The attack's origins trace to the night of December 31, 2015, when four men who had crossed the international border from Pakistan stopped a taxi driver named Ikagar Singh on a road near Pathankot. Singh fought back. They slit his throat and took his car, but the tires burst after a short distance. In the hijacked vehicle, the attackers left behind a hand-held walkie-talkie, apparently meant to coordinate with a second group already positioned near the airbase. That lost radio may have delayed the attack by a full day. Local police initially dismissed the abduction report filed by SP Salwinder Singh, a witness with a chequered past, and another survivor named Madan Gopal was tortured by interrogators for reporting what he had seen. The intelligence was there. The response was not.

Garud commandos -- the Indian Air Force's special operations unit -- intercepted the attackers roughly 700 meters from the parked aircraft, preventing what could have been catastrophic destruction of military assets. What followed was a grinding firefight that lasted the better part of three days. On January 2, four attackers and two security personnel were killed in the initial exchange. An IED blast during combing operations that night killed three more soldiers, including Commonwealth shooting medalist Subedar Fateh Singh of the Dogra Regiment, then serving with the Defence Security Corps. A fresh explosion on January 3 wounded three National Security Guard personnel, one of whom later died. Corporal Gursewak Singh of the Garud Squadron also fell that day. A fifth attacker was confirmed killed on January 4. The sixth and final militant was neutralized at 4:15 PM on January 5. The Indian Army designated the operation 'Operation Dhangu,' named after the locality where the base sits.

Phone records painted a damning picture. One of the attackers called a Pakistani number at 9:12 PM on December 31 from the murdered taxi driver's phone. Five hours into the assault on the airbase, another attacker used a stolen mobile phone to call his mother in Pakistan. Indian intelligence identified Maulana Masood Azhar, chief of Jaish-e-Mohammed, and his brother Abdul Rauf Asghar -- an alleged mastermind of the 1999 Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 hijacking -- among those suspected of orchestrating the attack. Though the United Jihad Council, a Kashmir-based umbrella group, initially claimed responsibility, the evidence consistently pointed to JeM. India shared its findings with Pakistan and made clear that future diplomatic engagement depended on credible action against the perpetrators. In October 2023, Shahid Latif, the senior JeM commander identified as the attack's mastermind, was assassinated by unknown gunmen in a mosque in Daska, Pakistan.

The timing was not coincidental. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had made a surprise visit to Pakistan just days earlier, stopping in Lahore on December 25, 2015 to meet Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif -- the first visit by an Indian leader in over a decade. The diplomatic momentum was real and fragile. Analyst C. Christine Fair argued that the Pakistan Army had deployed JeM precisely to shatter this rapprochement, serving both the tactical goal of disrupting peace talks and the strategic aim of redirecting JeM fighters -- who had turned against the Pakistani state after President Musharraf's 2001 policy reversal -- back toward India. Scheduled diplomatic talks were postponed. Though a five-member Pakistani investigation team visited the airbase in late March 2016, its members publicly characterized the attack as a false-flag operation staged by India. India-Pakistan relations remained frozen.

A parliamentary committee that investigated the attack did not spare the Indian military establishment. The perimeter wall was poorly guarded. The base lacked a patrol road around its circumference. Despite advance intelligence warnings about a possible cross-border infiltration, no effective measures had been taken. The committee found a confused command structure, poor coordination between units, and premature official statements claiming the operation was over while attackers remained alive inside the base. Seven security personnel had died, and the country's capital was placed on high alert for weeks afterward. The Western Air Command issued shoot-on-sight orders to all its bases. Yet for all the systemic failures the inquiry catalogued, the soldiers who fought at Pathankot -- the Garud commandos, the Dogra Regiment men, the National Security Guard operators -- had prevented the attackers from reaching the aircraft. The base survived. The peace process did not.