The decoy package of Sukhoi-30MKIs, in turn, took off from our Punjab to fake a strike operation towards Bahawalpur: Sources. There was no Pakistani fighter anywhere near the actual strike package … the closest one would have been well over 150 km away, the source added

NEW DELHI: During the aerial strike on the Jaish camp in Balakot, the Indian Air Force also deployed “a decoy package” of fighters ostensibly headed towards the JeM headquarters in Bahawalpur in the Punjab province to lure Pakistani combat air patrols away from the actual “strike package” that had the Balakot facility in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province in its cross-hairs in the wee hours of February 26.

This was in addition to the Mirage-2000s and Sukhoi-30MKIs, IL-78 mid-air refuellers and AWACS (airborne warning and control system) aircraft being deployed from Gwalior, Agra and Bareilly, instead of forward airbases, which took a circuitous route to the Muzaffarabad sector along the LoC to retain the element of surprise for the strikes, as was earlier reported by TOI.

“The decoy package of Sukhoi-30MKIs, in turn, took off from our Punjab to fake a strike operation towards Bahawalpur. Pakistan was taken in by the decoy formation and vectored its fighters in the air towards it,” said another source.


“Consequently, there was no Pakistani fighter anywhere near the actual strike package … the closest one would have been well over 150 km away. This also nails Pakistan’s claim that IAF fighters hastily dropped their bombs without achieving anything, much like its other factually incorrect statements like it did not use F-16s in the air intrusion on February 27,” he added.

The IAF cross-border strike, and that too well inside Pakistan instead of restricting it to POK, has redrawn India’s self-imposed red-lines, which earlier held that any use of air power would be a sharply escalatory step in the complicated dynamics between the two nuclear-armed neighbours. “If the IAF had been told not to cross the LoC, like it was directed during the 1999 Kargil conflict, the weapons package to be used would have been quite different,” said the source.