A new wave of militancy is destroying Kashmiri families

In April, 17-year-old Natish Shakeel from Srinagar’s Khanyar area went missing after he left his home on the pretext of running an errand. Eight days later, security forces released a grainy drone footage showing three armed men cowering in an under-construction house in Pahoo village, Pulwama.The militants, including a Pakistani national, were killed in a gunfight that followed. One of them was Natish. Pictures show him as a personable adolescent with a whiff of innocence.Last year, 17-year-old Shahid Bashir left home in the afternoon of August 17 for work. Shahid and his father, Bashir Ahmad, sold shoes from a cart in the Batamaloo area in Srinagar. But later when his father reached the place where they usually parked their cart, Shahid was not there.“We weren’t worried at first as we thought he would return by the evening,” says Bashir Ahmad, who lives on rent in a ramshackle house in one of Srinagar’s downtown neighbourhoods with his wife, two daughters and a son. “But he did not.”Two months later, the family was stunned to learn that Shahid had died in an encounter in Pulwama. Police dubbed him a militant affiliated with The Resistance Front (TRF), a new outfit that sprang into existence three years ago. Security forces, however, describe the TRF as a proxy group for the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).Terror in the capitalEver since its inception in October 2019, TRF has singularly dedicated itself to reviving militancy in Srinagar. Over the past two years, the city — which was almost militancy-free until 2017 — has seen a spate of high-profile attacks in which members of religious minorities and non-locals doing business or odd jobs in Kashmir have been targeted.At the centre of TRF’s modus operandi is the recruitment of juveniles whose participation in militancy, according to police sources, has soared. TOI+ has previously reported that around 100 juveniles have taken part, either directly or indirectly, in terrorist attacks in the past three years in Kashmir. medium96475737Vijay Kumar, Kashmir’s additional director-general of police, says that of all the killings in the Valley in the past two years, juvenile militants were directly involved in 16% of them.But after the minor combatants are arrested or killed in encounters, what’s left behind are scores of grief-stricken families struggling to cope with the sudden loss.Natish’s family members were shocked by the news that he had joined a militant organisation. “We are traditionally associated with the National Conference [a mainstream political party],” says Showkat Ahmad, a family member. “It was impossible that someone from our family would join a militant group.”Natish’s granduncle was Yousuf Halwai, the iconic ‘national martyr’ of the National Conference who was shot dead by militants at the onset of militancy in 1989.“I begged the police to help me find my son,” says Bashir Ahmad, Shahid’s father. “We are poor but I was willing to sell everything I had so that I could see his face again.” medium96475749Bashir Ahmad’s family is originally from Sangam village in South Kashmir and had relocated to Srinagar a couple of decades ago to search for work. Shahid was the youngest among his children.He left his studies midway to help his father run his business. “We have run into financial ruin since his killing,” his mother says, eyes welling up.When the family approached the police two days after Shahid’s disappearance, the investigators put the juvenile’s mobile device under surveillance. “His last location was traced to Kani Kadal, just a few hundred metres from his home,” Bashir Ahmad says. “But after 4pm, he switched off his phone and became untraceable.”Catching them youngIn order to piece together the complete picture, TOI+ spoke to three police officers who are privy to the investigations pertaining to Shahid’s case. They agreed to share information anonymously.Soon after leaving home, Shahid is reported to have caught up with Tanzeel Sofi, a senior TRF militant from the same neighbourhood and an old friend of Shahid. “There was also a third guy with them who is from Sopore. He is currently under arrest,” says an officer. medium96475627All three of them were staying at a house at Hamdaniya colony in the Bemina area of Srinagar. According to the police, they were on digital surveillance and traceable in real-time moments before the encounter took place on October 15.“When we discovered that Shahid was leaving Srinagar and moving towards Pulwama to receive weapons, a police party from Srinagar was secretly put on his trail,” one of the officers says. “But then we learned that he was intercepted by the Pulwama police, leading to an encounter that ended with his killing.”Shahid was gunned down in Pulwama’s Wahibugh village. Immediately after his killing, Srinagar units of the Jammu & Kashmir police and paramilitary forces swooped down on the safe house in Bemina in which Tanzeel was hiding, killing him as well.Mindless killingsIn October last year, 13 civilian killings were reported in Kashmir, including those of ML Bindroo, a well-known Kashmiri Pandit pharmacist; Virendra Paswan, a labourer from Bihar; Muhammad Shafi, an employee of the power department; Shafi Lone, a taxi driver from North Kashmir; Supinder Kour, a Sikh principal at the Government Boys Higher Secondary School, Iddgah; and Deepak Chand, Kour’s fellow teacher at the same school.While the police accused Shahid of killing Shafi, Tanzeel is said to have shot dead sub-inspector Arshid Mir of the J&K police. medium96475591When TOI+ reached out to Shafi’s family in Batamaloo, they pleaded ignorance about the identity of the perpetrators. “We don’t know,” his nephew Arsalan Mehraj says. “My uncle was apolitical and did not have any enemies. We just heard four loud bangs outside our gate. When we came out, he was lying on the road, dead.”At his home, Bashir Ahmad has the harshest words for his son’s militant recruiters. “Shahid was a caring son. He couldn’t have left us in this situation,” he says, as he sat reclining in the bed, suffering from a herniated disc.“The Kashmir issue is an old dispute and when its resolution would have seemed around the corner, all of us would have done something. Something that would appear legitimate at that time. But why get the young lives extinguished for something that isn’t going to happen anytime soon? Till then, we will all be Indians first and then Muslims,” says Bashir Ahmad. medium96475520Why teen militants are Kashmir’s new big threat medium96475523