“India launches airstrike inside Pakistan; Islamabad denies militant camp hit”, Reuters
Drazen Jorgic, Sanjeev Miglani, February 25, 2019
ISLAMABAD/NEW DELHI (Reuters) – India said its warplanes struck a militant training camp inside Pakistan on Tuesday, killing “a very large number” of fighters, raising risk of conflict between the nuclear armed neighbors, though Pakistan officials denied there had been any casualties.
The airstrike near the town of Balakot, some 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the frontier was the deepest cross-border raid launched by India since the last of its three wars with Pakistan in 1971.
Pakistan condemned the Indian action and said it would respond at a time and place of its choice.
The airstrikes, according to the Indian government, hit a training camp of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), the group that claimed credit for a suicide car bomb attack killed at least 40 Indian paramilitary police in Kashmir on Feb. 14. The action was ordered as India said it had intelligence that Jaish was planning more attacks.
“In the face of imminent danger, a preemptive strike became absolutely necessary,” Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale told reporters.
“The existence of such training facilities, capable of training hundreds of jihadis could not have functioned without the knowledge of the Pakistani authorities,” Gokhale said.
Pakistan denies harboring JeM, a primarily anti-India group that forged ties with al Qaeda and has been on a UN terror list since 2001. In December 2001, Jaish fighters, along with members of another Pakistan-based militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, launched an attack on India’s parliament, which almost led to a fourth war.
China, Pakistan’s long-time ally, urged both countries to exercise restraint as tensions rose to the highest in years.
“We hope that India and Pakistan can exercise restraint, and take steps that are conducive to stabilizing the regional situation and improving bilateral ties, rather than the opposite,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a daily news briefing in Beijing.
Gokhale said “a very large number” of militants were killed in the strikes by French-made Mirage 2000 jets on a Jaish training camp near Balakot, a town in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
The commander of the camp was Maulana Yusuf Azhar, a brother-in-law of JeM leader Masood Azhar, Gokhale said.
A senior Indian government source said that 300 militants had been killed in the strikes and that the warplanes had ventured as far as 80 km (50 miles) inside Pakistan. But no evidence was immediately provided to back up the claims of militant casualties.
“I want to assure you our country is in safe hands,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi told a cheering political rally in western India hours after the raid.
“I won’t let the country down,” said Modi, who faces a tight election in coming months.