The incident occurred after Afghan border guards discovered Iranian soldiers building an outpost inside Afghan territory, according to General Muhammad Chaghansori, a senior official at the police headquarters in Nimroz, a province in western Afghanistan that shares a long border with Iran.
Gen. Chaghansori said, “The Iranians were trying to build a military outpost secretly, but immediately after we got to know of this we prevented them from building it,” Gen. Chaghansori told The Independent of London.
“We tried to solve the problem through negotiations, but [the Iranians] insisted: ‘It’s our Iranian soil and we will build here.’ After we realized they would not listen to us, we shot a few rockets into the air.”
The Iranians then retaliated with eight rockets that landed in Nimroz and injured a boy, said Gen. Chaghansori.
In October, the Afghan news agency Pajhwok had reported that several exchanges of fire had taken place between Iranian and Afghan border guards, one of them lasting for “hours.”
Afghan parliamentarian Shukria Brakzai, who is also a member of the Defense Affairs Committee of the lower house, confirmed that such skirmishes have been occurring for the past nine months.
She attributed the souring in border relations to Iran’s concerns about the strategic agreement that Afghanistan is negotiating with the United States, which could result in permanent US bases in the country.
“Of course, Iran is very unhappy,” Barakzai said. “They don’t like to see this happening under their nose. The Isamic Republic of Iran wants to show its power in the region.”
Within the Islamic Republic, officials have become much more vocal in recent weeks in denouncing the talk of permanent US bases inside Afghanistan.