India launched military strikes on Pakistan on Wednesday and Pakistan claimed it shot down five Indian Air Force jets, in an escalation that has pushed the two nations to the brink of a wider conflict.
The escalation puts India and Pakistan in dangerous territory, with Islamabad vowing to retaliate against India’s strikes and the international community calling for restraint.
New Delhi said the strikes are in response to the massacre of 26 people – mostly Indian tourists – who died in April when gunmen stormed a scenic mountain spot in the India-administered part of Kashmir, a disputed border region. India has blamed Pakistan for the attack, which Islamabad denies.
India launched “Operation Sindoor” in the early hours of Wednesday morning local time (Tuesday night ET) in both Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
Indian officials claimed no Pakistani civilian, economic or military sites were struck in the 25-minute operation, which targeted the “terrorist infrastructure” of two militant groups – Lashkar-e-Tayyiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed.
But Pakistan is painting a different picture of the strikes – saying civilians were killed and mosques were hit across six locations. CNN has yet to verify those claims.
Some of those strikes hit the densely populated province of Punjab, Pakistan’s military said, and were the deepest India has struck inside Pakistan since one of their wars in 1971.
A high-ranking French intelligence official later told CNN that Pakistan had downed one Rafale, and that French authorities were looking into whether any more were brought down.
One senior Pakistani security source said 125 jets fought for over an hour, staying in their own airspaces and firing missiles from afar, while Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said they had blown the five Indian jets to “smithereens.”
India’s government has stayed silent over the claims. Its embassy in China pushed back against what it called “disinformation” after Chinese state media reported its planes had been downed. CNN has not been able to verify Pakistan’s claim.
But multiple reports of plane crashes in Indian territory have emerged since.
In India’s Punjab province, eyewitnesses and a local government official said a plane crashed out of the night sky in the early hours of Wednesday – around the same time Pakistan claims it shot down the jets. The official told CNN the aircraft was unidentified but “seems to be ours.”
And in Indian-administered Kashmir, eyewitnesses and a local official in the village of Wuyan said an unidentified aircraft crashed on Wednesday. Photos by AFP news agency showed plane wreckage, though it’s not clear who the aircraft belongs to or what brought it down.