US satellite images cast doubt on Indian claim

High-resolution satellite images reviewed by Reuters show that a religious school run by Jaish-e-Mohammad in northeastern Pakistan appears to be still standing days after India claimed its warplanes had hit the Islamist group’s training camp on the site and killed a large number of extremists.
The images produced by Planet Labs Inc, a San Francisco-based private satellite operator, show at least six buildings on the madrassah site on March 4, six days after the airstrike.
Until now, no high-resolution satellite images were publicly available. But the images from Planet Labs, which show details as small as 28 inches, offer a clearer look at the structures the Indian government said it attacked.
The image is virtually unchanged from an April 2018 satellite photo of the facility. There are no discernible holes in the roofs of buildings, no signs of scorching, blown-out walls, displaced trees around the madrassah or other signs of an aerial attack.
The images cast further doubt on statements made over the last eight days by the Indian government of prime minister Narendra Modi that the raids, early on February 26, had hit all the intended targets at the madrassah site near Jaba village and the town of Balakot in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.
India’s foreign and defence ministries did not reply to emailed questions sent in the past few days seeking comment on what is shown in the satellite images and whether they undermine its official statements on the airstrikes.
Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Project at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, who has 15 years’ experience in analysing satellite images of weapons sites and systems, confirmed that the high-resolution satellite picture showed the structures in question.
‘The high-resolution images don’t show any evidence of bomb damage,’ he said. Lewis viewed three other high-resolution Planet Labs pictures of the site taken within hours of the image provided to Reuters.
The Indian government has not publicly disclosed what weapons were used in the strike.
Government sources said last week that 12 Mirage 2000 jets carrying 1,000 kg (2,200 lbs) bombs carried out the attack. On Tuesday, a defence official said the aircraft used the 2,000-lb Israeli-made SPICE 2000 glide bomb in the strike.
A warhead of that size is meant to destroy hardened targets such as concrete shelters.
Lewis and Dave Schmerler, a senior research associate at the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation studies who also analyses satellite images, said weapons that large would have caused obvious damage to the structures visible in the picture.
‘If the strike had been successful, given the information we have about what kind of munitions were used, I would expect to see signs that the buildings had been damaged,’ Lewis added. ‘I just don’t see that here.’
Pakistan has disputed India’s account, saying the operation was a failure that saw Indian jets, under pressure from Pakistani planes, drop their bombs on a largely empty hillside.
‘There has been no damage to any infrastructure or human life as a result of Indian incursion,’ Major General Asif Ghafoor, the director general of the Pakistan military’s press wing, in a statement to Reuters.
‘This has been vindicated by both domestic and international media after visiting the site.’
In two visits to the Balakot area in Pakistan by Reuters reporters last Tuesday and Thursday, and extensive interviews with people in the surrounding area, there was no evidence found of a destroyed camp or of anyone being killed. 
Villagers said there had been a series of huge explosions but the bombs appeared to have landed among trees.
On the wooded slopes above Jaba, they pointed to four craters and some splintered pine trees, but noted little other impact from the blasts that jolted them awake about 3:00am on February 26.
‘It shook everything,’ said Abdur Rasheed, a van driver who works in the area.
He said there weren’t any human casualties, ‘No one died. Only some pine trees died, they were cut down. A crow also died.’
Mohammad Saddique from Jaba Basic Health Unit and Zia Ul Haq, senior medical officer at Tehsil Headquarters Hospital in Balakot said they had seen no casualties.
Meanwhile, UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet warned India on Wednesday that its ‘divisive policies’ could undermine economic growth, saying that narrow political agendas were marginalizing vulnerable people in an already unequal society, reports Reuters.
‘We are receiving reports that indicate increasing harassment and targeting of minorities – in particular Muslims and people from historically disadvantaged and marginalized groups, such as Dalits and Adivasis,’ Bachelet said in her annual report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
Meanwhile, a soldier was injured Tuesday as Pakistan resorted to heavy mortar shelling and firing from small arms on forward posts and villages at three places along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, officials said, reports NDTV.
The unprovoked firing from across the border took place in the Nowshera and Sunderbani sectors in Rajouri district and the Krishna Ghati sector in Poonch district, prompting the Indian Army to retaliate, a defence spokesman said.
Official sources said a sepoy, guarding a forward post in Kalal area of Nowshera sector, suffered a bullet injury in the firing from across the border and was subsequently admitted to a hospital.
Meanwhile, Indian opposition parties are launching a united attack on prime minister Narendra Modi for what they see as his politicisation of the armed forces as he tries to ride a patriotic wave into a second term in office at a general election, reports Reuters.
Pollsters say opposition parties may be making a mistake by questioning Modi on national security instead of focusing on more basic issues, such as a shortage of jobs and farmers’ distress. Voters concerned about those issues ousted Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in three state elections late last year.
‘The opposition is coordinating this and talking to each other every day,’ said Derek O’Brien, a lawmaker from the West Bengal-based All India Trinamool Congress, the third-biggest opposition party in the lower house of parliament.
‘The strategy is to first keep exposing them and bringing out the fact that they are trying to appropriate the armed forces. And two, we show that this is being done purely for election purposes.’
O’Brien was referring to Modi speaking at a rally with the pictures of the paramilitary police killed in the bombing in the background, as well as a BJP leader in Delhi attending a public event in army fatigues.
The BJP denies the accusations that it’s misusing the armed forces for political benefit.
The main opposition Congress party said that most opposition parties - there are more than 20 of them, some caste-based - were on one page in launching a counter-attack on the BJP line that India needs a leader like Modi to take on Pakistan.
‘What we are convinced about is that the government is diverting attention from its failures because it saw defeats in the three state elections, and the narrative is against the government,’ Congress spokesman Sanjay Jha said.
Pollsters say that they expect Modi and the BJP to get a boost from India’s aggressive response to the suicide bomb attack. He is seen as decisive and resolute by voters, they say.
The only problem may come if the government line - that it killed a large number of Islamist militants in the attack - turns out not to be true.
‘We will expose the BJP’s failures, the number of security forces killed, the rise in militancy, and, most important, the elephant in the room that people are not talking about, is Modi’s monumental failure in terms of putting Kashmir in a serious crisis,’ Congress’ Jha said.
Modi’s policies in Kashmir, claimed by both India and Pakistan but ruled in part, have been harder-line than his Congress predecessors in government, with greater use of the security forces and fewer attempts to engage with those in the Muslim community who believe in some kind of separatist state.
Political strategists and pollsters are convinced that Modi can weather any attacks from the opposition on security issues.
‘I’m confident that the opposition will not be able to turn the narrative in its favour on this issue,’ said Sanjay Kumar, director at think-tank Centre for the Study of Developing Societies that also conducts opinion polls.
Indian opposition leaders who question the country’s bombing raid on Pakistan last week should be tied under fighter jets and dropped like bombs when they stage a new mission, a government minister said Wednesday.
The comments inflamed an already bitter showdown between Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with the opposition over its claims that he has used the military strike to boost his standing ahead of a national election.
Meanwhile, Pakistan on Wednesday for the first time named the pilots it says shot down two Indian warplanes last week, in a rare aerial engagement which had ignited fears of an all-out conflict with its nuclear rival, AFP reports.
The dogfight over the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir on February 27 ended with both sides claiming they had shot each other’s planes down, and an Indian pilot captured by Pakistan.
He was returned to India Friday, crossing the Wagah border on foot.
It also fuelled fears that soaring tensions between the South Asian countries could erupt into their fourth war, with world powers rushing to urge restraint.
‘Two Indian planes were shot down by Pakistan air force on February 27,’ Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told parliament Wednesday.
He named them as Squadron Leader Hassan Siddiqui and Wing Commander Nauman Ali Khan, saying he wanted to ‘pay tribute’ to them both.
Siddiqui had been widely named in unverified comments on social media.
Pakistan has said that one plane crashed on its side of the Line of Control, the de facto border that divides Kashmir; while the second landed on the Indian side.
India, for its part, agrees that a second plane was shot down - but says it was a Pakistani plane, which Pakistan denies. 
It has not been possible to verify the competing claims. 
 

News Courtesy: www.newagebd.net