US President Donald Trump has made yet another claim on Operation Sindoor saying five jets were shot down during the military conflict between India and Pakistan.
Trump, however, did not specify which side had lost the five jets.
Speaking at a private dinner with Republican lawmakers at the White House, the President said, “We stopped a lot of wars. And these were serious, India and Pakistan, that was going on. Planes were being shot out of there. I think five jets were shot down, actually. These are two serious nuclear countries, and they were hitting each other. You know, it seems like a new form of warfare. You saw it recently when you looked at what we did in Iran, where we knocked out their nuclear capability, totally knocked out that…”
“But India and Pakistan were going at it, and they were back and forth, and it was getting bigger and bigger, and we got it solved through trade. We said, you guys want to make a trade deal. We’re not making a trade deal if you’re going to be throwing around weapons, and maybe nuclear weapons, both very powerful nuclear states.”
Pakistan earlier claimed without evidence that it had shot down Indian jets including three Rafale ones.
Though India initially didn’t provide any detail of its losses, Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan had said the Indian Air Force (IAF) did lose aircraft days after the ceasefire.
But General Chauhan did not reveal the number of jets which were shot down.
“What is important is that, not the jet being down, but why they were being down,” he had said, speaking to Bloomberg TV.
Though Trump repeatedly claimed the US brokered the ceasefire deal with trade as an incentive, India has categorically rejected it.
India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misry said Prime Minister Narendra Modi held a telephonic conversation with Trump and cleared the South Asian country will not allow any third-party mediation to resolve the issue of Pakistan’s illegal occupation of parts of Jammu and Kashmir.
Speaking on the conversation between the two leaders, Misri said: “PM Modi stressed that India never accepted mediation nor does it accept it now, nor will it ever do that. On this issue, there is full political unanimity.”
Rejecting Trump’s claims, India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar told Newsweek, “I can tell you that I was in the room when Vice President Vance spoke to Prime Minister Modi on the night of May 9, saying that the Pakistanis would launch a very massive assault on India.
“We did not accept certain things and the Prime Minister was impervious to what the Pakistanis were threatening to do.”
“On the contrary, he (PM Modi) indicated that there would be a response from us,” he added.
The minister said Pakistan launched a “massive” attack on India on May 9 night but the Indian forces responded to that quickly.
The next communication took place on May 10 morning between India’s External Affairs Minister and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who told New Delhi that ‘Pakistanis were ready to talk’.
In the afternoon on May 10, Pakistan had reached out to India for a ceasefire, said the External Affairs Minister.
