CNN
 — 

A ship that US and Philippine forces planned to sink beat them to it.

A former US World War II-era warship, which survived two of the Pacific War’s most important battles, was supposed to go down in a blaze of glory in a live-fire exercise off the western coast of the Philippines as part of annually held joint military drills.

Instead, before the bombs and missiles could fly, it slipped slowly beneath the South China Sea Monday morning, age and the ocean catching up to it before modern weaponry could decimate it.

The ex-USS Brattleboro was to be the main target for the maritime strike (MARSTRIKE) portion of the annual US-Philippine “Balikatan” exercise, which began April 21 and runs to May 9.

“The vessel was selected because it exceeded its service life and was no longer suitable for normal operations,” according to a statement from the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

A US Navy spokesperson told USNI News last month that the 81-year-old ship was to be the target for US Marine Corps F/A-18 fighter jets during the exercise. A report from the official Philippine News Agency (PNA) said it was to be hit by US and Philippine forces with a combination of anti-ship missiles, bombs and automatic cannon fire.

But as the 184-foot-long vessel was being towed to its station for the exercise, 35 miles west of Zambales province on the northern Philippine island of Luzon, it took on water, the Philippine military statement said.

“Due to rough sea conditions that we are currently experiencing in the exercise box and with its long service life, as is expected, she took on a significant amount of water and eventually sank,” Philippine Navy spokesperson Capt. John Percie Alcos said, according to PNA. He said the vessel was not damaged while being towed.

The ship sank quietly at 7:20 a.m. local time near the spot where it was to be obliterated later in the day, according to the Philippine military.

Other elements of the MARSTRKE exercise would go on, the military statement said.

The Philippine and US joint task forces “will rehearse virtual and constructive fire missions,” the statement said, without detailing what elements were still scheduled as part of the drill. “The combined force will still achieve its training objectives,” it added.

The Philippine military said there was no environmental danger from the sinking as the vessel had been cleaned before being towed out for the exercise.

The sinking of the ex-USS Brattleboro was a quiet end for a ship that distinguished itself across decades.

In World War II, it participated in the battles of Leyte Gulf and Okinawa, two key US defeats of Imperial Japanese forces in 1944 and 1945 respectively.

The ship, designated as a submarine chaser, served in a key rescue and air defense role in the Battle of Leyte during the US invasion of the Philippines, according to the US Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC).

Over the course of a month, it helped get more than 400 wounded soldiers from shore to larger hospital ships and shot down a Japanese aircraft, according to the NHHC.

After further combat around the island of Palau and later again in the Philippines, Brattleboro got orders to head to Okinawa to support the US invasion there in the spring of 1945.

The invasion of Okinawa commenced on April 1, and “over the next 91 days, the subchaser treated over 200 badly wounded men and rescued in excess of 1,000 survivors of ships that sank,” the NHC history says.

After being retired from US service in the mid-1960s, the ship was transferred to the South Vietnamese military in 1966.

With the fall of Saigon in 1975, the then-South Vietnamese ship was transferred to the Philippines, where it was recommissioned as the Miguel Malvar – a hero of the Philippine revolution – in the Philippine Navy in 1977.

It was decommissioned in 2021.

Monday’s ship-sinking exercise was planned in an offshore area facing the hotly disputed Scarborough Shoal, which has been closely guarded by the Chinese coast guard, navy and suspected militia ships, according to the Associated Press. The Philippines also claims the fishing atoll, which lies about 137 miles west of Zambales.

This year’s Balikatan, called “shoulder-to-shoulder” in Tagalag, involves more than 14,000 Filipino and US troops in exercises designed to be a “full battle test” between the two defense treaty allies in response to regional security concerns.

China and the Philippines have faced increasing clashes in the waters near Scarborough Shoal in recent years, as China exerts its disputed sovereignty over the entirety of the vast South China Sea. And tensions between Beijing and Manila are their worst in years amid concerns of military conflict.

China has vehemently opposed such exercises involving US forces in or near the South China Sea.

CNN
 — 

Multiple major airlines are avoiding flying over Pakistan as relations with neighbor India crater in the wake of a recent tourist massacre, the latest geopolitical flashpoint to disrupt global travel.

Air France said it has suspended flying over the South Asian country until further notice because of the “recent evolution of tensions between India and Pakistan” in a statement to CNN.

The airline is “adapting its flight schedule and flight plans to and from certain destinations,” the French flag carrier said, adding some routes will require longer flight times.

“Air France is constantly monitoring developments in the geopolitical situation of the territories served and overflown by its aircraft in order to ensure the highest level of flight safety and security,” Air France said.

Germany’s flag carrier Lufthansa also confirmed to Reuters that it was “avoiding Pakistani airspace until further notice.”

The travel disruptions come two weeks after militants massacred 26 civilians, mostly tourists, in the mountainous town of Pahalgam in Indian-administered Kashmir, a rampage that has sparked widespread outrage.

India was quick to place blame for the assault on Pakistan, which it has long accused of harboring militant groups. Pakistan denied involvement, and tensions have mounted since with a series of escalatory tit-for-tat moves between the two neighbors.

Both sides had already closed their airspaces to each other’s aircraft since the attack, but the increased tensions are now impacting other international airlines and will likely cost them as they burn extra fuel taking longer routes.

Airlines have already had to be cautious about other key flashpoints in recent years, including the Middle East and areas close to the Ukraine-Russia front lines.

Flight-tracking data showed some flights of British Airways, Swiss International Air Lines and Emirates traveling over the Arabian Sea and then turning north toward Delhi in order to avoid Pakistani airspace, Reuters reported.

Kashmir, one of the world’s most dangerous flashpoints, is controlled in part by India and Pakistan but both countries claim it in its entirety. The two nuclear-armed rivals have fought three wars over the mountainous territory that is now divided by a de-facto border called the Line of Control (LOC) since their independence from Britain nearly 80 years ago.

In the wake of the tourist massacre, India and Pakistan have been flexing their military muscle, putting both countries on edge.

Pakistan on Monday carried out a second missile test in three days, Reuters reported.

The Pakistani army said the missile tested was a Fatah series surface-to-surface missile with a range of 120 kilometers (75 miles), according to Reuters. It came two days after the successful launch of a surface-to-surface ballistic missile.

India has also ordered all its states and union territories to carry out mock security drills on Wednesday.

It comes days after India’s navy said it had carried out test missile strikes to “revalidate and demonstrate readiness of platforms, systems and crew for long range precision offensive strike.”

Tensions have ramped up despite the United States and China – two major global players – urging restraint.

The United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, on Monday also urged both India and Pakistan to “avoid a military confrontation that could easily spin out of control.”

“Make no mistake: A military solution is no solution,” he added.

Sarjiwar, Pakistani-administered Kashmir
CNN
 — 

Malik Khadim’s lips tremble, his voice chokes and his head dips as he raises a hand to his grief-stricken face. It’s a vain effort to stem the tears gushing down his gaunt and weatherbeaten cheeks.

Khadim is a farmer who lives on the Pakistani side of the de-facto border in the disputed Kashmir region known as the Line of Control, or LoC, between India and Pakistan. As so many civilians on both sides of this conflict have done, he is currently grieving the loss of a loved one. In this case, his brother.

Two weeks ago, gunmen stormed a mountain resort in the Indian controlled part of Kashmir killing 26 people, mostly Indian tourists. The killings sparked widespread public revulsion across India and this already heavily militarized remote border region has been on edge ever since.

The day after the April 22 massacre, Indian officials announced that two Pakistanis planning a terror attack had been shot dead near Khadim’s village on the Indian side of the LoC. That day, when Malik Farouk, Khadim’s brother, didn’t show up after taking out cattle the family reported him as missing, later identifying him from images of the two men released by Indian authorities, a Pakistani security source told CNN.

Both Khadim and Farouk’s son deny that allegation, saying that he was, like them, an impoverished farmer, chasing cattle who strayed toward the unmarked and unfenced LoC in the nearby forest.

In response to the tourist massacre, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi vowed to chase the “terrorists” to “the ends of the earth.” India was quick to blame Pakistan, Pakistan denied involvement, and tensions have mounted since.

Both sides have expelled each other’s diplomats and civilians, as well as closed airspace to each other’s airlines. India has also withdrawn from the 1960 Indus Water Treaty that has tempered the tempestuous relations here for decades.

Officials on the Pakistani side of the border have said they expect India to attack and vow, as a matter of “military doctrine,” to respond.

The current language in Islamabad is tougher than this reporter remembers when here covering the Kargil War of 1999. That high-altitude, monthslong border battle, just one of several wars and skirmishes over Kashmir, killed more than a thousand troops, according to the most conservative calculations, the year after Pakistan joined India in becoming a nuclear armed nation.

In the words of a senior Pakistani security official, now is “the moment” to change the dynamic in relations with India, as political relations with New Delhi have at times improved but military attitudes have toughened in recent decades.

Alongside skirmishes with India, Pakistan’s military also has fought – and still fights – an intense Islamist militant insurgency along the country’s western border. And the candid conversations that CNN has had with both senior and lower-level security officials suggested that Pakistan’s army is both mentally and militarily more hardened than before.

The military-facilitated trip that CNN took over the remote and rugged Himalayan mountains to Khadim’s village of Sarjiwar was both beautiful and terrifying.

Boulder-strewn tracks at altitudes of more than 10,000 feet threaded through snowfields, around fresh rock falls and through forests of the towering native Deodar cedar tree. At times, their giant trunks appeared to offer the only potential salvation from one wrong move and a plunge over terrifyingly precipitous drops into raging rivers below.

Just a few hours of this bone-jarring journey are enough to understand why neither Pakistan nor India have ever claimed a decisive victory here. It is just too rugged for an easy win.

Yet both nations want this region, to control all the water that torrents down from its snowcapped peaks. And, despite the challenging terrain, several million people split across the LoC call this disputed land home.

Life is hard here: Elderly women and children haul huge bundles of sticks off the vertiginous slopes; rudimentary farms elbow for room among the mighty Deodar; and meager villages cling to the hillsides where skinny water buffalo, a prized procession here, scavenge for grass.

By comparison, the village of Sarjiwar, which lies lower down the mountain and is populated with roughhewn wood and rock houses, has a sense of permanence. But living at the LoC has put its residents at the sharp end of the rising tensions. Khadim told CNN that Indian troops on front-line posts a few hundred meters from the villagers’ houses shoot at them at night.

Another villager told us that his extended family has taken to living in one house, adding that: “(the) elderly, children and women are incredibly scared we want to take our livestock to pasture but the Indians shoot… it’s our only livelihood… and we have nowhere else to go.”

No shots were fired over the two hours that this CNN team was in Sarjiwar, but both India and Pakistan have reported near daily exchanges of fire across the LoC since last month’s attack on tourists.

Khadim, who is 55 and was born in Sarjiwar, said the whole village is increasingly on edge, adding that residents want to take their few cattle to summer pastures – as they normally would at this time of year – but can’t because they fear being shot by Indian troops.

His biggest fear, however, is that his brother’s death is only a harbinger of a worse fate to come, and that he’ll lose not just beloved family members but his lifelong home and livelihood. “India’s done a great cruelty to us,” he told CNN. “If they want me to leave, put a bullet in my head, that’s they only way I’ll go.”

India has long accused Pakistan of harbouring militant groups who have conducted attacks inside its territory and not doing enough to crack down on them. And there is significant public pressure on Prime Minister Modi to respond to the latest massacre with force.

After a major insurgent attack on paramilitary personnel inside Indian-administered Kashmir in 2019, Modi did just that with India conducting airstrikes inside Pakistan for the first time in decades and both sides fighting a brief dogfight in the skies above Kashmir. After frantic international diplomacy, a full-scale war was ultimately averted.

Civilians here fear that today’s war of words between Islamabad and New Delhi will soon erupt into real conflict. On both sides of Kashmir’s line of control, people feel powerless as their politicians rehash old arguments, potentially reigniting decades of smoldering resentment.