Terror launch pads in PoK, destroyed by surgical strikes, active again

New Delhi: The terror launch pads that the Indian Army destroyed after the Uri attack are active again, a report said on Wednesday.

This is the time of the year when snow thaws and Pakistani forces try to push through infiltrators into India.

Talking to NDTV, Major General RP Kalita, who heads the Army's 19 Division based in Baramulla, said that terror launch pads directly opposite Uri in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (PoK) have now been reoccupied.

“After the surgical strike, for some time we had intelligence inputs that some of them (terrorists) had moved back but during the winter, we continued to get inputs about their occupation (of launch pads),” Major General Kalita told the channel.

He added that almost all the areas targetted after the Uri terror attacks which fall under his area of responsibility are now “active”.

The Army's 19 Division is shouldered with the responsibility of defending 100 kilometres of the Line of Control in Kashmir's Uri sector.

“Across our area, there are nine or ten launch pads that we are aware of,” he said. “The structure can be a hut, a dhok (a makeshift structure) which is temporarily occupied from which they carry out the final coordination and thereafter they are launched for infiltration.”

On the intervening night of September 28 and 29, India carried out surgical strikes on seven terror launch pads across the LoC with the Army inflicting “significant casualties” on terrorists preparing to infiltrate from PoK, days after Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned Uri attack would not go unpunished.

The strikes came 11 days after the attack by Pakistan-based terror outfit JeM on an Indian Army camp in Uri in Kashmir.