“Measured, Non-Escalatory”: GoI On ‘Operation Sindoor’

New Delhi: The nine terror camps and training facilities targeted in ‘Operation Sindoor’ – India’s overnight precision military response to the Pahalgam attack – represented a “measured, non-escalatory, proportionate, and responsible answer to Pakistan’s continuing support of cross-border terrorism and strikes on India,” the government said in a briefing Wednesday morning.

The targets were selected based on “credible intelligence input” and focused on “dismantling terrorist infrastructure and disabling terrorists”, Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri said.

‘Operation Sindoor’ – the Indian military’s first tri-service mission since the 1971 war with Pak – also represented the country’s right to respond to and pre-empt cross-border terrorism, he said.

The presser included statements from two women officers – Colonel Sofiya Qureshi from the Army and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh from the Air Force.

One of these camps, Col Qureshi said, was in Muridke, which is 40km north of Lahore.

Muridke housed a Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist training base that trained Ajmal Kasab and David Headley, the terrorists behind the 26/11 Mumbai attacks in which over 150 people were killed.

An offshoot of Lashkar, calling itself The Resistance Front, had claimed responsibility for the Pahalgam attack, in which 25 Indians and a Nepali, most of whom were civilians were killed.

Among the other terror camps targeted was Bahawalpur in Pak’s Punjab province, which was the nerve centre of the Jaish-e-Mohammed terror group responsible for the 2019 Pulwama attack, in which 40 Indian soldiers were killed, and the attack on Army base in Uri in 2016.