At just after 1am local time on Wednesday morning, Indian fighter jets 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, firing missiles that crashed into nine targets 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 black 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.
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