Operation Searchlight

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Operation Searchlight was a military operation carried out by the Pakistan Army in an effort to curb the Bengali nationalist movement in former East Pakistan in March 1971. Pakistan retroactively justified the operation on the basis of anti-Bihari violence carried out en masse by the Bengalis earlier that month. Ordered by the central government in West Pakistan, the original plans envisioned taking control of all of East Pakistan's major cities on 26 March, and then eliminating all Bengali opposition, whether political or military within the following month. West Pakistani military leaders had not anticipated prolonged Bengali resistance or later Indian military intervention. The main phase of Operation Searchlight ended with the fall of the last major Bengali-held town to West Pakistan in mid-May 1971. The operation also directly precipitated the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, in which between 300,000 and 3,000,000 Bengalis were killed while around 10 million fled to neighbouring India as refugees. Bengali intelligentsia, academics, and Hindus were widely targeted alongside Bengali nationalists—with widespread, indiscriminate extrajudicial killings. The nature of these systematic purges enraged the Bengalis, who declared independence from West Pakistan to establish the new nation of Bangladesh in the erstwhile region of East Bengal. The widespread violence resulting from Pakistan's Operation Searchlight ultimately led to the Bangladesh Liberation War, in which Mukti Bahini guerrillas fought to remove Pakistani forces from East Pakistan. The civil war escalated in the following months as East Pakistani loyalists, primarily Biharis, formed militias to support West Pakistani troops on the ground against the Mukti Bahini. However, the conflict took a decisive turn in the Bengalis' favour following the ill-fated Operation Chengiz Khan, which resulted in direct Indian military intervention in the civil war, eventually prompting Pakistan's unconditional surrender to the joint command of Indian forces and the Mukti Bahini on 16 December 1971.