Operation to hunt down terrorists enters third day in Kishtwar; several detained
Eight months after a braveheart of the Indian army sacrificed his life during an anti-terrorist operation code-named ‘Trashi’ in the Singhpora area of Chhatroo, Kishtwar, on May 22, 2025, a joint team of security forces is once again scouting the same general area in search of the Pakistani terrorists to neutralise them.
Operation Trashi was launched a month after the Baisaran valley in Pahalgam witnessed a horrific massacre of 26 civilians, the majority of whom were tourists, barring one local ponywallah.
Senior Army officers of the Northern Command and White Knight Corps, along with top brass of the Jammu and Kashmir police, are supervising the operations to track down the group of Pakistani terrorists.
Additional troops have been mobilised to plug the gaps and expand the scope of massive searches launched in the region.
On January 18, 2026, when Operation Trashi-1 was launched to hunt down the terrorists, the security forces were once again targeted by a group of foreign terrorists as they were tightening the cordon in the general area of Singhpora, Chhatroo.
Para Commando Havildar Gajendra Singh, hailing from Uttarakhand, sacrificed his life in the line of duty after terrorists, well entrenched inside their safe hideout, lobbed a grenade and also opened indiscriminate firing from multiple directions to inflict maximum casualties. In the ensuing gunfight, eight soldiers received injuries, and one paratrooper succumbed to his fatal injuries while undergoing treatment in a military hospital in Udhampur.
In the last eight months, over half a dozen anti-terrorist operations were launched in the upper reaches of Kishtwar, but the security forces failed to track down the footprints of terrorists hiding in the area.
A quick survey of the recent hideout busted by the security forces at a height of 12000 feet inside the general area of Singhpora, Chhatroo, clearly suggested that the security forces, apparently, became complacent and were not able to launch long-range patrols in the remote hills in the absence of any human intelligence about the presence of foreign terrorists.
The foreign terrorists also took advantage of the tactical mistake committed by the security forces and decided to carve out a new hideout in the thickly forested area of Singhpora.
The long list of inventory, stocked inside the underground hideout, also raises several question marks over the nature of vigil maintained by the joint teams of security forces in the remote areas of Kishtwar.
The group of terrorists had managed to carve out a safe hideout inside the forest area and stuffed the same with adequate ration supplies, including bags of Basmati rice, wheat, cereals, a sealed LPG cylinder, a gas stove with three burners, egg trays, desi ghee, cooking utensils, tomatoes, green chillies and other spices etc.
The security forces are closely looking at the role played by the active network of overground workers in arranging logistics for the terrorist commanders under the nose of the security forces. The majority of them are yet to come on the radar of the intelligence agencies present on the ground.
As the foot soldiers are combing the general area of Chhatroo in Kishtwar, the security forces have detained several individuals for questioning to ascertain the identities of overground workers extending logistics to the terrorist group.
A group of two to three terrorists allegedly affiliated with the Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) are believed to be trapped in the area. Operations have been intensified across the Jammu region in the run-up to Republic Day to ensure peaceful celebrations, amid intelligence inputs about desperate attempts by Pakistan-based handlers to push more terrorists into the region, officials mentioned.
Earlier, three terrorists, including a top commander of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) terrorist outfit, were gunned down by the joint team of security forces in the Naidgam area of Chhatru in the Kishtwar district without suffering any collateral damage on April 11-12.
The security forces had also recovered M4 and AK rifles from the encounter site.
Meanwhile, a solemn wreath-laying ceremony was held to pay tributes to the braveheart Havildar Gajendra Singh in Jammu on Tuesday morning.
The wreath-laying ceremony at Satwari was led by Brig Yudhvir Singh Sekhon, the officiating Chief of Staff, White Knight Corps, and later, the mortal remains of the deceased were dispatched to his hometown in Uttarakhand for the last rites.
