Claim: In the wake of the Pahalgam attack, personnel within the Pakistan armed forces have sent in a mass number of requests for resignation.
Fact: Two letters being circulated online are fake as they contain a number of linguistic, and visual errors.
On 28 April 2025, a user on X (formerly Twitter) posted a photo of a letter that claimed there had been mass requests for resignations within the Pakistan armed forces. The caption of the post read as follows in English:
“Huge. Mass resignations are being reported in Pakistan Army as morale is at its lowest under Asim Munir’s leadership.”
A picture of the shared letter is shown below:
According to the letter, the requests came in the wake of escalating tensions between India and Pakistan as a result of the recent Pahalgam attack, which claimed the lives of 26 tourists in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir on 22 April 2025.
Users had also responded to this post with images of a second letter, claiming that it was the real one. This letter stated that the total resignations within the Pakistani military amounted to “250 officers and 1,200 enlisted personnel”. Images of this letter can be seen below:
The following day, India also suspended the Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan, an agreement that governs the “water sharing of six rivers in the Indus basin between the two countries”.
Fact or Fiction?
We first conducted a reverse-image search of the first photo in the claim, which showed us that the photo had been uploaded to X and Instagram accounts on 28 April 2025. Hence, this was not a case of an old photo being passed off as a current one.
Then, we undertook a detailed analysis of the letter’s contents: the information, language, and visuals provided within it. Five aspects of the letter suggested it was forged.
Firstly, the email address at the top right of the letter—ispr@ispr.gov.pk—is invalid. Since the letter claims to be from the Director General of Inter-Services Public Relations (DGISPR), we went to the ISPR’s official website to check their official contact information. However, no official email address or phone number is available on the website. By conducting a Google search for “ISPR phone number”, we were led to the website of The Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry that displayed contact information for the ISPR office, as shown below:
While the phone number provided in the letter (+92-51-9271600) does appear in the image above, the provided email address does not.
We then ran the address through email address verifiers, including Mailmeteor, Verifalia, and Hunter. All the tools yielded results with a negative rating that classified the address as invalid or undeliverable. These results can be seen below:
The second discrepancy we noticed in the letter was that the name of the DG ISPR was incorrect. The letter states the name of the DG ISPR as Maj Gen Faisal Mehmood Malik. However, the current DG ISPR is Lieutenant General Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry.
A Google search for “Maj Gen Faisal Mehmood Malik” only led us back to this letter on Instagram and X.
Another glaring error in the letter was the term “Pakistan Jinabad!”, which comes at the conclusion. The actual slogan, which is exclaimed as a show of patriotism, is “Pakistan Zindabad”. This unusual iteration of the popular slogan on an official document makes the letter very dubious, in terms of its authenticity. In fact, including slogans is not a typical feature observed in official communications within the Pakistan Army.
The signature at the end of the letter also undermines its authenticity. It appears to be the signature of General Qamar Javed Bajwa, who served as the Chief of Army Staff from 2016–2022. Soch Fact Check has previously debunked a letter that was allegedly written by General Bajwa for the former premier Imran Khan. The letter turned out to be fake, with one of the reasons being that Bajwa’s signature was not authentic when compared to original instances of it. For the purposes of this fact-check, we compared the signature in the letter in the claim with one of the original instances of the signature, which shows that they match:
Hence, the usage of the signature of a previous Chief of Army Staff casts further doubt on the letter’s authenticity.
Lastly, the language of the letter is informal and contrary to how the ISPR typically phrases its press releases. For example, the letter refers to Pakistani soldiers as “Mujahideens”. Apart from sounding informal for an official letter, it is also not how Pakistani soldiers are usually referred to by the ISPR. This was made evident by scrutinising the recent press releases on their website, in which soldiers were usually referred to as “security forces”, “brave sons of soil” (when referring to soldiers who were martyred), or “Pakistan Armed Forces” (when referring to military officials meeting international dignitaries).
Similarly, the sentence construction, or tone, is also unlike that of the press releases. For example, the letter starts off with “The incident done by our Mujahideens.” This is in stark contrast to the concise and formal language of the ISPR when describing such incidents (usually referred to as “operations”), e.g., “On night 23/24 April 2025, Security Forces conducted an intelligence based operation in Bannu District”. Hence, the choice of words and particular sentence construction stands in contrast to how the ISPR usually phrases its information, as is evidenced by their press releases.
The second letter that users had shared in response to the claim also contained numerous errors. For example, at the top right of the first page, the words “commander”, “headquarters”, and “peshawar” are all spelt in lower case. Similarly, the “i” in “Xi Corps” is also spelt in lower case.
In light of these glaring errors, Soch Fact Check concludes that both the letters are fake.
Virality
On X, the claim was found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
On Instagram, the claim was found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
On Facebook, the claim was found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Conclusion: Both letters in the claim are fake. They contain a number of errors, including incorrect grammar, contact information and names of officials, misspelled popular slogans, outdated signatures, and language that is not typical of an official Pakistan Army document.
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Background image in cover photo: The Indian Express
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