Dragon Fire

Kargil, Ladakh, India

Kargil had a symbolic place in the hearts of many Indians as the military sector which repulsed the Pakistani attack in 1999. There was actually very little fighting around the town of Kargil, where the population was ethnically Kashmiri and mostly Muslim. It was the second biggest town in Ladakh, built next to the turbulent Suru River, but had little more than one long main road with smaller lanes running off it. In the past few years, residents had access to all-day electricity after a huge hydro-electric power station was opened nearby. In the spring and summer, the hotels were bustling with tourists. Kargil had two attractions: the awesome mountains and the Indian army which gave visitors a taste of being in a war zone. Hamid Khan chose it as the first community in Kashmir to be liberated from Indian rule.

The roar of shelling began at 2130, battery upon battery of the thirty-year-old American-made M198 155mm howitzers. The guns had a range of twenty kilometres with normal shells and thirty-two with rocket-assisted ammunition. General Hamid Khan did not want to carry out a symbolic shelling. India had rejected the offer of a referendum. In response, he was going to take Kargil and raise the Pakistani flag.

The first rounds fell on the bus station, exploding fuel tanks and sending flames leaping into the cold night air. One of the main bridges was hit, withstanding only minutes of sustained bombardment before it broke, collapsing into the river and cutting off Kargil’s main route to the northeast. The telephone exchange just south of the Baki Bazaar road functioned for ten minutes, then went down with a direct hit through the roof. The post office, between the bus stand and the Main Bazaar Road, was pulverized by three hits, together with the State Bank of India next door.

The bombardment lasted through the night, after which Kargil was a scene of burning debris, with barely a building in the centre left unmarked. Just before dawn the shelling suddenly stopped. There was a lull of a few seconds, then the quiet was shattered by the roar of twenty French-built Mirage ground-attack aircraft crossing the LoC. They flew dangerously low, only a few hundred feet above the mountain peaks. Using cannon and laser-guided missiles, two aircraft continued the attack on Kargil, ensuring this time that all roads in and out of the town were impassable. Other aircraft headed along the LoC from the Indian side, hitting anti-aircraft positions and Indian bunkers. West of Kargil, they attacked Dras, the key town west of Kargil on the Srinagar to Leh road, the key Indian resupply and artillery positions at Baltal, Matayan, the strategic command and control post on Tiger Hill and the Toleling feature north of the Mushkoh River. More aircraft concentrated on areas just east of Kargil, where India deployed the bigger artillery units of 105mm guns, the massive 155mm Bofors FH-77B howitzers with a range of more than twenty kilometres and the even longer-range 212mm Pinaka multi-rocket launchers. (These had proved disastrously unreliable in 1999, but were back in action again after being withdrawn and remodelled.) The Pakistani aircraft laid down a lethal line of fire with a cocktail of weapons around Goma, Batalik, Lamayuru and Chorbatla, then climbed and turned back to home territory.

No sooner had they finished than heavier, more cumbersome and ageing American-built F-16 multi-role combat aircraft came overhead. They were equipped with conventional single-warhead bombs with radar airburst fuses to increase the damage on structures and buildings. Cluster bombs sowed a lethal path of destruction, their tiny bom-blets throwing out delayed action mines and fragmentation devices to kill people and slice through light structures such as aircraft and vehicles.

The first Indian aircraft were scrambled out of Ambala, Srinagar, Awantipur and Leh as soon as Indian radar picked up the air attack, but they were too late to engage the Pakistanis in dogfights, and the pilots did not have permission to cross onto the Pakistani side of the LoC. That had to come from the Prime Minister and he had only just been woken up.

Hamid Khan’s final assault was the riskiest of the operation and began at the height of the bombing raids. A fleet of thirty helicopters, mainly the SA 330 Puma and the Mi-8 HIP C, some with twenty men, others with just four, swept into Indian-controlled Kashmir, meeting little resistance from ground fire. They were protected by a squadron of the Pakistan and Chinese built Super 7 aircraft as they flew low for the sixteen kilometres from the frontier to Kargil. Each helicopter pilot had a designated landing area, depending on the debris caused by the shelling and air attacks. Each unit had area to secure. The pilots dropped the men, from a hover, not letting the skids touch the ground, and headed straight back to the LoC.

It was in that narrow window of opportunity that the Indian fighter pilots found and attacked in a withering onslaught, while coming under fire themselves from the Pakistani Super 7s. Of the thirty helicopters which crossed into Indian territory, only twelve made it back. Three Indian aircraft were lost.

The men on the ground were not mujahedin fighters, but Pakistani soldiers, most of whom expected to be dead within the next few hours. Hand-to-hand fighting with Indian troops began as soon as they landed. But they secured enough of an area just north of the junction of Hospital Road and the Main Bazaar Road to raise the green flag of Pakistan with its white crescent and single star above the town’s mosque.