[Source: Reuters]

India hit Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir with missiles and Pakistan vowed to retaliate saying it shot down five Indian aircraft, in the worst clash in more than two decades between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

India told more than a dozen foreign envoys in New Delhi that “if Pakistan responds, India will respond,” fuelling fears of a larger military conflict in one of the world’s most dangerous – and most populated – nuclear flashpoint regions.

The escalation comes at a fragile moment for Pakistan’s $350 billion economy, which recently emerged from an economic crisis with the government trying to shore up finances and make progress on the $7 billion International Monetary Fund loan programme of 2024.

India said it struck nine “terrorist infrastructure” sites, some of them linked to an attack by Islamist militants that killed 25 Hindu tourists and one local in Indian Kashmir last month.

Pakistan said at least 31 of its civilians had been killed and 46 wounded, a military spokesperson said, and that India “had ignited an inferno in the region”. This included deaths from the strikes and border shelling.

Islamabad pledged to respond “at a time, place and manner of its choosing to avenge the loss of innocent Pakistani lives and blatant violation of its sovereignty”, emphatically rejecting Indian allegations it had terrorist camps on its territory.

“For the blatant mistake that India made last night, it will now have to pay the price,” Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in a televised address on state broadcaster PTV to the nation. “Perhaps they thought that we would retreat, but they forgot that…this is a nation of brave people.”

Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif told broadcaster Geo News that Islamabad would only strike Indian military targets and not civilians, in retaliation.

The Indian strikes included Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, for the first time since the last full-scale war between the old enemies more than half a century ago.

“The targets we had set were destroyed with exactness according to a well-planned strategy,” India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh said. “We have shown sensitivity by ensuring that no civilian population was affected in the slightest.”

Islamabad said none of the six locations targeted in Pakistan were militant camps.

Fifty-seven commercial aircraft were in the air over Pakistan when India attacked, endangering thousands of lives, the spokesperson said, adding they included airlines of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Thailand, South Korea and China.

In Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani Kashmir, the Indian strike had badly damaged a mosque-seminary in the heart of the city. Five missiles killed three people in the two storey structure, which also had residential quarters, locals said.

Reuters journalists saw the roof and walls of the concrete building crumbled under the impact of the strikes and household items scattered on the first floor. An Indian source said the mosque was actually a “terrorist camp”, which Pakistan denies.

Pakistan has said all targets were civilians.

‘OPERATION SINDOOR’

The Pakistan prime minister’s office said five Indian fighter jets and drones had been shot down, although this was not confirmed by India. The Indian embassy in Beijing called reports of fighter jets downed by Pakistan “disinformation”.

Local government sources in Indian Kashmir told Reuters three fighter jets had crashed in separate areas of the Himalayan region overnight and their pilots had been hospitalised. Indian defence ministry officials did not respond to Reuters requests for comment.

Images circulating on local media showed a large, damaged cylindrical chunk of silver-coloured metal lying in a field at one of the crash sites. Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the image.

Indian forces attacked facilities linked to Islamist militant groups Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba, two Indian military spokespeople told a briefing in New Delhi, in what New Delhi called “Operation Sindoor”.

Hindu-majority India and Islamic Pakistan have fought two of their three wars since independence in 1947 over Muslim-majority Kashmir, which both sides claim in full and control in part.

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