Pakistan indicted India on Friday with dragging the nuclear-armed neighbours “towards a great war”, as the three-day toll from missile, artillery, and drone assaults exceeded 50
The violence follows last month’s terrorist strike against holidaymakers in Indian-occupied parts of disputed Kashmir, which claimed the lives of 26 victims and which New Delhi blamed Pakistan for supporting — an accusation dismissed by Islamabad.
India retaliated with air raids Wednesday on what it termed “terrorist camps” in Pakistan, igniting the worst confrontations between the two in decades. On a third consecutive day of tit-for-tat strikes since, the Indian army claimed to have “repulsed” waves of Pakistani attacks launched by drones and other weapons overnight, and had delivered a “befitting reply.”.
India also blamed Pakistani troops on Thursday for shelling three military posts — two in Kashmir and one in the border state of Punjab. Pakistan’s Information Minister Ataullah Tarar stated Pakistan had “not targeted any points in Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu & Kashmir, or across an international border, so far”.
The two nations have engaged in several wars over Kashmir since their independence from Britain in 1947. The foreign ministry spokesman in Pakistan stated Friday that India’s “jingoism and war hysteria” ought to be a matter of grave concern for the world.
“Unfortunately, the two nuclear states are being drawn nearer to a great conflict because of India’s reckless behaviour,” said Shafqat Ali Khan at a briefing in the capital, Islamabad. Pakistani government and security officials told Reuters that Indian shelling overnight killed five civilians — one of them a two-year-old girl — along parts of the heavily militarised Line of Control (LoC), which cuts across Kashmir.
“In reaction, the Pakistan Army launched a solid counter-offensive, attacking three Indian outposts,” Kotli district police official Adeel Khan, informed AFP. Four of the civilian casualties took place there.
Pakistani military sources, on the other hand, reported that its troops had destroyed 77 Indian drones over the past two days, declaring that they were Israeli-origin.
In Indian-held Kashmir, a police officer reported that one woman was killed and two men injured by intense overnight shelling in Uri, which is about 100 kilometres (60 miles) from the state capital Srinagar.
“The generation of Kashmir will never forget this act of violence by India,” declared 15-year-old Muhammad Bilal in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistan-administered Kashmir where a mosque was targeted in Wednesday’s attacks.
In Jammu, which is also under Indian control, 21-year-old student Piyush Singh added: “Our [attack] is justified because we are doing it for whatever happened to our civilians.”
