Vital trade resumed at a key border crossing between Afghanistan and Pakistan yesterday as their busiest trading waypoint reopened almost a week after being shut by Taliban authorities.
Relations between the countries have soured since the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in 2021, with Islamabad accusing its neighbour of harbouring militants that have carried out strikes on its soil — a charge Kabul denies. There have been frequent checkpoint closures and flare-ups of violence along the mostly mountainous dividing line splitting the two nations, which no Afghan government has ever recognised. The Torkham border crossing was reopened at 6am yesterday, Afghan customs official Muslim Khaksar said at the site in Afghanistan’s eastern Nangarhar province. “The border is now open from both sides for civilians as well as for traders,” he said. “Trucks carrying rice, cement, construction material, medicines and other edibles were sent to Afghanistan,” a Pakistani customs official said, adding that lorries loaded with coal, vegetables and fruit had travelled the other way.
But around 1,400 trucks on the Pakistan side were still waiting to cross into Afghanistan as a backlog is cleared, he added.
Hundreds of people from both countries passed through the crossing yesterday after being stranded for days, an AFP correspondent reported from the frontier. “I was stranded here for five to six days with my sick mother,” Haroon, a resident of the Afghan city of Kunduz, told AFP before entering Pakistan with his ailing parent.