- Monday, March 10, 2025
A firefight broke out after militants ambushed Indian army’s foot patrol in the woods of Doda district in Jammu
By: Shajil Kumar
A MILITANT attack on an Indian Army patrol in Jammu and Kashmir killed four soldiers, including an officer on Monday night, the army said on Tuesday.
A firefight broke out after militants ambushed a foot patrol in the woods of Doda district, army officials said.
After a brief exchange of fire, the terrorists tried to escape but were chased by the troops led by an officer despite the challenging terrain and thick foliage.
This led to another firefight around 9 pm on Monday and five soldiers were critically injured in the encounter.
Four of them, including the officer, later succumbed to injuries. Those killed have been identified as Captain Brijesh Thapa, Naik D Rajesh, Sepoy Bijendra, and Sepoy Ajay, the officials said.
The Indian army’s 16 Corps said security forces had launched an operation in the Doda forest, in the Jammu area.
The officials said the Army and police mobilized reinforcements and launched a fresh search of the area with more troops on Tuesday morning.
They said there was no fresh contact with the terrorists on Tuesday who are believed to have infiltrated from across the border and been hiding in the forest area for the past couple of months.
The incident brings the number of soldiers and police killed this year to 17.
This was the third major encounter between security forces and terrorists in the forests of Doda district in the past three weeks.
The latest incident comes a week after a terrorist ambush on an Army patrol in the remote Machedi forest belt in Kathua district claimed the lives of five soldiers and injured as many.
A security official, who asked not to be named, said militants had shifted operations from the mainly Muslim Kashmir valley to the Hindu-dominated southern Jammu area, where “counterinsurgency measures are not as strong”.
The Jammu region has remained relatively peaceful between 2005 and 2021, and it is now witnessing a spike in terror attacks over the past month.
‘Cowardly’
Minister of Defence Rajnath Singh said he was “anguished to learn about the cowardly attack” on the soldiers and police who had made the “supreme sacrifice”, but did not provide a toll.
Kashmir’s lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha said forces would “avenge (the) death of our soldiers”.
This year, 61 people have been killed — including 17 civilians, 17 members of the security forces, and 27 militants, according to the New Delhi-based South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), which tracks the violence.
That compares to 132 people killed in 2023, including 12 civilians, 33 security officers and 87 militants, according to SATP data.
This year, almost all the soldiers killed were in Jammu, while last year almost all were killed in the Kashmir valley.
Monday’s clash came a day after the Indian army said it killed three suspected militants as they tried to cross from the Pakistan-controlled side of the heavily militarised dividing line, in Kashmir’s Kupwara district.
New Delhi and Islamabad accuse each other of stoking militancy and espionage to undermine each other, and the nuclear-armed rivals have fought multiple conflicts for control of the region.
The fighting has killed tens of thousands of civilians, soldiers and rebels.
In June, nine Indian Hindu pilgrims were killed and dozens wounded when a gunman opened fire on a bus carrying them from a shrine in the southern Reasi area.
It was one of the deadliest attacks in years and the first on Hindu pilgrims in Kashmir since 2017, when gunmen killed seven people in another ambush on a bus. (Agencies)
