Conflict Zones
Searching for Africa’s lost World War soldiers, a name and grave at a time | The World Wars
- /data/user9/2025/57/87943/wordpress/.f7670ed618c7ff075a7b5b7fb15be6f8/wp-content/plugins/mvp-social-buttons/mvp-social-buttons.php on line 27
http://dailyofworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Copy-of-DSC_1902-1741187726-1-1741510442_af7e5c-1741510602-1000x600.jpg&description=Searching for Africa’s lost World War soldiers, a name and grave at a time | The World Wars', 'pinterestShare', 'width=750,height=350'); return false;" title="Pin This Post">
- Share
- Tweet /data/user9/2025/57/87943/wordpress/.f7670ed618c7ff075a7b5b7fb15be6f8/wp-content/plugins/mvp-social-buttons/mvp-social-buttons.php on line 72
http://dailyofworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Copy-of-DSC_1902-1741187726-1-1741510442_af7e5c-1741510602-1000x600.jpg&description=Searching for Africa’s lost World War soldiers, a name and grave at a time | The World Wars', 'pinterestShare', 'width=750,height=350'); return false;" title="Pin This Post">
Nakuru and Kisumu, Kenya – Ogoyi Ogunde belonged to a proud family. His father had carved a home for their clan out of the earth in an area thick with bush, and accumulated a wealth of cows and grain. He provided for them, creating a vibrant community more than a century ago.
As the eldest son, Ogunde was his father’s greatest pride – strong, intelligent, fit to shoulder the privilege and burden of leading the clan in the future. So when conscription officers came to their village one day and singled out Ogunde for the war – a war they had never heard of, a war that had nothing to do with them – his father pleaded with them not to take him.
It was no use. The white men threatened him with jail, and carted Ogunde away.
“That was the last time anybody saw him there. He didn’t come back,” recounts Patrick Abungu. The loss of Ogunde broke his father’s spirit, and irreversibly shaped the trajectory of his descendents’ lives, including Abungu’s. “The war left a very big scar in my family,” he says.
Abungu heard this story countless times from his grandfather, who was Ogunde’s younger brother. Moving often as a child, his grandfather’s home in western Kenya was his anchor, and the stories he was told were the rudder that guided him in life. This particular story of Ogunde became myth, and then legend, and has gripped Abungu since he was a small boy.
His great-uncle was plucked from the shores of Lake Victoria by British colonial administrators to fight the Germans in World War I – during which he perished, along with tens of thousands of other Africans. The family was never notified of his death, told what happened, or shown a grave at which they could mourn. They received only deafening silence. And the questions that filled this void have haunted the family to this day.
But Abungu’s grandfather’s stories of Ogunde had a purpose. “I came to realise that he was preparing us. He did not want us to forget. He wanted us to find out,” he says. “And so when this chance came, I’d been prepared for that.”
The chance Abungu is talking about is his job – a very unique job that allows him to dig into the past, uncover its hidden secrets, and perhaps, one day, solve the mystery of Ogunde’s death.
No visible trace
Abungu slams shut the driver’s door of the silver Toyota Prado and looks at the metal gate in front of him. This seems an unlikely place for a burial ground. He is in the city of Nakuru, standing outside a metalworking yard called Jua Kali – a term used for the informal sector literally meaning “hot sun” in Swahili. Accompanied by his two colleagues, Mercy Gakii and Rose Maina, he walks over the black-stained ground, past flying sparks and burning torches, with the sharp smell of smouldering metal in his nose. The informal welders raise their heads as the three unusual visitors pass by, sticking out like sore thumbs in their immaculate matching attire.
The team is looking for 17 graves of Africans who died in World War II. They, like other African servicemen, were buried in so-called “native cemeteries” separate from where Europeans were laid to rest. Some of these were later abandoned, explains Abungu. Their names are commemorated on a collective memorial and their service records are known, but the location of their graves is not. According to information gleaned from his organisation’s archives, this cemetery is supposed to be 100 yards (90m) southwest of the Muslim cemetery in Nakuru – so most likely right here, where the welders have set up shop. If they were buried here, no visible trace remains. “It’s likely the graves are beneath,” Abungu says, looking around the yard. He pauses. “It feels bad.”
Tall and lanky, with close-cropped hair and a slender face, Abungu has a serious demeanour that quickly gives way to a broad smile. He wears black-rimmed glasses that darken when he is out in the field in bright sunlight, which is often. Abungu is heritage manager at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) in Kenya. The London-based organisation looks after the memory of those who died for Great Britain and the Commonwealth in the two World Wars and maintains thousands of cemeteries around the world, including in Kenya and other African countries. Despite often being seen as European wars, both World Wars left deep scars in Africa.
In Word War I alone, according to the CWGC, British forces employed around 50,000 African soldiers and more than one million African “carriers”, or porters who transported war materials. Most of these participated in the East Africa campaign, a series of brutal and arduous battles against German troops between 1914 and 1918 across the dense thickets, sprawling savannahs and impenetrable forests of what are now Kenya and Tanzania, as well as other countries. The unforgiving terrain rendered other means of transport impractical, making British (and German) troops rely heavily on carriers to transport supplies and weapons. One British soldier had on average about 15 porters, says historian David Masika of the University of Nairobi. The conditions were extremely harsh. Marches were long and arduous, through tough terrain, with porters carrying heavy loads in oppressive heat. Their nutrition was sparse and diseases ravaged the troops.
Amid the chaos of war, in 1917, the CWGC was founded by a Royal Charter. The human cost of World War I was at a scale never seen before, and the commission was set up to recognise that sacrifice. The founding principles of the organisation were to commemorate each person who died for the Commonwealth in war by name, in perpetuity, and to treat all equally. But this promise was not kept.
The Nakuru North Cemetery, only a few kilometres away from the welding yard, is an oasis of calm. Nestled amid a dilapidated public cemetery, the pristinely kept burial ground for World War I and II dead, managed by the CWGC, is made up of neat rows of light grey headstones, all equal in shape and size, in a bed of gravel. Planted around it are agaves, yellow daisies and silver-grey dusty millers. The space is the embodiment of dignity and respect. But walking along the rows of headstones, among the names, not a single African one can be found. “Some [dead] are looked after, while others are under the torches of Jua Kali,” notes Abungu solemnly.
“We know that there are tens of thousands who served and died in British service who are not commemorated in a way that was promised by the commission,” says George Hay, a historian at the CWGC. And most of these were in East Africa. This was known to the organisation for decades, but it took an explosive documentary to air in the United Kingdom in 2019 for it to act. A novel project – the Non-Commemoration Programme – was launched by the CWGC in 2021 to rectify this historical injustice and create meaningful remembrance for the descendants of soldiers and their communities today. It aims to do this by identifying missing names and burial grounds, reinstating neglected graves and creating new forms of commemoration. Hay and Abungu are part of this project. Three and a half years in, they now estimate that most likely 88,000 East Africans died for Britain in World War I – and that almost none were commemorated by name. By contrast, in World War II, more than 10,000 people served and died in East African forces, but all were commemorated by name, either listed on a collective memorial or with a headstone.
During World War I, some African soldiers and carriers died in the field and were buried by their comrades, while the majority passed away in military hospitals, Hay explains. The latter were likely interred in what are now civil burial grounds, often without any markers. Some graves may have been marked with simple wooden signs, but these were never formalised or properly recorded by military or other authorities. It was only after the war that the Imperial War Graves Commission, as the CWGC was then known, began the process of assuming responsibility for graves, relocating remains to more permanent cemeteries and erecting headstones. However, for the vast majority of African war dead, this never happened.
In stark contrast to places like France where the commission had direct access to information on deaths, in colonies such as Kenya it largely depended on colonial authorities and the military to provide the names of the war dead and locations of their graves. While the organisation was sometimes aware of burial sites, it was often told that no records existed, Hay explains. His team has since concluded that the commission too readily accepted this explanation. “It was never true … that the records weren’t there. They may not have been complete, but from what we’ve seen, they did exist.”
The decisions the commission made at the time were “imbued by language and thinking [that] was racialised” and “imperial in its outlook”, says Hay. This shines through unmistakably in official correspondence at the time. In 1920, George Evans, who would soon after become the commission’s Deputy Director of Works in East Africa, wrote that “most of the Natives who have died are of a semi-savage nature” and that the “erection of individual headstones would constitute a waste of public money”, as the CWGC notes in a report. For “those buried in the bush, as in the case of porters … some form of Monument characteristically depicting the Indian soldier, the African Askari and Porter” would suffice, he wrote. Such monuments were erected in Nairobi, Mombasa and Dar es Salaam, and don’t carry names.
Abungu’s great-uncle was most likely among these casualties. In a way, the heritage manager has been searching for what happened to Ogunde all his life.
Abungu has loved history since he was a child, a seed planted by his grandfather. “But it wasn’t an easy path,” he says. His decision to study history was not in the plans of his father, who preferred him to become a doctor. He chose information and communications technology instead and then entered the military. Afterwards, his brother George – a renowned Kenyan archaeologist who would later become director of the National Museums of Kenya – suggested he join him on a dig on the Kenyan coast. This was a fork in the road. And the new path led him to become a historian and heritage manager.
But it was always more than an interest in the past that drove Abungu. He cared about its impact today. “How do you use heritage as a resource for community development? … How do you translate this into a meaningful, relevant resource for the communities?” he asks. These questions burned inside of him. So when, one day, an email landed in his inbox about a job with the Non-Commemoration Programme, the stars seemed to align – the years of wondering about Ogunde, searching for his own purpose, questioning the role of heritage, all converged in that very moment. He realised, “there’s a possibility of getting Ogoyi Ogunde here,” Abungu remembers. “That’s the only chance.”
In search of burial grounds
With both hands firmly on the steering wheel – at precisely 9 and 3 o’clock – Abungu steers the car through traffic on the single-lane highway that leads from Nakuru to Kisumu in the far west of Kenya. He drives with confidence and care, and almost military precision. With an upright posture, he wears his uniform – khaki cargo trousers and a dark blue shirt with the commission’s name on it – like a badge of honour. Behind him sits his colleague, heritage supervisor Gakii. Her laptop is open on her lap, and she is staring at a spreadsheet listing war veterans, their service numbers and years of duty. “The psychological part is the race against time,” Gakii says about their work. “The people who have this knowledge are going so fast.” Abungu nods in agreement. “You realise the injustice and you try to make their voice heard before it’s too late.”
For almost four years Abungu and his team have been scouring the past. Going on information dug up by Hay and colleagues in the CWGC’s archives in London, the Kenyans have been travelling across the country looking for lost burial grounds. They travel once or twice a month on field trips such as this one to Nakuru and Kisumu. They speak to locals who might remember seeing graves or grave markings, spend hours walking across fields under the burning sun, and discuss with communities what forms of commemoration would be meaningful to them. At times, they’ve called in help from the British army, which has provided ground-penetrating radar. Meanwhile, others are combing through archives such as those of the Kenya Defence Forces, trying to find hitherto unknown names of Africans who died for Britain.
When it comes to World War II, the team is looking at different problems from those of World War I. All Africans who died in World War II were commemorated by name, either on a collective memorial or on headstones in the so-called “native cemeteries”. However, in the 1950s, some of these graveyards were deemed “unmaintainable” by colonial authorities and abandoned, such as the one likely under the metal working yard in Nakuru, Abungu explains. Names from those graveyards were then transferred to collective memorials. The team is now trying to find these missing burial grounds to ultimately memorialise and honour these spaces.
It’s slow, painstaking and exhausting work. Each conversation opens up another lead, another clue as to where a burial ground could be hidden. How long do you keep going before you give up? “We’re so close and yet so far,” says Maina, sighing, after yet another meeting with a person that didn’t lead to a smoking gun. But finding the location of a gravesite is one thing – getting confirmation for it is entirely another. Because digging up the earth, exhuming bodies or even doing DNA tests is not an option, the team needs eyewitnesses who might remember seeing the grave. And these are far and few between.
In Kisumu, a city nestled on the shores of Lake Victoria, Abungu and his colleagues get lucky. After several visits and countless conversations, they came across Jeremiah Otieno Sino. The 82-year-old is standing on an open field, next to a hospital, where a group of boys are playing football. He too used to play football here, Sino explains, as a child in the 1940s and 1950s. He points to the southern end of the field where a ramshackle vegetable garden has been planted. “There were headstones,” he says. He remembers graves of World War II soldiers who had died at the nearby hospital. This is what the team needed: confirmation of a “native cemetery” that had been abandoned sometime during the colonial period. Sino’s story is captured on camera. Abungu is satisfied.
It’s a small victory, but one as important as any other. Because for the team, every name counts, every grave deserves being chased. “The point of doing this work is to revisit that promise” – the promise of equal commemoration made by the commission at its founding – “and to try and deliver on it,” says David McDonald, the head of the Non-Commemoration Programme.
So far, more than 11,000 names of World War I servicemen not previously recorded have been uncovered in archives. Oral histories and first-hand accounts by World War II veterans have been recorded. The teams are narrowing down the locations of several lost gravesites. And working not only in Kenya but in other countries such as South Africa, Sierra Leone, Egypt and India, the project is striving towards its ultimate goal: to commemorate those who have previously been forgotten in a manner that is befitting of the communities they came from, and the times. A new memorial was unveiled in Cape Town in January and the commission is working on another one in Sierra Leone’s capital of Freetown.
But inherent in the programme’s work is one inalienable truth. “We can never get all the graves, all the names,” says Gakii. “The work will never be complete. It is endless.”
Abungu will continue the work as long as he possibly can, because for him, it is deeply personal. “I’d do this job for free if I had lots of money,” he jokes. With a grandfather who imprinted on him the importance of his heritage, and a very principled father, he feels a deep sense of obligation to all the Kenyan families whose loved ones left for the wars and never came back – who have felt the pain of not knowing their fate, like his family has. Abungu knows that he most likely will never locate Ogunde’s grave or find his name on a list in an archive. But he has accepted this. “I think I find him every day,” he says. Because every success he has at work translates to him personally.
“Every time we find someone, we find him.”
Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, detained at the International Criminal Court (ICC), is on course to win the mayoral election in his home Davao City, and five candidates backed by his family are leading the Senate race as midterm election results appear to show the Duterte political dynasty’s continued grip on power.
The results are a big boost for Vice President Sara Duterte, Rodrigo Duterte’s daughter, who faces impeachment by the Senate in July. A two-thirds majority is required to remove her from office and bar her from running in future elections, including the 2028 presidential one.
Twelve out of 24 Senate seats and all 317 seats in the House of Representatives were among the 18,320 elective positions up for grabs in the key election. Nearly 69 million people were registered to vote in the Asia Pacific country.
Who won the election?
With 97 percent of the votes reported, candidates backed by President Marcos Jr are on course to win six of the 12 seats in the Senate.
Duterte’s supporters, including staunch ally Christopher “Bong” Go are set to win five seats. One candidate who is winning a seat has been affiliated with both political families.
Rodrigo Duterte is set to win the mayoral seat in Davao after receiving more than 65 percent of the votes.
Duterte was the mayor of the southern city thrice, serving a total of 22 years. If he wins, it is likely that the role would be assumed by the city’s vice mayor, a position currently held by his son, Sebastian Duterte.
In the Philippines, candidates facing criminal charges, including those in detention, can run for office unless they are convicted.
What’s at stake?
While President Marcos Jr and Vice President Sara Duterte were not on the poll, their candidates were vying for positions from the Senate to municipal offices.
Sara Duterte is a strong contender for the 2028 presidential election. Her political future can be decided by the 24-member Senate. She requires support of nine Senate members to avoid conviction.
The 12 elected Senators will form half of the jury in her impeachment trial, which is tentatively set for July. If found guilty, she will be removed from office and barred from contesting future elections.
She was impeached by the House of Representatives in February after being accused of crimes ranging from the misuse of public funds to plotting Marcos’s assassination.
Sara Duterte says the impeachment is part of a political vendetta as the two families battle for power.
The fate of hundreds of governors and thousands of seats for city mayor and municipal mayors were also decided in this election.
The official results will be out within a week.
What is the political rivalry between the Marcos and Duterte families?
Sara Duterte is the daughter of former President Duterte, who was arrested and flown to the ICC at The Hague on March 11 by the Marcos Jr administration.
The elder Duterte was accused of “crimes against humanity” for the estimated deaths of 30,000 people during his tenures as mayor and president.
More than 7,000 people were killed during anti-drug operations while he was in power between 2016 and 2022, according to police records. Human rights advocates suggest the actual death toll was higher.
Marcos Jr allied with the Duterte family, which enjoyed popularity, during his successful 2022 presidential campaign, with Sara Duterte as his running mate. But the ties soon soured over policy differences and Marcos’s rejection of the war on drugs launched by Sara Duterte’s father, Rodrigo Duterte.
Finally, the alliance crumbled due to faltering support for Marcos Jr among supporters of the Duterte family after the arrest of Apollo Quiboloy, who was the spiritual adviser of former President Duterte. Quibology, an influential pastor, was charged with sex trafficking.
The arrest of Rodrigo Duterte on a warrant issued by the ICC further inflamed tension between the two political dynasties.
Until Rodrigo Duterte’s arrest, Marcos Jr repeatedly rejected the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) jurisdiction over his country, deeming the ICC “a threat” to the country’s sovereignty. Marcos Jr had held he would not assist the ICC in the elder Duterte’s arrest.
“Let me say this for the 100th time. I do not recognise the jurisdiction of ICC in the Philippines. The Philippine government will not lift a finger to help any investigation that the ICC conducts,” Marcos Jr said in early 2024.
In 2019, (Rodrigo) Duterte had removed the Philippines from the ICC, meaning the country was not required to detain someone with an ICC warrant against their name.
The political tensions between the Duterte family and Marcos Jr reached a crescendo when the younger Duterte was impeached this February. She remains VP, but a Senate trial hangs like the sword of Damocles over her head.
Conflict Zones
‘No guardrails’: How India-Pakistan combat obliterated old red lines | India-Pakistan Tensions News
New Delhi, India – Guns have fallen silent for now along the tense India-Pakistan frontier, after a ceasefire that appears to have held for three nights.
On May 7, India launched predawn attacks on what it called multiple “terror sites” across Pakistan to avenge the April 22 killing of 26 men, almost all of them tourists, in Indian-administered Kashmir’s resort town of Pahalgam. New Delhi accused Islamabad of backing the gunmen. Pakistan denied its involvement.
India’s aerial assault kick-started four days of heightened tension, as both neighbours fired missiles and drones at each other’s military installations in a rapidly escalating cycle that brought them to the brink of full-scale war.
Both sides have claimed to have decisively damaged, even destroyed, the other’s key strategic facilities, even though early evidence suggests more limited damage to military bases in both India and Pakistan.
Yet even as India and Pakistan arrived at a ceasefire that United States President Donald Trump insists his administration brokered, experts say something has indeed been decimated, potentially beyond repair: Old red lines that had defined the tense relationship between the South Asian neighbours.
“India and Pakistan have entered a phase of ‘armed coexistence’ with little room for diplomacy and a narrow margin for error, despite having a live and sensitive border,” Praveen Donthi, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group in New Delhi, told Al Jazeera.
“This situation does not bode well for either country or the region, because even accidental triggers could escalate into a war-like situation with no guardrails in place.”
India-Pakistan dispute: Who settles it?
The seeds of the India-Pakistan conflict were sown when their independence from British rule in 1947 was accompanied by a partition of the Indian subcontinent to create Pakistan.
Since then, the two neighbours have fought four wars, three of them over Kashmir, a region they both control partially along with China, which governs two thin slices in the north. India claims all of Kashmir, while Pakistan claims all parts other than the ones governed by China, its ally.
After their 1971 war that led to the creation of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan signed what is known as the Simla Agreement, which said “the two countries are resolved to settle their differences by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations.”
While Pakistan has often cited United Nations resolutions to argue for international involvement in the resolution of the Kashmir dispute, India has cited the Simla Agreement for more than half a century to insist that any negotiations between the countries be strictly bilateral.
To be sure, the US has since intervened to calm tensions between India and Pakistan: In 1999, for instance, President Bill Clinton pressured Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to withdraw troops from the icy heights of Indian-controlled Kargil, where they had entered. However, Washington publicly played coy about its role, allowing India to insist that the US had only helped with crisis management, not any dispute resolution mediation.
That changed on Saturday, when US President Donald Trump upstaged New Delhi and Islamabad to announce a “full and immediate” India-Pakistan ceasefire hours before the governments of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi or his Pakistani counterpart Shehbaz Sharif confirmed the development.
The next day, Trump went further. “I will work with you, both to see if, after a ‘thousand years,’ a solution can be arrived at concerning Kashmir,” he posted on his Truth Social platform.
And on Monday, merely 30 minutes before Modi was scheduled for his first address since India launched attacks in Pakistan, Trump told reporters at the White House that his administration had leveraged trade to reach a ceasefire. “Let’s stop [the fighting]. If you stop it, we’ll do a trade. If you don’t stop it, we’re not going to do any trade,” Trump said. “And all of a sudden they said, ‘I think we’re going to stop.’ For a lot of reasons, but trade is a big one.”
Such US mediation, were it to happen, would shatter India’s longstanding red line against mediation by other countries, say experts.
“India has consistently sought to avoid third-party involvement in the Kashmir dispute even as it has occasionally welcomed third-party help in crisis management,” Christopher Clary, a former Pentagon official and a non-resident fellow at the Washington, DC-based Stimson Center, told Al Jazeera.
When he spoke, Modi largely stuck to traditional positions he has taken after previous bouts of tension with Pakistan. He said “terror and talks cannot happen together,” and “water and blood cannot flow together,” a reference to the Indus Waters Treaty for sharing water between India and Pakistan, which New Delhi walked out of after the Pahalgam attack.
Unlike Pakistan PM Sharif, who expressed gratitude to Trump for brokering a ceasefire, Modi claimed that India had “only paused” its military action – noting the decision was taken bilaterally. He did not mention Trump or his administration.
Regardless, “the spectre of international intervention” in Kashmir has been resurrected, said Sumantra Bose, political scientist and the author of the 2021 book Kashmir at the Crossroads. He said India’s furious barrage of missiles and drones at Pakistan in response to the Pahalgam killings “catered to domestic jingoism but naturally roused global alarm”.
India might, however, be helped in avoiding actual US intervention in Kashmir by the immediacy of the Trump administration’s other foreign policy goals, like the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, “that will divert already overburdened [American] policymakers to other tasks”, said Clary.
Unprecedented targets
According to Bose, India and Pakistan crossed not just red lines, “but a Rubicon by attacking numerous high-population targets in cities and towns” last week.
India, in its most expansive offensive against Pakistan outside full-blown wars, said it hit “terrorist infrastructure” on May 7 as part of what it called Operation Sindoor. That was a reference to the vermillion that married Hindu women apply to their forehead, and an allusion to the manner in which the Pahalgam attack appears to have unfolded: Multiple witness accounts suggest the attackers segregated the men, then picked and hit non-Muslims.
Modi claimed, in his Monday statement, that the Indian attacks had killed more than 100 “terrorists”. Pakistan has insisted that only 31 civilians – including two children – were killed in the May attacks.
Yet both sides agree that the Indian missiles struck not just two cities – Muzaffarrabad and Kotli – in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, but also four cities in Pakistan’s Punjab province, the county’s economic heart and home to 60 percent of its population. The targets were Bahawalpur, Muridke, Shakar Garh and a village near Sialkot. This was the first time that India had struck Punjab since the 1971 war.
As tensions spiked, India accused Pakistan of unleashing a swarm of drones towards it – a charge Islamabad denied. Then India launched a wave of drones that reached Pakistan’s biggest population centres, including its two biggest cities, Karachi and Lahore. In the early hours of May 10, India and Pakistan fired missiles at each other’s military bases across multiple provinces – far beyond disputed Kashmir – even hitting a few.
Pakistan, which called its campaign Operation Bunyan Marsoos (a structure made of lead, in Arabic), targeted Indian air force bases and missile storage facilities in Drangyari, Udhampur, Uri and Nagrota (all in Indian-administered Kashmir), as well as in Pathankot, Beas and Adampur in Indian Punjab and Bhuj in Gujarat, Modi’s home state. Indian armed forces said that while they shot down most incoming missiles and drones, four air force bases suffered “limited damage”.
“We don’t know what the quantum [of Indian losses] are, but clearly Pakistan has demonstrated capability to impose costs on India even as we try to impose costs on them,” Indian military historian and strategic analyst Srinath Raghavan told Al Jazeera.
“Regarding red lines, another thing Pakistan sought to demonstrate was that they could keep this [the fighting] going till they had hit Indian military installations in retaliation.”
Meanwhile, India too targeted the Nur Khan airbase near Rawalpindi, Murid airbase in Chakwal and the Rafiqui airbase in Shorkot.
“India has shown that it is willing and capable of carrying out more strikes across the border, whether it’s a terrorist or even military infrastructure in Pakistan,” Raghavan said. India’s response went far beyond what happened in 2019, when Indian jets bombed what they described as a “terrorist camp” in Balakot, in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, after a suicide bomber killed more than 40 Indian paramilitary soldiers.
Now, the 2025 attacks will serve as the new baseline for India, experts said.
“India would respond [in the future] on a similar scale, perhaps even a little bit more. Given the way both Balakot and the current crisis have played out, that should be the expectation,” said Raghavan.
Other weapons: Water to peace pacts
It isn’t just missiles and drones that the two sides fired at each other, though.
Right after the Pahalgam attack, India suspended its participation in the Indus Waters Treaty, a 1960 agreement that had previously survived three wars – in 1965, 1971 and 1999 – unscathed. The treaty gives India access to the waters of the three eastern rivers of the Indus basin: The Ravi, Beas and Sutlej. Pakistan, in turn, gets the waters of the three western rivers: The Indus, Jhelum and Chenab.
The river system is a vital lifeline for Pakistan, which relies on its waters. India, as the upper riparian state, has the ability – in theory at least – to restrict or stop the flow of the water into Pakistan. Islamabad described New Delhi’s decision to walk away from its obligations under the Indus Waters Treaty as an “act of war”.
In an incendiary remark at the peak of the tensions, Pakistani former Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto said “either the water will flow, or their blood will,” seemingly referring to Indians.
Three days after the ceasefire was announced, India has still not recommitted itself to the pact. In his speech on Monday evening, Modi’s statement that “blood and water cannot flow together” signalled that New Delhi had not yet decided to return to the treaty.
New nuclear threshold?
Even as India and Pakistan ratcheted up their measures – first diplomatically, then militarily – against each other, the rest of the world was spooked by the prospect of what could have turned into a full-blown war between nuclear-armed neighbours.
Up until now, that reality of nuclear weapons has affected India’s decisions in terms of how it treats its tensions with Pakistan, said Clary, the former Pentagon official. “India’s goal is to punish Pakistan without risking nuclear danger,” he said.
But on Monday, Modi appeared to suggest that New Delhi was reassessing that approach. “India will not tolerate any nuclear blackmail. India will strike precisely and decisively at the terrorist hideouts developing under the cover of nuclear blackmail,” he said.
Modi’s comments pointed to a “fundamental shift that has occurred in relations between India and Pakistan”, Donthi, the International Crisis Group analyst, said. “Both sides are willing to take greater risks and explore the potential for escalation below the nuclear threshold. However, there is very little space there, effectively making the euphemism of the region being a nuclear flashpoint truer than ever.”
Armed group or Pakistani government? No difference to India
Modi’s comments on “nuclear blackmail” weren’t the only ones that marked a break from the past.
When India launched attacks against Pakistan on May 7, it emphasised that it was only targeting “terrorist” bases and not attacking Pakistani military installations. However, on Monday, Modi said that in future, “India will not differentiate between the government sponsoring terrorism and the masterminds of terrorism.”
That position raises the danger of war, said experts.
“The conflation of terrorists and their (alleged) backers – namely, the military and the government – portends serious risks,” Donthi said. “It assumes that they are in lockstep. Such an assumption doesn’t take into account facts such as the seemingly successful ceasefire.”
India and Pakistan had signed a ceasefire along the Line of Control (LoC) in 2003 and had renewed it in 2021. Despite cross-border firing along the LoC, the ceasefire had largely held until last week.
With the threshold for a military conflict lowered, “the situation has become precarious,” Donthi said.
“A single militant attack is all it takes to plunge into war, leaving no room for diplomacy and raising no questions. Any power hostile to either or both sides can exploit this.”
Conflict Zones
Gaza’s hospitals cannot provide food to recovering patients | Israel-Palestine conflict News
Hospital patients in Gaza are under increasing threat as Israel’s blockade on food and other supplies entering the enclave enters its third month.
Palestinians across Gaza are struggling to feed themselves, and with hospitals unable to provide food, families must bring whatever they can find for their loved ones.
“Most, if not all, wounded patients have lost weight, especially in the past two months,” said Dr Khaled Alserr, a general surgeon at Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis.
Nutritional supplements for intensive care unit patients are lacking, he said. “Our hands are tied when it comes to making the best choice for patients. Choices are limited.”
Aid groups say that malnutrition is on the rise across Gaza.
Thousands of children have been found with acute malnutrition in the past month, but adults are also not receiving proper nutrients, according to the United Nations. It estimates that 16,000 pregnant women and new mothers this year face acute malnutrition.
Since Israel’s blockade began on March 2, food sources have been dwindling.
Aid groups have stopped food distribution. Bakeries have closed. Charity kitchens handing out bowls of pasta or lentils remain the last lifeline for most of the population, but they are rapidly closing for lack of supplies, according to the UN.
Markets are empty of almost everything except canned goods and small amounts of vegetables, and prices have been rising.
Local production of vegetables has plummeted because Israeli forces have damaged 80 percent of Gaza’s farmlands, the UN says, and much of the rest is inaccessible inside newly declared military zones.
Israel says it imposed the blockade and resumed its military campaign in March to pressure Hamas to release its remaining captives and disarm.
Israeli officials have asserted that enough food entered Gaza during a two-month ceasefire earlier this year. Rights groups have disputed that and called the blockade a “starvation tactic” and a potential war crime.
Now, Israel plans to control aid distribution in Gaza, using private contractors to distribute supplies.
The UN and other aid groups have rejected the idea, saying it could restrict who is eligible to give and receive aid and could force large numbers of Palestinians to move, which would violate international law.
Those under care at hospitals, and their families who scrounge to feed them, would face further challenges under Israel’s proposal. Moving to reach aid could be out of the question.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed at least 52,829 Palestinians and wounded 119,554, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. The enclave’s Government Media Office updated the death toll to more than 61,700, saying thousands of people missing under the rubble are presumed dead.
An estimated 1,139 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023, and more than 200 were taken captive.
