Pakistan engineered 'false flag' campaign after Pahalgam attack: NCRI report

Pakistani state-linked entities engineered and amplified a narrative framing the Pahalgam massacre as a 'false flag' operation carried out by India.

- ABHINANDAN MISHRA

On April 22, 2025, a terrorist attack in Pahalgam targeting Indian civilians was immediately followed by the rapid emergence of a digital disinformation campaign originating from Pakistan.

A new investigative report by the US-based Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), supported by Cyabra and ThinkFi, has detailed how Pakistani state-linked entities engineered and amplified a narrative framing the Pahalgam massacre as a "false flag" operation carried out by India.

The report documents a structured three-phase operation: narrative seeding by Pakistani officials, coordinated amplification through inauthentic bot networks, and the internationalization of the narrative via foreign influencers with known affiliations to adversarial regimes.

At a macro level, the findings reveal how Pakistan's deep state and military have been working to strengthen their narrative warfare capabilities.

As per the findings, former Pakistani High Commissioner Abdul Basit was one of the earliest voices to frame the attack as an Indian fabrication, posting just hours after the incident that Kashmiri militants do not target civilians.

His messaging was reinforced days later through an online appearance with Jackson Hinkle, a US-based political commentator with a documented record of supporting Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Houthi positions.

NCRI found that Hinkle's posts promoting the false flag theory on May 6—the day India launched retaliatory strikes under Operation Sindoor into Pakistani territory and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir—attracted over 2.5 million views.

Significantly, Hinkle's reach among Western audiences was used to reposition Pakistan's internal propaganda as international skepticism of India's counterterrorism claims.