JeM commander’s big admission: Indian Op Sindoor strikes in Bahawalpur ‘tore apart’ Masood Azhar’s family

In an unusual admission, a senior Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) commander has revealed that Indian forces delivered heavy losses on the family of the group’s chief, Masood Azhar, during the May 7 Bahawalpur strikes under Operation Sindoor.

A video surfacing online shows Masood Ilyas Kashmiri, a top JeM figure, recollecting the assault while sided by armed militants. Speaking in Urdu, he said that after years of waging jihad “from Delhi to Kabul and Kandahar,” Azhar’s family was “torn apart” when Indian forces destroyed their Bahawalpur hideout.

Advertisement

The strikes, conducted jointly by the Army, Navy, and Air Force, were launched in retaliation to the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir, which killed 26 civilians, most of them tourists.

According to official briefings, Indian forces hit nine terror-linked facilities across Bahawalpur, Kotli, and Muridke, targeting entrenched networks of JeM, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and Hizbul Mujahideen.

Colonel Sofiya Qureshi stressed that no Pakistani military assets were targeted and India reported zero civilian casualties. Islamabad, however, countered that 26 people were killed and 46 others injured in six of the nine strike locations.

In a statement released to the media on May 7, 2025, Masood had said, “Ten members of my family including five children, my elder sister and her husband, my Islamic scholar nephew, his wife and my niece in addition to this, my old friend Hazifa, his mother and two other colleagues were killed.”

Stating that the selection of targets for strike operation was based on credible intelligence inputs and role of these facilities in perpetrating terror activities, Quereshi had said that the locations were selected with due diligence to avoid damage to civilian installations and loss of civilian lives.