinson, man of the match in the first two Tests, struck with the first ball of Pakistan’s second innings on Thursday and again three deliveries later to leave England closing in on a 3-0 series ⁠whitewash.

The demoralised tourists reached 52-2 before rain ended play early on day two, needing 268 runs to make England bat again.

Robinson, 32, has been almost unplayable in this series, taking 21 wickets at an average of under seven runs each.

He continued in the same ⁠vein in Birmingham, removing Saim Ayub, who was dismissed for a duck in both innings, and then Abdullah Shafique to finish the day with figures of 2-10 from his six overs.

“He’s probably one of the most consistent bowlers in world cricket. He knows what he’s doing with the ball, and he wears you down a bit so it’s a challenge,” said Pakistan batting coach Mike Smith.

“He has bowled exceptionally well, and he’s in a little purple patch as a player. We need to find a way to combat that as well as we can.”

Shan Masood, who was dropped at slip by Ben Duckett off Gus Atkinson, was still there on 21 at the close, alongside opener Azan Awais on 29, but Pakistan’s position appears hopeless.

England, who led by 23 overnight, had earlier pressed the accelerator to extend their first-innings advantage to a daunting 320.

They made 453 with Harry Brook and Dan Lawrence extending their fifth-wicket partnership to 86 until Brook set off for an impossible single and was run out by Masood for 75 from ⁠97 balls.

Lawrence went on to make 65 from 82 balls before dragging a wide ball onto his ⁠stumps to give Mohammad Imran his first Test wicket. It was a third Test half-century in a row for Lawrence, who was recalled after a two-year absence for this series.

“I’m really happy with how I’ve contributed,” said Lawrence. “I was feeling really good today, got on a bit of a roll with Brooky and ⁠went with it.

“I thought I was going to make a really big score, to be honest. It wasn’t to be, but I think if I’d been offered 65 at the start of the ⁠day, I’d have taken it.”

There was also a welcome half-century from the out-of-form Jamie ⁠Smith, who overcame an uncertain start and a finger injury, which caused him to hand over the wicketkeeping gloves to Jordan Cox, to strike 69 off 84 balls including one six and nine fours.

It was his highest Test score since a second-innings 88 against India on the same ground 14 months ago.

Robinson chimed in with ‌a 50 of his own, which included a huge six into the Hollies Stand off Mohammad Abbas, before becoming Razaullah’s fourth victim.

The blooding of the 21-year-old, who had only played eight first-class games prior to his call-up, was one of the few positives for ‌Pakistan.

While ‌he was expensive – he conceded 148 runs off his 23 overs – he posed a threat with his pace and aggression.

Razaullah may represent a brighter future for Pakistan, but the present remains bleak for a team that has lost 15 of its last 20 Tests.

Jamie Smith reaches his half-century, becoming England’s fourth batter to score a 50 in the innings against Pakistan, helping them build a strong lead in day two of the third Test at Edgbaston.

FOLLOW LIVE: England v Pakistan – Third Test, day two

Available to UK users only.

BIRMINGHAM, England: Pakistan’s new-look team was unable to shake off old problems as it was bowled out for a paltry 133 after being put into bat by England in the third and final cricket test at Edgbaston on Wednesday, before Emilio Gay and Harry Brook carried the hosts further into the ascendancy.

Josh Tongue claimed 4-42 while Ollie Robinson and Jofra Archer shared six wickets as Pakistan’s shake-up since going 2-0 down in the three-match series had minimal impact.

Gay and Brook then made fifties to lift England to 156-4 at stumps on day one, leading by 23 despite captain Joe Root being out lbw for the 10th time in 13 innings.

Robinson conceded just 15 runs in 11 overs, as he went from 99 to 102 test wickets, while his average of 19.1 is the best post-war of any bowler with more than 100 dismissals.

England claimed a first breakthrough when the recalled Saim Ayub was trapped lbw for a duck to give quick bowler Robinson his 100th test wicket.

Jofra Archer then forced Azan Awais into offering mid-on fielder Josh Tongue a low, diving catch off a leading edge.

Abdullah Shafique was next to go, caught low down by Dan Lawrence at third slip off Robinson.

Shan Masood became the fourth wicket to fall when he lobbed the ball to mid-wicket off fast bowler Archer following a poor cross-bat stroke.

Fellow paceman Tongue then removed Pakistan captain Babar Azam before dismissing debutants Ghazi Ghori and Imran Randhawa, lbw and clean bowled respectively, before lunch.

Razaullah Khan, another debutant, fell for 11 in the afternoon session. Saud Shakeel, who made a fighting 97 in a losing cause at Lord’s, was the one shining light for Pakistan as he top-scored with 43 before being clean bowled by a sharp inswinging delivery from Tongue.

Archer took the final wicket when he had Mohammad Abbas caught in the slips for 21 to finish with figures of 3-25. Robinson picked up 3-15 in a miserly 11-over stint and Tongue 4-42.

Then, in England’s first-innings reply, Ben Duckett was removed by Mohammad Ali for 11 before Jordan Cox fell to Abbas for 4.

England took an unassailable 2-0 lead in the series after beating Pakistan by 194 runs at Lord’s.