Did Pakistan really shoot down five Indian fighter jets?

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Did Pakistan really shoot down five Indian fighter jets?

At just after 1am local time on Wednesday morning,

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took off for the launch of Operation Sindoor, a series of strikes targeting alleged terrorist camps inside Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

French-made Rafales and Russian MiGs were in the air for less than half an hour,

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across the border. The question now gripping the region is whether all of them returned.

The first site struck was the Abbas camp in the city of Kotli, about 13km across the Line of Control in Kashmir, at 1.04am.

Vyomika Singh, a wing commander in the Indian air force (IAF), said that the camp had been used by suicide bombers from Lashkar-E-Taiba (LeT), the group New Delhi blames for killing 26 tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir last month.

In grainy, bird’s-eye video posted online by the information wing of India’s armed forces, small clouds of ****** smoke puff up from a scrubby hillside as the missiles explode on impact.

Some of the eight other operations targeted sites much deeper inside Pakistan, including the Subhnallah mosque compound in the Punjabi city of Bahawalpur and an LeT training camp in the city of Muridke, a short distance north of Lahore.

The sites were targeted “based on credible intelligence inputs and locations that were so selected to avoid damage to civilian infrastructure and loss of civilian lives”, Ms Singh said.

Long-range Scalp missiles, the French name for the Storm Shadow jointly produced with Britain, were used in the attack, alongside Hammer precision-guided bombs and advanced loitering munitions.

Video taken from the ground in Muridke shows a fire burning close to a concrete wall, inside what was reportedly the training camp for David Headley, the LeT mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which 166 people were killed.

New Delhi said that the strikes were

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to the Kashmir terror attack.

Operation Sindoor refers to the vermilion dye worn by married Hindu women, so many of whom were widowed by the

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.

“Our intelligence indicated that further attacks against India are impending,” said Vikram Misri, India’s foreign secretary, in a statement on Wednesday morning. “Our actions were measured and non-escalatory, proportionate and responsible,” he added.

Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, hailed the operation as a “moment of pride” in a cabinet meeting,

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. Ministers thumped their desks in reply.

But by then, serious questions were being asked over whether the attack had not come at a far greater cost to the Indian armed forces than the slick, video-led briefings suggest.

No ‘official confirmation’ from India

According to Pakistan’s defence ministry, five Indian jets were shot down overnight, including three Rafales, and a Russian-made Su-30 and MiG-29. New Delhi has not officially responded to the claims.

The Indian embassy in China declared the story “disinformation” in response to a post on social media by the state-owned

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.

In the early hours after the attack, images of previous Indian fighter jet crashes were circulated on Pakistani social media as “proof” of a successful counter-strike. One, from a 2021 ******, showed the smoking tail of a MiG-29 jet.

But reports of jet crashes were soon corroborated from the ground. Local government sources told Reuters that three Indian jets had indeed crashed inside Indian-controlled Kashmir.

The reports mirrored a story in The Hindu, but that was swifty deleted by the newspaper under apparent pressure from the Indian government.

“There is no such on-record official confirmation from India,” the Hindu said as it apologised for what it called an error. “We regret that it created confusion among our readers.”

Residents ‘saw wreckage footage’

Early on Wednesday morning, Dar Yasin, a photojournalist with the Associated Press, raced to the outskirts of Srinagar, the main city in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

He managed to slip past Indian authorities and took pictures of what appeared to be a drop tank disposed of from an Indian fighter jet. He was barred from taking pictures closer to the site of more debris.

“Locals told me they saw a huge ball of fire emerging from the accident site and the wreckage was burning for…hours,” Mr Yasin told AP from the scene. Several locals also took and shared video of the wreckage on social media, before being ushered away from the scene.

Images of a burned aircraft engine appear to be of the M88 engine typically used in Rafale jets, said Andreas Rupprecht, an expert in ******** military aviation.

On Wednesday afternoon, a French intelligence source told CNN that a Rafale had indeed been shot down in the overnight exchanges of fire.

Some 370 miles further south, villagers in Akhali Kurd in the province of Punjab were jolted awake early in the morning by a loud explosion. Scrambling out of bed, they also found the wreckage of an aircraft, The Indian Express reported.

Credit: X/@parteekmahal

‘We shot down jets’ says Pakistani minister

Army officials soon arrived to cordon off the area and collect debris, the newspaper said. One villager had been killed by a secondary explosion as he tried to take video.

“We shot jets down in Akhoor, Ambala, Barnala and in Jammu,” said Attaullah Tarar, Pakistan’s information minister, at an early morning briefing.

Akhali Kurd is about 50 miles from Barnala.

“We also shot down quadcopters and a big drone,” Mr Tarar said.

Analysts said that the wreckage at Akhali Kurd was more likely to be Indian than Pakistani. Both countries maintain that no aircraft crossed the border on Wednesday morning.

“Until evidence comes out to the contrary, I think it’s reasonable to assume this is an IAF jet because Indian authorities have had [roughly] five hours to say otherwise,” said Christopher Clary, a non-resident fellow at the Stimson Centre think tank.

“I don’t think they’d be so tight-lipped if a PAF [Pakistan air force] aircraft was on the ground here.”

Indian sources briefed the local media that all the pilots who took part in the mission were safe, but left open whether any had been forced to eject.

On Wednesday morning, Pakistan’s national security committee said that Islamabad reserved the right to respond at a time and place of its choosing, taking revenge for what it said was the loss of 26 civilian lives.

But local media broadly focused on how many Indian fighter jets had already been shot down.

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had dampened somewhat since the initial, apocalyptic fury overnight.

Previous flare-ups of fighting between the

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have stayed within careful boundaries of **** for tat.

As they issued frantic calls for de-escalation, world leaders will hope that Pakistan’s thirst for revenge has already been somewhat slaked.

If it has indeed shot down several Indian jets, Operation Sindoor could be cast as much of a victory for Islamabad as its old enemy across the border.

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