[Dawn] A barrage of cross-border artillery and rocket attacks from Pakistain have forced thousands of Afghan villagers to flee their homes, witnesses and officials in Afghanistan said on Tuesday.The shelling was reported in eastern Kunar province
... which is right down the road from Chitral. Kunar is Haqqani country.....
after Pakistain accused Afghanistan of giving safe haven to snuffies who infiltrated the border to kill 13 Pak soldiers.
Afghanistan and Pakistain typically blame each other for Taliban violence plaguing both sides of their mostly non-existent border.
"More than 500 families have been displaced in two districts of Dangam and Nari due to continued Pak rocket shelling in the past two weeks," said Wasefullah Wasef, a front man for the provincial government in Kunar.
Afghan families are large and typically number seven to 10 people.
"The shelling has intensified after the recent incident in which some Pak soldiers were killed by Talibs," Wasef told AFP.
Wasef said officials "believe" the rockets were fired by Pak troops, who are operating along the border against homegrown myrmidons.
The Pak military was not immediately reachable for comment.
Mohammad Fazel Naseh, provincial head for refugees, told AFP: "So far 343 displaced families from Dangam district, and more than 270 families from Nari and Marawara districts have been registered." Mohammad Yusuf, police chief of Nari also accused Pakistain's military over the shelling.
"We have intelligence that the rockets are fired from Mighty Pak Army posts situated directly on the other side of the border," he told AFP.
Locals in Dangam district told AFP that three residents, including a woman, were maimed on Tuesday after rockets fired from Pakistain slammed into a home.
"Many people have already left their homes in the past two weeks. We have stayed, but we can not venture out of our hiding places because of the continued shelling," a local resident said.
"We are poor people, we demand the government take action to protect us," added another resident, Abdul Qader.
Pakistain said 13 soldiers were killed after snuffies crossed from Afghanistan into the northwestern district of Upper Dir, a key transit route that neighbours the Swat
...a valley and an administrative district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistain, located 99 mi from Islamabad. It is inhabited mostly by Pashto speakers. The place has gone steadily downhill since the days when Babe Ruth was the Sultan of Swat...valley where Pakistain defeated a Taliban insurgency in 2009.
Six were killed in gunbattles on Sunday and another seven had their heads chopped off after going missing, the military said.
The Pak Taliban grabbed credit for the attack.
On Monday, Pakistain summoned the deputy Afghan ambassador in protest and to demand that Kabul "take appropriate measures" to stop incidents in the future.
Pakistain says rebels have regrouped in eastern Afghanistan.
Its troops have been fighting local Taliban for years but US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
...current SecDef, previously Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Panetta served as President Bill Clinton's White House Chief of Staff from 1994 to 1997 and was a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1977 to 1993....
has warned that Washington is running out of patience over Pak havens for snuffies who attack Americans in Afghanistan.
Islamabad imposed a blockade, now in its seventh month, on overland NATO
...the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. A cautionary tale of cost-benefit analysis....
supplies into Afghanistan after US air strikes killed 24 Pak soldiers along the Afghan border on November 26.