India and Pakistan Agree to US-Mediated Cease-Fire
India and Pakistan have agreed to the terms of a U.S.-mediated cease-fire following three days of cross-border shelling, drone attacks, and missile strikes.
President Donald Trump
The two nuclear powers came to blows on May 7, in their most serious confrontation in decades. The conflict stemmed from an attack in an Indian-controlled part of Kashmir in which terrorists opened fire on a group of tourists and killed 26 people.
A relatively unknown group called the Kashmir Resistance claimed responsibility for the attack, and India suggested the group was an offshoot of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a terrorist group that has in the past attacked the Indian military and police.
Pakistan has denied the allegation and suggested the attack was an Indian false flag operation.
Islamabad and New Delhi have periodically come to blows over control of Kashmir since 1947, when India and Pakistan were first divided and granted independence by the British Empire. At that time, Pakistan was created as a nation for India's Muslims, in a similar manner to how Britain divided Israel and Palestine in 1948.
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Pakistan's foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, announced the cease-fire in a statement to local news and added that Saudi Arabia and Turkey played a role in facilitating the deal.
'Pakistan and India have agreed to a ceasefire with immediate effect,' Dar
Indian Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, meanwhile, said that military chiefs from both countries spoke in the afternoon and would speak again on Sunday.
'It was agreed between them that both sides would stop all firing and military action on land, and in the air and sea. ... Instructions have been given on both sides to give effect to this understanding,' Misri said.
More than 60 people have been killed in the clashes, which threatened to destabilize the subcontinent with all-out war between nuclear-armed powers.
The fighting began on May 7 when India carried out strikes on what it said was terrorist infrastructure in Pakistani Kashmir and Pakistan.
Though India and Pakistan have seen dozens of brief dust-ups and border clashes in recent years, the two powers have not engaged in an all-out war since 1999, when Pakistani militants crossed the border into Indian-controlled territory in an effort to seize more land in Kashmir.
India also blames Pakistan for a decades-long Islamist insurgency in Kashmir and elsewhere that began in the eighties and has killed tens of thousands of people. Pakistan said that it is not behind the insurgency but that it provides moral, political, and diplomatic support to Kashmiri separatists.
Pakistan has likewise been accused by the United States of sponsoring terrorism throughout recent decades, including in 2011 when U.S. forces located and killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a northwestern province of the country.
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