Kirana Hills and the Loitering Munition Question After Operation Sindoor
During Operation Sindoor in May 2025, Pakistani media showed images of smoke rising from Kirana Hills, a ridge complex about ten kilometres north of Sargodha in Punjab. The site has long been linked to Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme. For more than a year, Indian officials said Kirana Hills was not a deliberate target.
That changed on 25 August 2026. General Anil Chauhan, who was Chief of Defence Staff during Operation Sindoor, spoke at an event hosted by Vivekananda International Foundation in New Delhi and offered a new explanation.
Chauhan said India did not intend to hit Kirana Hills or Pakistan's nuclear facilities. In his view, a loitering munition sent to hunt radars near Sargodha failed to find a target and eventually struck one of the hills.
What General Chauhan Said
Speaking nearly fifteen months after Operation Sindoor, Chauhan described what he believed happened.
Before the main strikes, Indian forces sent a large number of loitering munitions around Sargodha. Kirana Hills sits just to the north. The weapons were not meant to attack the hills. Their job was to find and destroy Pakistani radar systems in and around the Sargodha air defence complex, a standard suppression-of-enemy-air-defences (SEAD) task.
Chauhan said each loitering munition can stay airborne for roughly two hours, circling a set area while its sensors look for targets. If it finds one, it dives and detonates. If it does not, it does not return to base. It eventually comes down and strikes somewhere.
"It must have come and hit one of those hills," Chauhan said, linking the smoke in Pakistani footage to this failure mode rather than a planned strike on a nuclear site.
He also backed an earlier denial. During Operation Sindoor, Air Marshal Bharti, then Director General of Air Operations, was asked at a press conference whether India had hit Kirana Hills. Bharti said Indian forces had not targeted the area and added that they had not known it housed a nuclear installation. Chauhan called that answer correct in substance. India did not deliberately target Kirana Hills. His new remarks were meant to explain what may have happened by accident, not to overturn the denial of intent.
Why Kirana Hills Matters
Kirana Hills is not ordinary terrain. Open-source reports have for decades tied the ridge complex to Pakistan's nuclear weapons infrastructure, including suspected tunnel facilities and storage sites. Any strike nearby, deliberate or not, carries escalation risk well beyond a normal military target.
Sargodha, south of Kirana Hills, is a major Pakistani Air Force hub. Radars protecting it would have been high-priority targets for any Indian SEAD package. Sending loitering munitions into that airspace fit documented Indian practice during the operation, including widely circulated footage of Harop-class weapons hitting Pakistani surface-to-air missile sites in the Lahore area.
The question was never whether Indian munitions were active near Sargodha. It was whether what hit Kirana Hills was one of them, and if so, how.
Loitering Munitions
A loitering munition is part drone, part missile. It is launched like a weapon, circles an area for hours looking for a target, and then dives in to detonate. India used the Israeli Harop during Operation Sindoor. The Harop runs on a small piston engine with a propeller. On video, its terminal dive has a clear high-pitched whine.
What the Video Shows
Chauhan's account rests on a spent Harop hitting Kirana Hills after failing to find a radar near Sargodha. The strike footage points elsewhere.
NDTV's Vishnu Som noted that unless the video was altered, the incoming munition at Kirana Hills did not carry the propeller whine heard in Harop and Harpy strikes during the same operation. Those hits on Pakistani SAM sites near Lahore are well documented. The sound is unmistakable.
The Kirana Hills clip does not match. It sounds more like a missile than a loitering drone. If the video is authentic, what struck the hills was likely not a Harop running out of fuel. It may have been a missile that went astray, or a jet-powered system India has not publicly acknowledged. That sits awkwardly with the official story, and suggests the armed forces may be downplaying what actually happened.