New Delhi, May 7: India carried out precision strikes on Pakistan, destroying 9 terrorist camps in its Punjab province and occupied Kashmir.
Codenamed Operation Sindoor, the strikes began at 1 AM when the country was asleep. Indian maintained a surprise element given the planned mock drill and IAF exercise.
Indian military carried out a “measured, non-escalatory, proportionate, and responsible” strike to dismantle terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan to “deter and to pre-empt” any further terrorist strikes, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said, hours after India retaliated to the Pahalgam attack.
Addressing a packed press conference here, Misri said it was deemed essential that the perpetrators and planners of the April 22 attack be brought to justice as there was “no demonstrable” step from Islamabad to take action against the terror infrastructure on its territory or territory under its control.
“Our intelligence monitoring of Pakistan-based terrorist modules indicated that further attacks against India were impending,” he said at the briefing, which was also addressed by Col. Sofia Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh.
The foreign secretary’s comments came hours after India struck nine terror camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir with missiles and drones under an operation christened ‘Operation Sindoor’.
Misri said there was a compulsion both to “deter and to pre-empt”.
“These actions were measured, non-escalatory, proportionate, and responsible. They focused on dismantling the terrorist infrastructure and disabling terrorists likely to be sent across to India,” Misri said.
The foreign secretary said, despite a fortnight having passed since the Pahalgam attacks, there has been “no demonstrable step” from Pakistan to take action against the terrorist infrastructure on its territory or territory under its control.
On the Pahalgam attack, Misri said Pakistani and Pakistan-trained terrorists belonging to the Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out the savage strike on Indian tourists and murdered 26 people.
It was the largest number of civilian casualties in a terrorist attack in India since the November 26, 2008, Mumbai terror attacks.
Misri noted that the manner of the attack was also driven by an “objective of provoking communal discord”, both in Jammu and Kashmir and the rest of the nation.
Colonel Sofiya Qureshi from the Army’s Corps of Signals and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh, a helicopter pilot, shared the names and details of the sites targeted in the early hours on Wednesday.
“In this action, nine terrorist camps were targeted and destroyed. In the last three decades in Pakistan, terror infrastructure is being built, including recruitment and indoctrination centres, training areas and launch pads,” she said, as the Corps of Signals insignia clipped on her cap shone bright.
Wing Commander Singh, during the briefing, said the strike on the terror camps was taken through “precision capabilities”.