Military tensions are rising between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan after Islamic terrorists massacred 26 people in the Indian province of Kashmir. “The country has closed its main border crossing with Pakistan, expelled its military diplomats and suspended a landmark water-sharing treaty,” the BBC noted Thursday.
On Tuesday, terrorists gunned down 25 Indians and a Nepalese citizen at a popular holiday destination in the northern Indian region of Kashmir. The gunmen separated Hindus and Christians from Muslims before shooting them at point-blank range. The attackers were seen filming their horrific murders.
Terrorists “were singling out non-Muslims from a large crowd of people who were in the Baisaran valley,” Indian news website The Wire reported Wednesday. “Highly placed source- and eyewitness-accounts collected by The Wire, some of which have been verified by officials, paint a horrifying picture of the carnage in which some victims were shot at point-blank range after their non-Muslim identity was confirmed by the gunmen, who were also apparently filming the attack with body cameras.”
India responded to the massacre by ordering Pakistani nationals to leave the country by April 29 and closing the main border crossing to Pakistan. “India announced a five-pronged diplomatic response following the Pahalgam carnage — one of the deadliest civilian attacks in the Valley in recent years — which included suspending the Indus Waters Treaty and scaling down diplomatic presence on both sides,” the Indian website Print reported.
Pakistan announced retaliatory measures, including closing its airspace to Indian carriers. “Islamabad has announced a series of retaliatory measures, including shutting down the Wagah border, suspending all SAARC visas for Indian nationals, and closing its airspace for Indian airlines,” the news outlet added.
The Pakistan-based Islamic terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), on Thursday, took responsibility for the massacre. “Kashmir Resistance, also known as The Resistance Front, has claimed responsibility for Tuesday’s attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir,” Reuters reported.
Lashkar-e-Taiba, which also perpetrated the 2008 Mumbai attack, has training camps near the Indian and Afghan borders. Besides receiving support from Pakistani authorities, the terrorist group also has close operational ties with Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, reports say.
Tuesday’s massacre, which has echoes of the October 7 attack in which 1400 Israeli men, women, and children were murdered by Palestinian terrorists in cold blood, could have deeper links to the Islamic terror group Hamas.
Israel’s Ambassador to India, Reuven Azar, on Thursday, confirmed that a group of Hamas leaders had toured the Pakistan-held Kashmir ahead of the deadly attack. The visiting Hamas operatives met with the representatives of the terrorist groups waging jihad against India, he said. The Gaza-based terrorist group has ties to Pakistan-backed LeT, Indian news reports indicate.
India’s NDTV channel reported:
Israel’s Ambassador to India, Reuven Azar, today compared the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam to the October 7, 2023 Hamas strike on Israel, citing similarities in their targeting of civilians and warning of growing coordination among terrorist groups.”The terrorists are collaborating at all levels and trying to be copycats of each other. I am sure the intelligence agencies are working together to defeat them,” Mr Azar told NDTV. (…)”Unfortunately, we must confess, these terrorist groups are inspiring each other. There are similarities between the Pahalgam attack and what happened on October 7 (2023) in Israel. Innocent tourists were enjoying their vacation in Pahalgam, while in Israel, people were celebrating a music festival,” he told news agency PTI.He linked the Pahalgam attack’s timing to the recent visits by Hamas leaders to Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (PoK), where they reportedly met with Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorists and a few others, suggesting possible coordination.
The move by New Delhi to recall diplomats and expel Pakistani nationals suggests that Indian could be considering a cross-border raid or strike. In 2019, the Indian Air Force struck a jihadist training camp reportedly belonging to the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) terrorist group after a suicide bombing in Kashmir killed 40 Indian soldiers.
In a warning aimed at Pakistan, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed to pursue the perpetrators of Tuesday’s attack and their foreign backers. “India will identify, track and punish every terrorist and their backers and we will pursue them to the ends of the Earth,” Prime Minister Modi said at a rally on Thursday. He vowed that the “terrorists behind the killings, along with their backers, will get a punishment bigger than they can imagine.”
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