Pakistan says Afghan nationals carried out this week’s suicide attacks

ISLAMABAD (AP) — Pakistan’s interior minister said Thursday that Afghan nationals carried out two fatal suicide attacks this week — one targeting a cadet college near the Afghan border and the other outside a court in the capital, Islamabad.

“In both of the suicide bombings, Afghan citizens were involved, and they carried out the attacks,” Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said.

There was no immediate comment from Kabul.

On Tuesday a suicide bombing outside a district court in Islamabad killed 12 people and wounded 27 others. Separately on Monday, three soldiers were killed when a suicide bomber and four other militants tried to storm the Cadet College Wana in northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, triggering a gunbattle.

The attacks underscored Pakistan’s worsening security situation as the government faces growing militancy, tense relations with Kabul and an increasingly fragile truce along the border. Until Tuesday’s attack, the capital had largely been considered safe compared with the country’s conflict-hit northwest.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Wednesday offered talks to Afghanistan’s Taliban government in a renewed peace overture. His call in a televised speech on Wednesday followed the collapse of peace negotiations in Istanbul last week. It raised fears that a ceasefire brokered by Qatar and Turkey could unravel and trigger new border clashes.

Pakistan wants Afghanistan to rein in the Pakistani Taliban — known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, which has claimed most of the attacks in Pakistan in recent years. The group has distanced itself from the latest attacks, saying it was not behind them.

Pakistan has long accused the Afghan Taliban of harboring TTP leaders and fighters, an allegation Kabul denies. One TTP breakaway faction, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, initially claimed responsibility for the Islamabad bombing, before one of its commanders retracted the statement.

The Pakistan Army on Thursday escorted journalists from Islamabad to the cadet college, which showed clear signs of the assault.

Pakistan's Information Minister Attaullah Tarar said Wednesday that all five attackers in the assault on the Cadet College Wana were killed by security forces. More than 600 people — including 525 cadets, their teachers and staff — were safely rescued, he told reporters.

Tarar said the assailants appeared to be attempting a repeat of the 2014 Peshawar school massacre, when a TTP splinter group killed 154 people, mostly children, at an army-run school.

According to local media, authorities have arrested some suspects for questioning in connection with the Islamabad attack, and the detainees were captured in multiple raids.

Pakistan’s Ministry of Information said the attack on the cadet college was planned and directed from Afghanistan and carried out by Afghan nationals using weapons supplied from there. In a post on X, the ministry said the assault was orchestrated by a militant identified only as Zahid, with approval from TTP’s chief Noor Wali Mehsud.

The attackers used “American-made” weapons brought from Afghanistan, the ministry said. Pakistan has repeatedly said that U.S. military equipment left behind during the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 has fallen into militant hands and ultimately made its way to the Pakistani Taliban, strengthening the group’s firepower.

Tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan have spiked since last month, when Afghanistan accused Islamabad of launching drone strikes on Oct. 9 that killed several people in the Afghan capital. The strikes sparked cross-border clashes that left dozens of soldiers, civilians and militants dead before Qatar brokered a cease-fire on Oct. 19.

Two subsequent rounds of peace talks in Istanbul ended without progress after Kabul refused to provide written assurances that militants would not use Afghan soil for attacks in Pakistan.

The TTP, which is separate from but allied with the Afghan Taliban, has been emboldened since the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 2021.

Associated Press writers Riaz Khan and Rasool Dawar in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Asim Tanveer in Multan, Pakistan, contributed to this story.

Army soldiers stand guard next to a damaged area at the main gate of an army-run cadet college that was assaulted by militants on Monday, in Wana, a city in the northwestern Pakistani district South Waziristan bordering with Afghanistan, Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Ahsan Shahzad)

Army soldiers stands guard next to a damaged building of an army-run cadet college that was assaulted by militants on Monday, in Wana, a city in the northwestern Pakistani district South Waziristan bordering with Afghanistan, Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Ahsan Shahzad)

Army soldiers stand guard next to a damaged area at the main gate of an army-run cadet college that was assaulted by militants on Monday, in Wana, a city in the northwestern Pakistani district South Waziristan bordering with Afghanistan, Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Ahsan Shahzad)

A photographer takes a picture of a damaged room of an army-run cadet college that was assaulted by militants on Monday, in Wana, a city in the northwestern Pakistani district South Waziristan bordering with Afghanistan, Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Ahsan Shahzad)

An Army soldier stands guard next to damages at the main gate of an army-run cadet college that was assaulted by militants on Monday, in Wana, a city in the northwestern Pakistani district South Waziristan bordering with Afghanistan, Thursday, Nov. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Ahsan Shahzad)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)