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"Operation Searchlight" was the code name given to the attack that began on March 25, 1971. Lieutenant General Tikka Khan, who had been installed as military governor of East Pakistan, ordered the attacks that began by disarming police and paramilitary units in the capital city, Dhaka. Once the armed opposition was neutralized, Bengali males were summarily rounded up and executed so as to provide no further threat from able-bodied young men. Civilians were taken from their homes as tanks rolled down the streets of Dhaka toward the university. After being expelled from Dhaka with his fellow newsmen, ''London Daily Telegraph'' journalist, Simon Dring filed a report from Bangkok three days after Operation Searchlight ended. His eyewitness accounts tell of Pakistani troops “firing incendiary rounds into the buildings,” and in the “Hindi area of the old town, the soldiers reportedly made the people come out of their houses and shot them in groups.”<ref>Simon Dring, “Dacca Eyewitness: Bloodbath, Inferno,” ''The Washington Post, Times Herald'' (1959-1973), March 30, 1971, http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/docview/148145683.</ref>Bengali Hindus were the primary targets of the Pakistani army as the Islamist elites demanded what they considered a pure Pakistan. In order to erase Bengali and Hindu influences from Pakistan, the troops were ordered to eliminate artists and intellectuals; they murdered them. They were also ordered to utilize women to degrade the “burgeoning Bangladeshi national identity,” and “boost the morale of soldiers;” they raped them.<ref>Jalal Alamgir and Bina D’Costa, “The 1971 Genocide: War Crimes and Political Crimes,” ''Economic and Political Weekly,'' March 26, 2011.</ref>

== Rape as a Tool of Genocide ==