After NYT, Washington Post says Indian air strikes inflicted heavy damage on Pakistan

Before and after satellite images of the Nur Khan airbase sourced from Maxar cited by Washington Post in its report.

Indian retaliatory strikes deep inside Pakistan on Saturday damaged runways and structures across at least six airfields, The Washington Post reported, citing a visual analysis by experts who termed the attacks as the most significant in decades between the two rivals.

As per the report, based on a review of two dozen satellite images and aftermath videos, Indian strikes damaged three hangars, two runways and a pair of mobile buildings used by Pakistan's air force. The report further said that some of the sites hit by India were as deep as 100 miles inside the country.

India, which has termed its military actions "measured and calibrated", has claimed that it hit 11 of Pakistan's airbases. As per The Post report, these 11 bases where India claimed to have carried out the attacks included the sites where it has found considerable damage.

Also Read: NYT report highlights New Delhi’s ‘clear edge’ in conflict, says India’s strikes crippled key Pakistan airbases

"The satellite evidence is consistent with the claim that the Indian military inflicted meaningful — though in my view not devastating — damage on the Pakistan air force at a number of bases across eastern Pakistan," said Christopher Clary, associate professor at the University at Albany and author of a book on the India-Pakistan rivalry.

“High-profile targets were hit in precision strikes with the aim of severely degrading Pakistan’s offensive and defensive air capabilities,” The Washington Post quoted William Goodhind, a geospatial analyst at Contested Ground, a research project that uses satellite imagery to track armed conflict, as saying.

Walter Ladwig, a senior lecturer in international relations at King’s College London and an expert in South Asian security issues, told The Post that India's strikes marked “the most extensive Indian air attacks on Pakistani military infrastructure since the 1971 war”.

Notably, The Washington Post is the second major global media outlet to validate India's success in the strikes carried out across the border. On Wednesday, New York Times reported that India emerged with a "clear upper hand" in the military confrontation with Pakistan.

The NYT report also cited high-resolution satellite imagery confirming that Indian strikes inflicted significant damage on key Pakistani military facilities, despite Islamabad’s attempts to downplay the impact.

“An examination of satellite imagery indicates that while the attacks were widespread, the damage was far more contained than claimed — and mostly inflicted by India on Pakistani facilities,” stated the report, based on satellite images by Maxar technologies and Planet Labs.

The Post report further said that two mobile control centers were destroyed at the Nur Khan airbase in Rawalpindi, just outside Islamabad, validating the details of the operation shared by India’s armed forces.

As per The Post, the Nur Khan airbase is one of the most important ones in the country as it is the military’s central transport hub. This base is close to the Strategic Plans Division, the unit responsible for safeguarding the country’s nuclear warheads, which are stored in facilities across Pakistan.

The Post also reported that Bholari and Shahbaz airbases in Pakistan suffered severe damage, with destruction of buildings used as aircraft hangars. “A large hole nearly 60 feet wide is visible in the roof of a hangar at Bholari, which experts said was consistent with a missile impact," it reported.

The report also cited experts as saying that Operation Sindoor marked a deliberate shift by India which had earlier limited its air operations to Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir or to remote parts of Pakistan but had now struck facilities in Pakistan "proper at one time".

“India is treating terrorist attacks as grounds for conventional military reprisals," Ladwig told Washington Post.

Notably, both the NYT and the Washington Post had refused to acknowledge the brutal killing of 26 civilians in Jammu and Kashmir's Pahalgam as a terror attack and that the civilians were killed by the terrorists after ascertaining the religious identities of the victims.

The New York Times and Washington Post had headlined their stories after the April 22 attack as "At Least 24 Tourists Gunned Down by Militants in Kashmir" and "Gunmen Launch Rare Attack on Tourists in Indian-Administered Kashmir", respectively.