The region is a favourite location for Pakistan terrorist factories.
India on Tuesday morning launched an airstrike on a terrorist training camp in Balakot in Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. The region is at the core of Pakistan's terror industry, and is not very far from Abbottabad, the military town where Osama bin Laden was killed in a raid by US forces in 2011.
Indian Air Force planes bombed a training camp of Jaish-e-Mohammed, the Pakistan-backed terrorist outfit that claimed responsibility for the February 14 Pulwama terror attack, in which 40 Indian paramilitary personnel were killed.
Predictably, Pakistan claimed that there was no such camp in the area. But the mountainous area is known to harbour a number of such facilities, not all of them aimed at running Pakistan's sub-conventional insurgency against India. Balakot was also identified by US authorities in the 2005 'sleeper cell' trial of Hamid Hayat as the area where he received training.
Balakot's location - close to Muzaffarabad in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir as well as the Afghan border - has made it an attractive option to locate Pakistan terrorist factories.
Needless to say, Balakot is just 60 km north of Abbottabad, where the Pakistan Military Academy is located, and was the last home of Osama bin Laden. It was at a fortified compound in Abbottabad that US Special Forces successfully killed bin Laden in a midnight raid on May 2, 2011.
The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), quickly tweeted images of overturned mud, saying the bombs released by the IAF fighter planes had landed on empty ground.
Early news of the airstrike on Balakot got a number of people confused in both India and Pakistan on whether the target of the IAF strike was the Balakot in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) or the Balakote in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK).
However, an early tweet by Pakistan military spokesperson had already clarified beyond doubt which Balakot had been targeted, considering it said the IAF action had happened in the Muzaffarabad sector. Muzaffarabad, the capital of PoK, is about 40 km by road from Balakot.
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 "Osama bin Laden's safe house was a mere 60 km from the camp that India targeted on Tuesday.")
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