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Operation Gibraltar: The Pakistani troops
who infiltrated Kashmir to start a rebellion.
By M Ilyas Khan
BBC News, Pakistani-administered Kashmir
5 September 2015 Asia
In August 1965, what looked like an indigenous
uprising spread like a jungle fire across the part
of Kashmir under Indian control. A month later,
India invaded Pakistan in what Pakistanis call an
"unprovoked" move. Since the war ended in
stalemate, Pakistan holds a victory pageant each
year on 6 September to mark the day it fended
off a much bigger enemy. But was the uprising in
Indian-administered Kashmir really indigenous?
Qurban Ali, 71, is one of the "insurgents" who
fought the Indian troops in August 1965.
But he is a native of the Pakistani-administered
side of Kashmir, and he was not an insurgent, but
a soldier of the Pakistani army's Azad Kashmir
(AK) Regiment.
"I was a fresh recruit then, barely 20 years old. I
had completed the regimental training, and then
we volunteered for the Gibraltar Force," he says.
Pakistan is yet to officially confirm it ever
commissioned such a force, but a former
Pakistan army major, security expert and author,
Ikram Sehgal, describes it in a newspaper article
as "a mixture of volunteers from the army, mainly
those belonging to Azad Kashmir [Free Kashmir,
as Pakistanis call the part of Kashmir they
control], and fresh recruits" from the Pakistani-
administered side of Kashmir who were "hurriedly
trained and launched into the valley [Indian-
administered Kashmir] in late July/early August".
The plan, called Operation Gibraltar, was hatched
by the officer in command of the region, Maj-Gen
Akhtar Hussain Malik, according to Pakistani and
other military historians.
The idea was to use armed guerrilla bands to
destroy India's communication system, and
attack nodal points to tie up the Indian army.
Qurban Ali and his group took a long, circuitous
route through Pakistani territory to infiltrate
Indian-controlled Kashmir from the north.
They walked for several days, carrying dry food
rations, arms and ammunition on their backs,
"climbing and descending the hills, sometimes
sliding down the snow-covered slopes".
They set up hideouts in jungles near Chowkibal, a
town in Kupwara district on the Indian side.
They would spend their days and nights in the
hollows of tree trunks, or under the cliffs or
overhanging rocks.
During the month they spent there, they blew up
a bridge and hit a number of supply points of the
Indian army.
He says there were 180 men in his group, most of
them civilian recruits. "There were six civilians for
every 10 men in our group."
Unbeknown to Mr Ali and his fellow foot soldiers,
groups with similar formations had infiltrated
other areas of Kashmir as well.
Estimates of the Gibraltar Force numbers range
from 7,000 to well over 20,000.
One of them was Mohammad Nazeer, now 64.
He was a school boy of about 14 when he was
recruited. He was part of a team that hit more
than a dozen Indian posts in the Poonch region.
"When they moved us from the training camp, we
didn't know where we were going," he recalls.
"We thought it was part of our training."
They crossed over from the side of Forward
Kahuta, and operated mostly around the town of
Mandi in Poonch district.
He says most of the men in his group were "just
kids, like me".
At this tender age, they saw much bloodshed -
but their morale was high.
"When there was shooting and action, we would
be in high spirits. But when it was quiet, we
would get bored. We hardly ever thought about
life and death back then."
Operation Gibraltar was based on the assumption
that guerrilla attacks would trigger an uprising by
the Muslim majority population of Indian-
controlled Kashmir, most of whom had wanted to
join Pakistan at the time of the partition of British
India in 1947.
A rebel radio station purported to have been set
up somewhere inside Kashmir, but actually
operating out of the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi,
aggressively reported on the exploits of the
"mujahideen", hoping to instigate such an
uprising.
But the civilians of Indian-administered Kashmir
were not only not prepared for mass rebellion,
they actually suffered at the hands of the
intruders. Military historians cite numerous
examples where civilians were killed or harmed,
and others where they turned the infiltrators in.
India also reinforced its troops in Kashmir, choked
infiltration points, and captured heights from
where they threatened Muzaffarabad, the capital
of Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
To relieve Indian pressure, Pakistani troops made
a thrust into Jammu in the first week of
September in an attempt to cut off the Indian
supply line. This triggered Indian's attack on
Lahore and Sialkot.
Towards the end of August, most infiltrators had
been found, captured or killed. Those that
survived were asked to pull back when India
attacked Lahore.
"We were told that they couldn't continue to
resupply us, and that we were on our own," says
Qurban Ali.
"It was the most difficult time of our mission; the
heights behind us that were under Pakistani
control previously had been captured by Indians.
We were vulnerable."
Kashmir timeline
1947 - British rule ends, sub-continent is
partitioned into mainly Hindu India and Muslim-
majority Pakistan
1947-48 : First war between India and Pakistan
over the region, ends with a ceasefire and
Kashmir being partitioned
1965 : Second Kashmir war ends with both sides
returning to pre-war positions
1971 : Third Indo-Pakistani war leads to the 1972
Simla Agreement, turning the Kashmir ceasefire
line into the Line of Control
1999 : Another war after militants cross from
Pakistani-administered Kashmir into the Indian-
administered Kargil district
2001: An attack on the Indian parliament is
blamed on two militant groups considered close
to Pakistan. The two nuclear-armed neighbours
mobilise millions of troops in a confrontation that
lasts 18 months.
2003 : Two sides agree a ceasefire along the Line
of Control
Mohammad Nazeer walked back to the Pakistani
post dragging the dead body of a fellow fighter
from his village, Mohammad Yusuf.
"The sentry at the post said there was no
transport to ship the body to the village. Then
some civilian contractors came along and helped
me carry Yusuf to his family home."
Yusuf, a tall man of about 23, had been married
for only a year when he joined the Gibraltar
Force. A mortar shell hit him when he was
providing cover fire to his team in a shootout
during the withdrawal.
His wife, Nisha Begum, was seven months
pregnant with her first - and only - child.
"When he was away, I used to pray for his safe
return. But then one day they brought his dead
body," she says, her eyes betraying no emotion.
But she says God has compensated her
adequately.
"He gave me a son, and the strength to educate
him, and a chance to see him get married and
have children of his own."
The war, it seems, failed to break Nisha Begum,
but many say it broke Ayub Khan, Pakistan's first
military ruler who authorised Operation Gibraltar.
He rapidly lost power after the war, and was
overthrown in a popular uprising three years later.
He died in 1974 "a sad and broken man", writes
Dr Ahmad Faruqui, a US-based defence analyst.
And he left behind a legacy of military adventurism.
Air Marshal (retired) Nur Khan, who headed the
Pakistan Air Force in 1965, said in an interview with Dawn newspaper that the army "misled the
nation with a big lie" - that India rather than
Pakistan provoked the war - and that Pakistan
won a "great victory".
And since the "lie" was never rectified, the
Pakistani "army came to believe its own fiction,
(and) has continued to fight unwanted wars," he
said.
Operation Gibraltar: The Pakistani troops who infiltrated Kashmir to start a rebellion - BBC News
who infiltrated Kashmir to start a rebellion.
By M Ilyas Khan
BBC News, Pakistani-administered Kashmir
5 September 2015 Asia
In August 1965, what looked like an indigenous
uprising spread like a jungle fire across the part
of Kashmir under Indian control. A month later,
India invaded Pakistan in what Pakistanis call an
"unprovoked" move. Since the war ended in
stalemate, Pakistan holds a victory pageant each
year on 6 September to mark the day it fended
off a much bigger enemy. But was the uprising in
Indian-administered Kashmir really indigenous?
Qurban Ali, 71, is one of the "insurgents" who
fought the Indian troops in August 1965.
But he is a native of the Pakistani-administered
side of Kashmir, and he was not an insurgent, but
a soldier of the Pakistani army's Azad Kashmir
(AK) Regiment.
"I was a fresh recruit then, barely 20 years old. I
had completed the regimental training, and then
we volunteered for the Gibraltar Force," he says.
Pakistan is yet to officially confirm it ever
commissioned such a force, but a former
Pakistan army major, security expert and author,
Ikram Sehgal, describes it in a newspaper article
as "a mixture of volunteers from the army, mainly
those belonging to Azad Kashmir [Free Kashmir,
as Pakistanis call the part of Kashmir they
control], and fresh recruits" from the Pakistani-
administered side of Kashmir who were "hurriedly
trained and launched into the valley [Indian-
administered Kashmir] in late July/early August".
The plan, called Operation Gibraltar, was hatched
by the officer in command of the region, Maj-Gen
Akhtar Hussain Malik, according to Pakistani and
other military historians.
The idea was to use armed guerrilla bands to
destroy India's communication system, and
attack nodal points to tie up the Indian army.
Qurban Ali and his group took a long, circuitous
route through Pakistani territory to infiltrate
Indian-controlled Kashmir from the north.
They walked for several days, carrying dry food
rations, arms and ammunition on their backs,
"climbing and descending the hills, sometimes
sliding down the snow-covered slopes".
They set up hideouts in jungles near Chowkibal, a
town in Kupwara district on the Indian side.
They would spend their days and nights in the
hollows of tree trunks, or under the cliffs or
overhanging rocks.
During the month they spent there, they blew up
a bridge and hit a number of supply points of the
Indian army.
He says there were 180 men in his group, most of
them civilian recruits. "There were six civilians for
every 10 men in our group."
Unbeknown to Mr Ali and his fellow foot soldiers,
groups with similar formations had infiltrated
other areas of Kashmir as well.
Estimates of the Gibraltar Force numbers range
from 7,000 to well over 20,000.
One of them was Mohammad Nazeer, now 64.
He was a school boy of about 14 when he was
recruited. He was part of a team that hit more
than a dozen Indian posts in the Poonch region.
"When they moved us from the training camp, we
didn't know where we were going," he recalls.
"We thought it was part of our training."
They crossed over from the side of Forward
Kahuta, and operated mostly around the town of
Mandi in Poonch district.
He says most of the men in his group were "just
kids, like me".
At this tender age, they saw much bloodshed -
but their morale was high.
"When there was shooting and action, we would
be in high spirits. But when it was quiet, we
would get bored. We hardly ever thought about
life and death back then."
Operation Gibraltar was based on the assumption
that guerrilla attacks would trigger an uprising by
the Muslim majority population of Indian-
controlled Kashmir, most of whom had wanted to
join Pakistan at the time of the partition of British
India in 1947.
A rebel radio station purported to have been set
up somewhere inside Kashmir, but actually
operating out of the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi,
aggressively reported on the exploits of the
"mujahideen", hoping to instigate such an
uprising.
But the civilians of Indian-administered Kashmir
were not only not prepared for mass rebellion,
they actually suffered at the hands of the
intruders. Military historians cite numerous
examples where civilians were killed or harmed,
and others where they turned the infiltrators in.
India also reinforced its troops in Kashmir, choked
infiltration points, and captured heights from
where they threatened Muzaffarabad, the capital
of Pakistani-administered Kashmir.
To relieve Indian pressure, Pakistani troops made
a thrust into Jammu in the first week of
September in an attempt to cut off the Indian
supply line. This triggered Indian's attack on
Lahore and Sialkot.
Towards the end of August, most infiltrators had
been found, captured or killed. Those that
survived were asked to pull back when India
attacked Lahore.
"We were told that they couldn't continue to
resupply us, and that we were on our own," says
Qurban Ali.
"It was the most difficult time of our mission; the
heights behind us that were under Pakistani
control previously had been captured by Indians.
We were vulnerable."
Kashmir timeline
1947 - British rule ends, sub-continent is
partitioned into mainly Hindu India and Muslim-
majority Pakistan
1947-48 : First war between India and Pakistan
over the region, ends with a ceasefire and
Kashmir being partitioned
1965 : Second Kashmir war ends with both sides
returning to pre-war positions
1971 : Third Indo-Pakistani war leads to the 1972
Simla Agreement, turning the Kashmir ceasefire
line into the Line of Control
1999 : Another war after militants cross from
Pakistani-administered Kashmir into the Indian-
administered Kargil district
2001: An attack on the Indian parliament is
blamed on two militant groups considered close
to Pakistan. The two nuclear-armed neighbours
mobilise millions of troops in a confrontation that
lasts 18 months.
2003 : Two sides agree a ceasefire along the Line
of Control
Mohammad Nazeer walked back to the Pakistani
post dragging the dead body of a fellow fighter
from his village, Mohammad Yusuf.
"The sentry at the post said there was no
transport to ship the body to the village. Then
some civilian contractors came along and helped
me carry Yusuf to his family home."
Yusuf, a tall man of about 23, had been married
for only a year when he joined the Gibraltar
Force. A mortar shell hit him when he was
providing cover fire to his team in a shootout
during the withdrawal.
His wife, Nisha Begum, was seven months
pregnant with her first - and only - child.
"When he was away, I used to pray for his safe
return. But then one day they brought his dead
body," she says, her eyes betraying no emotion.
But she says God has compensated her
adequately.
"He gave me a son, and the strength to educate
him, and a chance to see him get married and
have children of his own."
The war, it seems, failed to break Nisha Begum,
but many say it broke Ayub Khan, Pakistan's first
military ruler who authorised Operation Gibraltar.
He rapidly lost power after the war, and was
overthrown in a popular uprising three years later.
He died in 1974 "a sad and broken man", writes
Dr Ahmad Faruqui, a US-based defence analyst.
And he left behind a legacy of military adventurism.
Air Marshal (retired) Nur Khan, who headed the
Pakistan Air Force in 1965, said in an interview with Dawn newspaper that the army "misled the
nation with a big lie" - that India rather than
Pakistan provoked the war - and that Pakistan
won a "great victory".
And since the "lie" was never rectified, the
Pakistani "army came to believe its own fiction,
(and) has continued to fight unwanted wars," he
said.
Operation Gibraltar: The Pakistani troops who infiltrated Kashmir to start a rebellion - BBC News
wow! kabhi nahi sudhroge
