Welcome back to World Brief, where we’re looking at a lethal Pakistani attack in Afghanistan, the alleged assassination of Iranian security chief Ali Larijani, and U.S. threats to take Cuba.
Deadly Airstrike
More than 400 people were killed and at least 265 others injured in a Pakistani airstrike on a state-run drug rehabilitation center in Kabul late Monday, Afghan officials said on Tuesday. The attack on Camp Phoenix was the single deadliest incident since fighting erupted between the two adversaries in February.
Camp Phoenix (known locally as Omid Camp, or “Camp of Hope”) was an abandoned NATO military base that Afghan officials converted into a drug treatment facility roughly a decade ago. According to Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid, Pakistani forces regularly target “hospitals and civilian sites” such as Camp Phoenix in their operations. “We strongly condemn this crime and consider such an act to be against all accepted principles and a crime against humanity,” Mujahid wrote in a separate post on X.
Islamabad, however, has rejected the Taliban’s claims as “baseless.” Monday’s strikes were “precise, deliberate, and professional,” Pakistani Information Minister Attaullah Tarar wrote on X on Tuesday. “The targets were military and terrorist infrastructure, including ammunition and technical equipment storage sites and other installations linked to hostile activity against Pakistan,” he added.
Pakistan declared war on Afghanistan last month for allegedly harboring the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group that has repeatedly attacked Pakistani security forces. Mosharraf Zaidi, a spokesperson for Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, told Reuters on Tuesday that Camp Phoenix was being used by the Afghan Taliban to “train terrorists and store weapons.”
Although the United Nations Security Council published a report last month accusing Kabul of providing the Pakistani Taliban with weapons, Afghanistan continues to deny hosting the group, instead arguing that Islamabad is trying to deflect blame from its own domestic security issues.
Over the past three weeks, Pakistani forces have hit Afghan military installations, residential areas, and civilian infrastructure, including more than 20 health care facilities. Afghan troops have responded with drone strikes and border raids. Monday’s attack brings the total death toll on both sides of the war to around 500 people.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry urged Kabul and Islamabad on Tuesday to come to the negotiating table, just hours after the U.N. Security Council adopted a Beijing-sponsored resolution extending the mandate of the United Nations’ mission in Afghanistan.
But cease-fire talks remain unlikely. A Taliban spokesperson warned on Tuesday that Afghanistan will retaliate for the Camp Phoenix strike. And Zaidi, the Pakistani spokesperson, reiterated to Reuters, “All military operations will continue till such time as there is a change in the behaviour and the ground reality in Afghan Taliban regime-controlled territory.”
Today’s Most Read
What We’re Following
Israel’s war strategy. Israeli forces killed Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, in overnight airstrikes, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Tuesday. Tehran has not yet commented on the claim.
If confirmed, Larijani’s assassination would deliver a significant blow to Tehran’s regime, which is still reeling from the death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28. And it could upend potential future peace talks with Iran, as some experts had viewed Larijani as the likeliest interlocutor to negotiate with Washington.
Since Israeli and U.S. strikes first targeted Iran last month, Israel has pursued a devastating military campaign against Tehran’s leadership. In addition to Larijani, Katz said on Tuesday that Israeli airstrikes had killed Gholamreza Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Basij militia, an all-volunteer paramilitary force used to repress protests inside Iran. Tehran confirmed Soleimani’s death later in the day.
“We are undermining this regime in the hope of giving the Iranian people an opportunity to remove it,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a video posted on Tuesday announcing the killing of Larijani and Soleimani. According to a Friday cable circulated by the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem and seen by the Washington Post on Tuesday, Israeli officials are hoping for mass anti-government protests in Iran—even though they believe that “the people will get slaughtered” in response.
Widespread demonstrations in Iran earlier this year sparked a fierce government crackdown that killed tens of thousands of people. Larijani is believed to have overseen that crackdown, which was carried out by the Basij militia and other forces.
The fate of Cuba. U.S. President Donald Trump escalated his threats against Havana on Monday by musing over the “honor of taking Cuba.”
“Whether I free it, take it—I think I can do anything I want with it,” Trump said when asked by reporters what U.S. intervention on the island could look like. However, the White House stopped short of specifying whether a military operation could mirror the U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro or continued U.S. strikes on Iran.
Trump’s comments came the same day that Cuba’s national electric grid collapsed, plunging more than 10 million people into darkness. This was Cuba’s first nationwide outage since the United States effectively barred the flow of oil into the country in January. Only two small ships carrying crude imports have since made it into Cuba, according to ship-tracking data seen by Reuters on Monday.
Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has repeatedly stressed the importance of bringing oil into Cuba. The country is running on around 40 percent of the fuel it needs to function, Díaz-Canel said on Friday, and that figure is expected to drop. With Monday’s power grid collapse, officials from the U.S. Embassy in Havana have warned residents to conserve “fuel, water, food, and your mobile phone charge, and prepare for significant disruptions.”
On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters at the White House that Cuba’s economy is “in a lot of trouble. And the people in charge, they don’t know how to fix it. And so, they have to get new people in charge.”
Deadly coordinated attack. Suicide bombers killed at least 23 people and injured more than 100 others in a string of attacks in the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri on Monday. Three crowded locations were targeted—a hospital, a market, and a post office—in what was believed to be the first coordinated assault on Maiduguri in almost a decade. The explosions came on the heels of another attack at a military post on the outskirts of the city the day before.
No group has claimed responsibility, but a Nigerian military official attributed the bombings to Boko Haram, a jihadi insurgent group. “The cowardly attacks targeted crowded public areas in an attempt by the terrorists to inflict mass casualties and create panic within the metropolis,” military spokesperson Lt. Col. Sani Uba said on Monday. He warned that the militant group may have other attackers in the city and advised residents to stay away from crowded areas.
Boko Haram and its offshoots have killed tens of thousands of people over the past two decades and have displaced millions of others. In recent months, Abuja has intensified its security operations to combat the groups, and in January, it announced that the United States would deploy 100 military personnel to Nigeria’s northeastern region to aid these efforts.
“The Monday attacks were desperate acts of the evil-minded terrorist groups,” Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu said. “Our gallant military and civilian task forces will curtail and put them down.”
Odds and Ends
It’s T-minus 86 days until Mexico, Canada, and the United States kick off the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, but some soccer fans are already getting into the competitive spirit. Around 9,500 aspiring athletes gathered in Mexico City’s main square on Sunday to set a world record for the largest soccer class ever held—breaking the previous Guinness World Record of 1,038 participants in Seattle last June. Attendees ran soccer drills, practiced coordination exercises, and celebrated the world’s most popular sport. Meanwhile, FP’s World Brief writer reminisced about the one goal she ever scored in a soccer game—albeit, against her own team.
