Pakistan has been the Afghan Taliban's closest friend for decades. Now, there's an "open war" between the two. The two countries, now at loggerheads, are India's western neighbours.
Iran, which is involved in a war with the US-Israel, is also India's neighbour. The Islamic republic's southern coast lies directly across the Arabian Sea from India's western shore.
"Geopolitically, Iran also sits at the crossroads of regions vital to India's interests - Afghanistan, Central Asia and even Pakistan," Brahma Chellaney, a strategic affairs expert, noted in a post on X.
All three - Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran - are locked in a bitter war. The wars in the three Islamic republics are playing out during the holy month of Ramzan, synonymous with prayer, spirituality and joyful nighttime gatherings.
Pakistan-Afghanistan Fight
On Monday night, Pakistan carried out an air strike on Afghan capital Kabul, the latest attack in fighting between the neighbours that has flared in recent weeks.
Officials said the overnight Pakistani airstrike killed at least 400 people at a drug rehabilitation hospital.
Pakistan has denied Afghanistan's accusation that it targeted a hospital, saying its strikes did not hit any civilian sites.
The strikes late Monday night mark a dramatic escalation of a conflict that began between Afghanistan and Pakistan late last month and has seen repeated cross-border clashes as well as airstrikes inside Afghanistan. International calls for a ceasefire have gone unheeded.
The strike came hours after Afghan officials said the two sides exchanged fire along their common border, killing four people in Afghanistan, as the deadliest fighting between the neighbours in years entered a third week.
Pakistan's Information Minister Attaullah Tarar posted on X in the early hours Tuesday that the Pakistani military had "carried out precision airstrikes" targeting military installations in Kabul and the eastern province of Nangarhar.
"All targeting has been done with precision only at those infrastructures which are being used by Afghan Taliban regime to support its multiple terror proxies," he wrote.
On Saturday, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari said Afghanistan's Taliban administration crossed a "red line" by deploying drones that injured several civilians in Pakistan last week.
Pakistan's defence minister said last month the escalating tensions between the two Islamic neighbours amounted to an "open war". On February 22, Pakistan launched air strikes on militant targets in Afghanistan.
Later that month, Pakistan carried out multiple air strikes on Afghanistan's major cities. The air and ground strikes, which hit Taliban military posts, headquarters and ammunition depots in multiple sectors along the border, came after Afghanistan launched an attack on Pakistani border forces, officials said.
Earlier, border clashes between the two countries killed dozens of soldiers in October until negotiations facilitated by Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia ended the hostilities and a fragile ceasefire was put in place.
The escalating conflict has alarmed the international community, particularly as the area is one where other militant organizations, including al-Qaida and the Islamic State group, still have a presence and have been trying to resurface.
The present situation is a long way from Islamabad's historic support for the Taliban.
The Taliban's top leadership was based in Pakistan's Quetta while it fought US troops and the previous Afghan government.
Pakistan welcomed the return to power of the Taliban in 2021, with then-Prime Minister Imran Khan saying that Afghans had "broken the shackles of slavery".
But Islamabad soon found that the Taliban were not as cooperative as it had hoped.
Islamabad says that the leadership of militant group Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and many of its fighters are based in Afghanistan, and that armed insurgents seeking independence for the southwestern Pakistani province of Balochistan also use Afghanistan as a safe haven.
Militancy has increased every year since 2022 with attacks by the TTP and Baloch insurgents growing, according to Armed Conflict Location & Event Data, a global monitoring organization.
Kabul for its part has repeatedly denied allowing militants to use Afghan territory to launch attacks in Pakistan.
Islamabad says the ceasefire did not hold long due to continued militant attacks in Pakistan from Afghanistan, and there have been repeated clashes and border closures since then that have disrupted trade and movement along the rugged frontier.
Another challenge that Pakistan faces is the Taliban's warming ties with India. Though India has not formally recognised the Taliban, the engagement between Delhi and Kabul is deepening. Pakistan's Defence Minister said the Taliban had become a "proxy for India".
The Iran War
The oil-rich Gulf has borne the brunt of Iran's attacks in response to US-Israeli strikes that sparked the Middle East war, with Tehran targeting US assets but also civilian infrastructure.
Iran has fired more than 1,900 missiles and drones at the UAE, more than any other country targeted by Tehran since the start of the war on February 28 when a joint US-Israeli strike assassinated its supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said this week that US bases in the Middle East had been used to launch air raids and that missiles had been fired from the UAE to strike Iran's Kharg Island, though UAE officials have denied the claim.
There was no let-up in attacks by both sides early on Tuesday, with the Israeli military saying it was targeting "Iranian regime infrastructure" across Tehran, as well as Hezbollah sites in Beirut, a day after saying it had drawn up detailed plans for at least three more weeks of war with Iran.
Iran launched overnight attacks on Israel, underscoring that, more than two weeks into the war, Tehran still retains the capacity to carry out long-range strikes. It also targeted the United Arab Emirates, where attacks forced the temporary closure of airspace and a drone hit an oil facility in Fujairah, a key port for Emirati oil exports, for a second consecutive day.
On Monday, Dubai International Airport, typically one of the world's busiest, was closed for several hours; oil loading operations in Fujairah were halted, and operations at the Shah gas field in Abu Dhabi were suspended following drone strikes.
Iran has said that a US attack over the weekend on military sites at Kharg Island, a key hub for the country's oil exports, was launched from the UAE, and warned that it would target oil and gas facilities in any country from which US strikes on the island were carried out.
Iran has also said that it would target US industrial facilities in the Middle East and urged people living near US-owned plants to leave.
Trump said earlier on Monday that Iran's retaliatory strikes against its neighbours including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait were a surprise.
"They (Iran) weren't supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East," he said. "Nobody expected that. We were shocked."
