Operation Akhal - one terrorist killed in J&K
Operation Akhal - one terrorist killed in J&K
Yashwant Bhaskar
|
Updated:
Aug 02, 2025, 11:36 AM IST
Under Operation Akhal, an encounter is going on between the army and terrorists in Kulgam area of Kashmir since late Friday night. In this encounter, the Indian Army has killed one terrorist.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
News18
an hour ago
- News18
Indian Army Stresses 'Highest Standards Of Discipline' After Officer Assaults SpiceJet Staff
Last Updated: The Army's response came after a violent altercation where a senior Army officer assaulted SpiceJet employees over excess luggage, leaving them with grievous injuries. The Indian Army on Sunday said it was committed to upholding the highest standards of discipline and took all allegations seriously, after an FIR was registered against a senior Army officer for allegedly assaulting four SpiceJet staff members at Srinagar airport last week. 'The matter involving an alleged altercation between an Army personnel and airline staff at Srinagar Airport on 26 July has come to the notice of the Indian Army. The Indian Army is committed to uphold the highest standards of discipline and conduct, and takes all allegations seriously. Full cooperation is being extended to the authorities in investigating the case," the Indian Army said in a statement. A violent altercation erupted at Srinagar airport on July 26 when the senior Army officer allegedly assaulted multiple SpiceJet staff members after refusing to pay for excess cabin baggage, the airline has confirmed in an official statement. The officer, identified as a Lieutenant Colonel currently posted at the High Altitude Warfare School in Gulmarg, reportedly lashed out at airline personnel when they informed him of additional charges for baggage exceeding cabin limits. The incident occurred during the boarding process for SpiceJet flight SG-386 to Delhi. SpiceJet filed a police complaint against the Army officer, accusing him of 'murderous assault". According to the FIR, the Army officer's assault was 'unprovoked", 'violent", and 'abusive", and left SpiceJet employees with a spinal fracture and injuries to the jaw. SpiceJet confirmed that it has filed the FIR with the local police and has begun the process of placing the officer on India's no-fly list. The FIR has been registered under sections 115(2), 126(2), 351(2) and 131 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), which pertain to voluntarily causing hurt, wrongful restraint, criminal intimidation, and assaulting or using criminal force. The altercation, which was caught on video, has been widely shared across various social media platforms, sparking significant public outrage. The footage has prompted widespread condemnation, with many users demanding swift action and accountability from the authorities involved. view comments First Published: Disclaimer: Comments reflect users' views, not News18's. Please keep discussions respectful and constructive. Abusive, defamatory, or illegal comments will be removed. News18 may disable any comment at its discretion. By posting, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
NDTV
4 hours ago
- NDTV
After Pahalgam Attack, 21 Terrorists Killed In 6 Separate J&K Encounters
New Delhi: Following the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22, counter-terror operations by security forces have led to the killing of 21 terrorists in six separate encounters across Jammu and Kashmir. The operations, carried out jointly by the Indian Army, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), Border Security Force (BSF), and Jammu and Kashmir Police, targeted both foreign and local terrorists. Twelve of the terrorists were Pakistani nationals, while nine were local recruits. According to intelligence sources, the overall number of active local terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir has dropped following these operations. Breakdown Of Operations And Terrorists Operation Akhal: Kulgam Encounter The most recent operation, codenamed Operation Akhal, was conducted in Kulgam nearly 70 km from Srinagar. It resulted in the elimination of three Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorists: 1. Zakir Ahmed Gani - Resident of Kulgam. Joined Lashkar-e-Taiba on September 29, 2023. 2. Adil Rehman Dentu - Resident of Sopore. Joined LeT on March 5, 2021. Classified as a Category-A terrorist. 3. Harish Dar - Resident of Pulwama. Joined LeT in June 2024. Listed as Category-C terrorist. Security forces said that this group had recently been reactivated for local recruitment and planning logistical support for cross-border infiltrators. Encounter 1: Sambha Sector - Jaish-e-Mohammed Module In an encounter in the Samba district, BSF troops eliminated seven Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorists, all Pakistani nationals. This encounter was one of the most lethal for the JeM network in recent months. Their identities have not yet been disclosed by officials pending further verification through forensic and biometric analysis. Encounter 2: Shopian's Kellar Forest - Lashkar-e-Taiba Cell Neutralised Three key LeT terrorists were killed in a dense forested area of Shopian district: 1. Shahid Kutte - Resident of Chotipora Heerpora, Shopian. A Category-A terrorist who joined LeT on March 8, 2023. Kutte is accused in the 2024 resort shooting case in Shopian that injured two German tourists and a local driver. He is also an accused in the 2024 assassination of a BJP sarpanch in Herapora and the killing of a Territorial Army jawan in Kulgam this February. 2. Adnan Shafi Dar - Resident of Vanduna Melhora, Shopian. Joined LeT on October 18, 2024 and a Category-C terrorist. He was responsible for the murder of a migrant labourer on the day of his induction. 3. Aamir Bashir - From Shopian. A member of The Resistance Front (TRF), a front outfit of LeT, and a Category-C terrorist. TRF had claimed responsibility for the Pahalgam attack. Encounter 3: Tral Forest - Jaish-e-Mohammed Module Another operation took place in the Tral forest area, eliminating three militants of Jaish-e-Mohammed, all from Tral: 1. Asif Ahmed Sheikh - District Commander of Awantipora. Category-C. Active from April 18, 2022. 2. Aamir Nazir Wani - Active since April 26, 2024. Category-C. 3. Yawar Ahmed Bhatt - Active since August 26, 2024. Category-C. These terrorists were reportedly involved in reactivating sleeper cells in southern Kashmir. Encounter 4: Mulnar Village - Operation Mahadev Three Pakistani LeT terrorists were killed in Mulnar village under Operation Mahadev: Sulaiman, Afghan and Jibran. Home Minister Amit Shah, addressing the Rajya Sabha on Wednesday during a debate on Operation Sindoor, confirmed that the three terrorists eliminated in Operation Mahadev were the same individuals who carried out the Pahalgam massacre. Encounter 5: Poonch - Operation Shivshakti Under Operation Shivshakti, two Pakistani LeT terrorists were killed in the Poonch region. While their names have not been publicly disclosed, officials confirmed they were infiltrators who recently crossed over from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). Current Active Local Terrorists According to intelligence sources, a handful of remaining local operatives still active: 1. Ahsan Ahmed Shaikh - Pulwama. LeT affiliate. Active from June 24, 2023. Category-C. 2. Asif Ahmed Khande - Shopian. Joined Hizbul Mujahideen in July 2015. Category-A. 3. Naseer Ahmad Wani - Shopian. LeT. Active from November 30, 2019. Category-C. 4. Zubair Ahmed Wani alias Abu Ubaida alias Usman - Anantnag. Hizbul Mujahideen Chief Operational Commander in Anantnag. Active since April 19 2018. Category A+. 5. Aaron Rashid Ganai - Anantnag. Travelled to PoK in 2018, returned to South Kashmir in June 2021. Affiliation unclear. 6. Adil Hussain - Anantnag. LeT member. Further details awaited. UN Security Council Mentions TRF The United Nations Security Council (UNSC), for the first time, officially identified The Resistance Front (TRF) in a sanctions monitoring report as responsible for the terror attack in Pahalgam. The report explicitly cited TRF's claim of responsibility for the attack that left 26 people dead. This is the first time TRF, a proxy group linked to the Pakistan-based LeT, has been named in any formal United Nations document. The report's inclusion of TRF happened despite strong diplomatic resistance from Pakistan. According to the Monitoring Team report, five terrorists launched the attack in Pahalgam on April 22. On the same day, TRF claimed responsibility and also published a photograph of the attack site. The group repeated its claim on April 23 but retracted it on April 26. No other group stepped forward to claim the attack. Despite this retraction, the report notes that at least two member states informed the UN sanctions team that the attack could not have occurred without the support of Lashkar-e-Taiba. One member state explicitly said TRF and LeT were synonymous. A third member state, however, disagreed, claiming that LeT was now defunct. In the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack, India launched Operation Sindoor, targeting terror infrastructure in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK). The inclusion of TRF in the UN report comes against the backdrop of Pakistan's attempts to manipulate language in official UNSC documents. Pakistan's Foreign Minister had boasted in the Pakistan National Assembly about achieving this retraction. The Monitoring Team's report now directly contradicts that claim and restores the reference to TRF in the official UN record.
&w=3840&q=100)
First Post
6 hours ago
- First Post
Why India must shift to strategic offence to secure Kashmir
The strategic verdict is clear: deterrence alone is no longer enough read more An Indian Army soldier looks out from an armoured vehicle on a highway leading to south Kashmir's Pahalgam, in Marhama village, in Kashmir. File image/ Reuters On April 22, 2025, Baisaran, a higher valley above Pahalgam, echoed not with the laughter of visiting tourists but with gunfire. Armed terrorists emerged from the pine forest, forcing tourists to line up and demanding they recite Islamic verses. Those who faltered were executed on the spot. Twenty-six civilians, including a Nepali national and several newlyweds, were murdered in what was no random killing but a calculated Hindu massacre. Among the dead was Manjunath, visiting Kashmir with his wife, Pallavi, and son, who survived only because a terrorist chillingly told Pallavi, 'I won't kill you. Go and tell Modi.' STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Intelligence inputs revealed that the perpetrators were foreign terrorists, affiliated with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a UN-proscribed terror outfit headquartered in Muridke, Pakistan. Forensic teams later confirmed that terrorists used Chinese AK-47s and American M4 carbine assault rifles. The men were trained killers, infiltrated via Pakistan-Occupied Jammu & Kashmir (PoJK), supported by Pakistan's military, and facilitated by its intelligence agency, the ISI. As grief engulfed the nation, action followed. Within hours, Union Home Minister Amit Shah was on the ground in Srinagar. Prime Minister Narendra Modi cut short his Saudi state visit and convened the Cabinet Committee on Security meeting just off the tarmac at Delhi Airport the next day. By then Intelligence had identified the terrorists: Suleiman, Jibran, and Hamza 'Afghani', all Pakistani nationals trained in Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoJK). Armed with solid evidence directly implicating Pakistan, PM Modi swiftly ordered immediate diplomatic and economic countermeasures against Islamabad. Citing material breach, India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, with Modi asserting that 'blood and water cannot flow together'. Pakistan's diplomats were expelled, and all visas were cancelled. Simultaneously, India's security establishment swiftly mobilised to deliver its own decisive response. The reply came on May 7 when a deep-penetration multi-strike into PoJK and Pakistan's Punjab province codenamed 'Operation Sindoor' obliterated nurseries of terror across the Line of Control (LoC) and the International Border. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD PM Modi named the operation 'Sindoor', a word that connotes both sanctity and bereavement: many of the Baisaran victims were newly married Hindu couples, their crimson vermilion barely set before widowhood descended. Guided by satellite reconnaissance and advanced targeting technologies, Indian Armed Forces executed a series of exquisitely calibrated strikes against nine terrorist redoubts: Lashkar-e-Taiba's Sawai Nala and Bilal camps in Muzaffarabad; Jaish-e-Mohammed's Gulpur and Abbas facilities in Kotli; and, most infamously, the sprawling Markaz Taiba at Muridke, the very academy that trained the gunmen who ravaged Mumbai in 2008. The barrage then shifted southwest to Bahawalpur, where Markaz Subhanallah, the headquarters of Jaish-e-Mohammed and its founder, Masood Azhar, was reduced to rubble. These were no indiscriminate strikes but the surgical excision of Pakistan's radical jihadist terror infrastructure: more than one hundred terrorists, including senior trainers and recruiters, were eliminated. Islamabad's protestations of civilian casualties and religious infrastructure swiftly unravelled when leaked images revealed state funerals for UN-proscribed, now-dead terrorists, coffins draped in the Pakistani national flag, borne by officers of the ISI, local police, and the Pakistan Army. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Pakistan's riposte to the Indian strikes on terror was a blunt show of asymmetric force; swarms of Turkish-made Songar and STM Kargu and Chinese-supplied drones targeted Indian civilians in cities such as Amritsar, Jammu, Srinagar, and Surat, while heavy artillery raked the LoC along Samba, Poonch, Rajouri, and more, indiscriminately hitting Gurdwaras, churches, and temples along the LoC. India's layered, largely indigenous air defence web, fronted by made-in-India S-400 batteries at Adampur and backed by Akash and Barak-8 interceptors, shot down almost all of those unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and loitering ammo, an effectiveness the world witnessed in awe and defence equipment companies scrambled to comprehend. Recognising that Pakistan had decided to hit its civilians, New Delhi swiftly switched from defence to punishment: in a 22-minute blitz, cued by space-based Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) and AI-fused targeting, India crippled Pakistan's air infrastructure, flattening drone hubs at Murid, gutting fighter pens at Rafiqui and Chunian, shattering Sukkur's runway, and knocking Nur Khan's AWACS shelters offline. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD With radar screens dark and sortie rates collapsed, Pakistan's Director-General of Military Operations rang his Indian counterpart to plead for an immediate 'stoppage of firing'. PM Modi informed Parliament that India accepted, without a hint of external mediation, its objective achieved and its message unmistakably clear. While Islamabad scrambled to tender repairs for its obliterated airbases, New Delhi redoubled the hunt on home soil. Operation Mahadev, an integrated sweep by the Army, Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), and Jammu and Kashmir Police, shadowed the Baisaran terrorists through dense woodland for fourteen weeks until, on July 28, 2025, the Baisaran terrorist trio was surrounded and neutralised in a Dachigam forest block outside Srinagar, under the brooding silhouette of Mount Mahadev. Among the items recovered were the very AK-47s used in the Baisaran Hindu massacre, Pakistani voter-identity cards, and chocolate bars stamped 'Made in Lahore'. When India's Home Minister, Amit Shah, rose in Parliament to confirm the terrorists deaths, his statement was met with thunderous applause. More than 1,000 local residents had been interviewed, those who harboured them were arrested, and the bodies were identified by courageous citizens. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Building on the precedent set by the 2016 surgical strikes and the 2019 Balakot airstrike, Operation Sindoor established an entirely new threshold. Henceforth, any terrorist assault upon Indian soil will be treated as an act of war; New Delhi will draw no distinction between the terrorists and the state that shelters them; and Pakistan's habitual nuclear blackmail will no longer afford it protection. Above all, Operation Sindoor remains unfinished business. The era of 'strategic restraint' was laid to rest and replaced by 'offensive defence', the doctrine championed by National Security Adviser Ajit Doval. The policy shift is historical. However, for several decades Islamabad's proxy war has been personified by a succession of Pakistani nationals who slipped across the LoC, wrought carnage, and, in most cases, died on Indian soil. Mast Gul set the grim template in 1995 when, leading Harkat-ul-Ansar terrorists, he torched the revered Charar-e-Sharief and escaped to a hero's welcome in PoJK. A generation later Lashkar-e-Taiba's Abu Qasim masterminded the August 5, 2015, Udhampur highway ambush that killed Border Security Force troopers, only to fall in a Kulgam encounter that October. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD His mantle passed to Abu Dujana, whose video-broadcast bravado masked a record of hit-and-run assaults on Pampore and other army posts until he was gunned down in Pulwama in August 2017. That same year, LeT gunman Abu Ismail planned the Amarnath Yatra bus attack, murdering eight Hindu pilgrims; he lasted barely two months before being cornered on Srinagar's outskirts. The most notorious of the lot, Naveed Jatt, escaped police custody from Srinagar's SMHS Hospital in 2018, assassinated senior Kashmiri journalist Shujaat Bukhari, and was himself neutralised by the Indian Security forces that November in Budgam. Each terrorist enjoyed ISI facilitation, specialised in high-profile ambushes designed for maximum communal shock, and left behind a trail of civilian and security-force deaths that highlight how PoJK's occupation has resulted in its curation as a factory for cross-border terror. While the amendment of Article 370 of the Indian constitution in 2019 changed the ground reality. With local terrorist recruitment drying up, Pakistan turned increasingly to foreign fighters. The target killing of Hindus, labourers in Kashmir under the false pretext of domicile recipients, the Reasi terror attack in 2024, and the Baisaran Hindu massacre in 2025 are proof of Pakistani desperation, and India's reply is proof of capability. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Ultimately, enduring security in the Himalayas hinges on reclaiming Pakistan-occupied Jammu & Kashmir and the Pakistan-occupied Territories of Ladakh (PoTL), illegally occupied in 1947 and methodically fashioned into a crucible of jihad. Muzaffarabad's training grids and the Neelum Valley's shadowed ravines continue to disgorge terrorists and hateful indoctrination across the Line of Control; so long as these launchpads and extremist ideologues persist, peace will remain elusive. Now, grief has hardened into resolve: from Srinagar's streets to Rameshwaram's shores, Indians of every shade stand united behind decisive action. The strategic verdict is clear: deterrence alone is no longer enough. Hence, India's strategy must now include not just 'offensive defence' but reclamation. Rahul Pawa is an international criminal lawyer and director of research at New Delhi based think tank Centre for Integrated and Holistic Studies. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost's views.
