PANAJI: A former army General who planned the 2016 surgical strikes on terror launch pads in PoK, Friday said special forces were training for the strike almost a year before the Uri terror attack.
Lt General (retd) D S Hooda, a former Northern Army commander, who now heads the Congress’ task force on national security, was speaking at an event here.
Hooda headed the the Army’s Northern Command when special forces commandos carried out a cross-border operation in September 2016 after the Uri terror attack, in which 19 soldiers were killed.
Recalling the Uri terror attack, Hooda said, “That evening, I was there with the Chief of Army Staff and we were walking through four inches thick ash from burnt tents.”
“And we were saying that we have to do something, we cannot just let this pass. When we were talking of options, what helped us was that, for the past one year, we had been training for such a contingency. We did not know whether it would come,” he said.
“For the past one year (before Uri attack), special forces were preparing…that if we had to do a cross-border raid in Pakistan, how exactly we would do it,” Hooda said. |
