Home-Grown, Home-Slain

Some 50 Kashmiri militants were killed near their homes in 2017. That number is increasing. Why?

- Naseer Ganai

THE skeleton of his burnt-down house greets the eyes of Ghulam Mohideen Dar, 41, as he sits gazing upon the remains from a distance, his three-year-old daughter on his lap. Has anything survived? Who knows. None from the family has dared to enter the charred walls, braving the police poster that has hung there—“Danger: don’t venture near the house”—since the house, in Chinktar village in the volatile Tral area of Pulwama district, was gutted in a gunfight at the end of October.

According to Mohideen, two militants, who the police later identified as Showkat Ahmad Khan, 17, and Usman Haider, nephew of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) chief Moulana Masood Azhar, entered the house that day, followed by the army; a gun battle erupted within minutes. Locals say the soldiers set fire to the residence, killing the fighters inside. No protest occurred during the encounter.

Cut to Handora, a small village in the foothills of a mountain, only about seven kilometres away. There, 62-year-old Ghulam Nabi Khan, frail and grey-bearded, tells Outlook that the police had called him that evening to collect the body of his younger son, Showkat—the teenage fighter killed at Mohideen’s house. This was the second son he’d lost this year; his elder son Ishfaq, 22, was a JeM fighter who was killed along with three associates in a gunfight in the Tral region’s Laam forest this April.