Uri Attack: A Watershed Moment In Cross-Border Terrorism

The Uri attack, which saw the indian army suffer its worst casualties in recent times, is another watershed moment in cross-border terrorism.

- Sandeep Unnithan And Asit Jolly

The four Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) fidayeen terrorists, who cut through the barbed wire fence of an administrative area of the Uri brigade headquarters on the night of September 17, were specifically tasked and equipped for a mass casualty attack.

Each of them carried an AK-47 with a grenade launcher clipped under its barrel. They had over 50 incendiary grenades designed to set off fires. Their target was a fuel dump where nearly hundreds of 200 litre oil barrels were stacked. They contained diesel for trucks, petrol for the Maruti Gypsies of the 12 brigade based near Uri town and kerosene for cooking food in their high altitude posts on the Pir Panjal range. Near this dump, men of the 5 Bihar regiment lay asleep in their tents. At around 5.30 am, the terrorists fired off a salvo of over a dozen incendiary grenades setting off explosions and a conflagration that quickly engulfed the canvas tents. Nearly 14 soldiers were consumed in the blaze. A sentry shot down one terrorist but the three terrorists gunned down four more soldiers as they escaped the blaze. Para-commandos and soldiers gunned down three terrorists in the encounter which lasted three hours. The platoon-sized death toll—18 soldiers with nearly twice the number seriously injured—is one of the army’s largest loss of lives in a single terrorist attack in Jammu & Kashmir in nearly two decades. It added to the lethal cocktail of the over three-month-long violent civil protests in Kashmir in which over 80 protesters have been killed.

SLACKENING OF VIGIL

The 12 Brigade headquarters in Uri is a virtual oasis, protected naturally by the high ranges of the Pir Panjal and the Jhelum river that flows by. “The place just does not lend itself to any manner of attack,” says an Indian Army officer who has done several tours of duty in the insurgent Kashmir Valley.