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In Kashmir, Blood and Grief in an Intimate War: ‘These Bodies Are Our Assets’
By Jeffrey Gettleman
Officer Ashiq Tak, the commander of a tactical police unit in southern Kashmir. His uncle was killed by the militant Sameer Tiger.CreditAtul Loke for The New York Times
QASBAYAR, Kashmir — It was 9:30 p.m. when Sameer Tiger came to the door, a rifle slung over his shoulder.
Most of the village of Qasbayar, a tucked-away hamlet surrounded by apple orchards and framed by Kashmir’s mountain peaks, was getting ready for sleep. A few yellowish lights burned in windows, but otherwise the village was dark.
“Is Bashir home?” Sameer Tiger asked. “Can we talk to him?”
Bashir Ahmad’s family didn’t know what to do. Mr. Ahmad wasn’t a fighter; he was a 55-year-old pharmacist. And Sameer Tiger was a bit of mystery. He had grown up a skinny kid just down the road and used to lift weights with Mr. Ahmad’s sons at the neighborhood gym; they’d spot each other with the barbells, all friends.
But Sameer Tiger had disappeared for a while and then resurfaced as a bushy-haired militant, a member of an outlawed Kashmiri separatist group that had killed many people, the vast majority of them fellow Kashmiris.
The conflict today is probably driven less by geopolitics than by internal Indian politics, which have increasingly taken an anti-Muslim direction. Most of the fighters are young men like Sameer Tiger from quiet brick-walled villages like Qasbayar, who draw support from a population deeply resentful of India’s governing party and years of occupation.
Anyone even remotely associated with politics is in danger. That included Mr. Ahmad, who, when he wasn’t sitting behind the counter of the village pharmacy, was known to host events for a local Kashmiri political party.
“Don’t worry,” Sameer Tiger said, standing at Mr. Ahmad’s door, seeming to sense the family’s anxiety.
He looked Mr. Ahmad’s son right in the eye.
“We don’t mean any harm,” he said. “Your father is like our father.”
Mr. Ahmad rushed home from work and invited Sameer Tiger in for tea. They sat on the living room carpet talking quietly, then Mr. Ahmad nodded goodbye to his wife and son and left with the visitor.
He didn’t have much choice. Sameer Tiger was armed, and insistent, and had arrived with three others who were waiting in the road. The group moved slowly down the unlit lane.
At a bend in the road, in front of a shuttered shop, Sameer Tiger and Mr. Ahmad started arguing, a witness said. Four gun blasts rang out. Mr. Ahmad screamed. The few remaining lights in the neighborhood were suddenly extinguished.
JUST THE NAME KASHMIR conjures a set of very opposing images: snowy mountain peaks and chaotic protests, fields of wildflowers and endless deaths. It is a staggeringly beautiful place that lives up to all its fabled charm, yet even the quietest moments here feel ominous.
Asia’s most dangerous flash points, where a million troops have squared off along the disputed border. Both sides now wield nuclear arms. And the two sides are divided by religion, with Kashmir stuck in the middle.
killing or blinding many people, including schoolchildren who are simply bystanders, despite cries from human rights groups to stop.
killed in May just two days after he joined.
Their attacks tend to be quixotic and they usually die in a hail of automatic weapon fire. Their assassinations and killings are not militarily significant, more acts of protest against Indian rule. Of the approximately 250 known militants, police officials said, only 50 or so came from Pakistan, and most of the rest, the locals, have never left the valley.
Peoples Democratic Party, Kashmir’s dominant political organization.
The party used to sympathize with separatism, but to win control of the state parliament, it joined hands with the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party three years ago. Many Kashmiris accused it of selling out to Indian rule.
In June, the alliance suddenly broke apart, leaving a vacuum in the State Assembly. India’s central government took over running the state. Kashmiris are now terrified that the government will escalate military operations; the sense of hopelessness is rising.
According to Mr. Altaf, as they walked through the unlit lanes of Qasbayar with the militants, Sameer Tiger urged him and Mr. Ahmad to renounce their party affiliation. When Mr. Ahmad started arguing, Sameer Tiger ordered both men to lie facedown and close their eyes.
Mr. Altaf was shot once in the back of his right knee and not critically hurt. He thinks the intent was to send a message.
But Mr. Ahmad was shot three times in his legs, the bullets moving upward toward his waist, Mr. Altaf said. His cousin, a lifelong friend, bled to death on the spot. Maybe the Kalashnikov jumped in Sameer Tiger’s hands. Maybe he squeezed a split second too long.
Mr. Altaf can’t stop thinking about it. The betrayal haunts him.
“Bashir invited Sameer Tiger in for tea, tea,” he said.
Israelis have been surreptitiously helping them, providing security cameras, night vision gear, drones and other surveillance equipment along the border to stop big infiltrations. All this, coupled with the fact that Pakistan has closed most of its militant camps under pressure from the United States, has pushed the fighting away from the border, and deeper into the villages.
Kashmiris speak of a psychological tension that divides communities, individual families and sometimes even the same person. On one hand, people want to support a functioning society — to have their children go to school, get jobs, see some economic development — and Indian control represents that. On the other, they feel real sympathy for a cause, Kashmiri independence, that they consider just.
“Let’s be realistic: India’s never going to give up this land,” said one young Kashmiri who asked that his identity not be revealed because he could be labeled a collaborator.
“I can say such things in my house. But as soon as I step outside, even into my own street, I can’t say that. It has to be ‘Azadi! Azadi! Azadi!’ ” he said, using the word for freedom. “It’s like you have to be two different people, all the time.”
front-page news.
The hunt for him intensified but more civilians were rallying to the defense of militants, often barricading the roads as the police closed in and pelting officers with rocks.
“It’s getting very hard to do operations,” Officer Tak grumbled.
Around this time a mysterious video appeared on Facebook in which Sameer Tiger issued a threat to Maj. Rohit Shukla, one of the area’s commanding army officers: “Tell Shukla to come and face me.”
A few days later, on April 30, the army got a tip that Sameer Tiger was hiding in a house in the center of Drabgam. Though he was now a highly wanted militant, upgraded to an A rating, it seemed he had never strayed far from home.
This time, the Indian Army didn’t arrive en masse. They used mud-smeared dump trucks packed with soldiers wearing traditional pheran cloaks, guns hidden. The villagers thought they were laborers. The soldiers quietly surrounded the house and called for backup.
The soldiers sent in two rounds of emissaries, including village elders, to persuade Sameer Tiger to surrender. He replied with a burst of bullets, hitting Major Shukla in the shoulder.
The sound of gunfire served as an alarm, setting off an eruption. The village mobilized. Boys, girls, men and women scampered out of their houses and rushed into the road with stones in their hands. Mosque loudspeakers blared: “Sameer Tiger is trapped! Go help him!” The whole town, quite openly, was rallying to an outlaw’s side.
As additional army trucks rumbled in, packed with troops, more civilians rushed forward, trying to insert themselves between the troops and Sameer Tiger. One young man was shot dead; the crowd kept coming.
But the cordon had been well laid, growing to nearly 300 soldiers and police officers. The civilians, however determined, couldn’t break it.
Several police commanders said security officers then moved in, firing a rocket at the house. Flames burst out. Sameer Tiger scampered onto a rooftop. The soldiers opened up with automatic weapons from four directions. He was hit several times.
A CULTURE OF DEATH IS SPREADING across Kashmir. The militants have become the biggest heroes. People paint their names on walls. They wear T-shirts showing their bearded faces. They speak of them affectionately, as if they are close friends. The militants are especially revered after they are dead.
On a Tuesday morning, May 1, Sameer Tiger’s lifeless body, riddled with holes and soaked in blood, was hoisted onto a makeshift wooden platform in the yard of one of Drabgam’s mosques. Thousands poured in from across the valley. For hours they chanted his name: “Tiger! Tiger! Sameer Tiger!”
Image
Sameer Tiger’s funeral procession. “These bodies are our assets,” said a woman who identified herself as a separatist leader.CreditTauseef Mustafa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Boys scrambled up trees and scurried across tin roofs, the light metal popping beneath their gym shoes, to find any vantage point. Others fought through the nearly impenetrable crowd to the funeral pyre, just to gently stroke Sameer Tiger’s beard or to kiss his pale face goodbye. Many vowed to join the militants.
One woman who identified herself as a separatist leader looked out at the sea of mourners and gravely smiled.
“We are winning,” she said. “These bodies are our assets.”
A few hundred yards away, on the rooftop where Sameer Tiger had been cornered, a team of boys wearing religious skullcaps scrubbed a rust-colored splotch. A crowd pressed in to watch.
“Young ones, tell me: What does the spilling of this blood mean?” one man shouted.
“Azadi!” the crowd roared back.
The boys worked fast, heads down, sweat trickling off their temples. They used wet rags to mop up the splotch. They squeezed the blood-water mixture into a copper urn, to be saved. An imam watching closely told them to capture every last drop of blood.
By Jeffrey Gettleman
- Aug. 1, 2018
Officer Ashiq Tak, the commander of a tactical police unit in southern Kashmir. His uncle was killed by the militant Sameer Tiger.CreditAtul Loke for The New York Times
QASBAYAR, Kashmir — It was 9:30 p.m. when Sameer Tiger came to the door, a rifle slung over his shoulder.
Most of the village of Qasbayar, a tucked-away hamlet surrounded by apple orchards and framed by Kashmir’s mountain peaks, was getting ready for sleep. A few yellowish lights burned in windows, but otherwise the village was dark.
“Is Bashir home?” Sameer Tiger asked. “Can we talk to him?”
Bashir Ahmad’s family didn’t know what to do. Mr. Ahmad wasn’t a fighter; he was a 55-year-old pharmacist. And Sameer Tiger was a bit of mystery. He had grown up a skinny kid just down the road and used to lift weights with Mr. Ahmad’s sons at the neighborhood gym; they’d spot each other with the barbells, all friends.
But Sameer Tiger had disappeared for a while and then resurfaced as a bushy-haired militant, a member of an outlawed Kashmiri separatist group that had killed many people, the vast majority of them fellow Kashmiris.
The conflict today is probably driven less by geopolitics than by internal Indian politics, which have increasingly taken an anti-Muslim direction. Most of the fighters are young men like Sameer Tiger from quiet brick-walled villages like Qasbayar, who draw support from a population deeply resentful of India’s governing party and years of occupation.
Anyone even remotely associated with politics is in danger. That included Mr. Ahmad, who, when he wasn’t sitting behind the counter of the village pharmacy, was known to host events for a local Kashmiri political party.
“Don’t worry,” Sameer Tiger said, standing at Mr. Ahmad’s door, seeming to sense the family’s anxiety.
He looked Mr. Ahmad’s son right in the eye.
“We don’t mean any harm,” he said. “Your father is like our father.”
Mr. Ahmad rushed home from work and invited Sameer Tiger in for tea. They sat on the living room carpet talking quietly, then Mr. Ahmad nodded goodbye to his wife and son and left with the visitor.
He didn’t have much choice. Sameer Tiger was armed, and insistent, and had arrived with three others who were waiting in the road. The group moved slowly down the unlit lane.
At a bend in the road, in front of a shuttered shop, Sameer Tiger and Mr. Ahmad started arguing, a witness said. Four gun blasts rang out. Mr. Ahmad screamed. The few remaining lights in the neighborhood were suddenly extinguished.
JUST THE NAME KASHMIR conjures a set of very opposing images: snowy mountain peaks and chaotic protests, fields of wildflowers and endless deaths. It is a staggeringly beautiful place that lives up to all its fabled charm, yet even the quietest moments here feel ominous.
Asia’s most dangerous flash points, where a million troops have squared off along the disputed border. Both sides now wield nuclear arms. And the two sides are divided by religion, with Kashmir stuck in the middle.
killing or blinding many people, including schoolchildren who are simply bystanders, despite cries from human rights groups to stop.
killed in May just two days after he joined.
Their attacks tend to be quixotic and they usually die in a hail of automatic weapon fire. Their assassinations and killings are not militarily significant, more acts of protest against Indian rule. Of the approximately 250 known militants, police officials said, only 50 or so came from Pakistan, and most of the rest, the locals, have never left the valley.
Peoples Democratic Party, Kashmir’s dominant political organization.
The party used to sympathize with separatism, but to win control of the state parliament, it joined hands with the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party three years ago. Many Kashmiris accused it of selling out to Indian rule.
In June, the alliance suddenly broke apart, leaving a vacuum in the State Assembly. India’s central government took over running the state. Kashmiris are now terrified that the government will escalate military operations; the sense of hopelessness is rising.
According to Mr. Altaf, as they walked through the unlit lanes of Qasbayar with the militants, Sameer Tiger urged him and Mr. Ahmad to renounce their party affiliation. When Mr. Ahmad started arguing, Sameer Tiger ordered both men to lie facedown and close their eyes.
Mr. Altaf was shot once in the back of his right knee and not critically hurt. He thinks the intent was to send a message.
But Mr. Ahmad was shot three times in his legs, the bullets moving upward toward his waist, Mr. Altaf said. His cousin, a lifelong friend, bled to death on the spot. Maybe the Kalashnikov jumped in Sameer Tiger’s hands. Maybe he squeezed a split second too long.
Mr. Altaf can’t stop thinking about it. The betrayal haunts him.
“Bashir invited Sameer Tiger in for tea, tea,” he said.
Israelis have been surreptitiously helping them, providing security cameras, night vision gear, drones and other surveillance equipment along the border to stop big infiltrations. All this, coupled with the fact that Pakistan has closed most of its militant camps under pressure from the United States, has pushed the fighting away from the border, and deeper into the villages.
Kashmiris speak of a psychological tension that divides communities, individual families and sometimes even the same person. On one hand, people want to support a functioning society — to have their children go to school, get jobs, see some economic development — and Indian control represents that. On the other, they feel real sympathy for a cause, Kashmiri independence, that they consider just.
“Let’s be realistic: India’s never going to give up this land,” said one young Kashmiri who asked that his identity not be revealed because he could be labeled a collaborator.
“I can say such things in my house. But as soon as I step outside, even into my own street, I can’t say that. It has to be ‘Azadi! Azadi! Azadi!’ ” he said, using the word for freedom. “It’s like you have to be two different people, all the time.”
front-page news.
The hunt for him intensified but more civilians were rallying to the defense of militants, often barricading the roads as the police closed in and pelting officers with rocks.
“It’s getting very hard to do operations,” Officer Tak grumbled.
Around this time a mysterious video appeared on Facebook in which Sameer Tiger issued a threat to Maj. Rohit Shukla, one of the area’s commanding army officers: “Tell Shukla to come and face me.”
A few days later, on April 30, the army got a tip that Sameer Tiger was hiding in a house in the center of Drabgam. Though he was now a highly wanted militant, upgraded to an A rating, it seemed he had never strayed far from home.
This time, the Indian Army didn’t arrive en masse. They used mud-smeared dump trucks packed with soldiers wearing traditional pheran cloaks, guns hidden. The villagers thought they were laborers. The soldiers quietly surrounded the house and called for backup.
The soldiers sent in two rounds of emissaries, including village elders, to persuade Sameer Tiger to surrender. He replied with a burst of bullets, hitting Major Shukla in the shoulder.
The sound of gunfire served as an alarm, setting off an eruption. The village mobilized. Boys, girls, men and women scampered out of their houses and rushed into the road with stones in their hands. Mosque loudspeakers blared: “Sameer Tiger is trapped! Go help him!” The whole town, quite openly, was rallying to an outlaw’s side.
As additional army trucks rumbled in, packed with troops, more civilians rushed forward, trying to insert themselves between the troops and Sameer Tiger. One young man was shot dead; the crowd kept coming.
But the cordon had been well laid, growing to nearly 300 soldiers and police officers. The civilians, however determined, couldn’t break it.
Several police commanders said security officers then moved in, firing a rocket at the house. Flames burst out. Sameer Tiger scampered onto a rooftop. The soldiers opened up with automatic weapons from four directions. He was hit several times.
A CULTURE OF DEATH IS SPREADING across Kashmir. The militants have become the biggest heroes. People paint their names on walls. They wear T-shirts showing their bearded faces. They speak of them affectionately, as if they are close friends. The militants are especially revered after they are dead.
On a Tuesday morning, May 1, Sameer Tiger’s lifeless body, riddled with holes and soaked in blood, was hoisted onto a makeshift wooden platform in the yard of one of Drabgam’s mosques. Thousands poured in from across the valley. For hours they chanted his name: “Tiger! Tiger! Sameer Tiger!”
Image
Sameer Tiger’s funeral procession. “These bodies are our assets,” said a woman who identified herself as a separatist leader.CreditTauseef Mustafa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Boys scrambled up trees and scurried across tin roofs, the light metal popping beneath their gym shoes, to find any vantage point. Others fought through the nearly impenetrable crowd to the funeral pyre, just to gently stroke Sameer Tiger’s beard or to kiss his pale face goodbye. Many vowed to join the militants.
One woman who identified herself as a separatist leader looked out at the sea of mourners and gravely smiled.
“We are winning,” she said. “These bodies are our assets.”
A few hundred yards away, on the rooftop where Sameer Tiger had been cornered, a team of boys wearing religious skullcaps scrubbed a rust-colored splotch. A crowd pressed in to watch.
“Young ones, tell me: What does the spilling of this blood mean?” one man shouted.
“Azadi!” the crowd roared back.
The boys worked fast, heads down, sweat trickling off their temples. They used wet rags to mop up the splotch. They squeezed the blood-water mixture into a copper urn, to be saved. An imam watching closely told them to capture every last drop of blood.
