Fighting persists in the troubled area of India’s Jammu and Kashmir province as two different gun battles claimed by the rebels led to the death of two Indian soldiers and six militants.
They all took place in the Kulgam district of the union territory, stated the Inspector-General of Kashmir Police Vidhi Kumar Birdi. ”Security forces conducted two distinct operations in the villages of Modergram and Frisal Chinnigam, which the exchange of gunfire occurred,” he said to the AFP news agency.
Birdi said that two rebels’ bodies were recovered from Modergram and four bodies in Frisal Chinnigam. Terrorists’ bodies have been retrieved, he said.
The violence erupted at a time when there was an increase in the frequency of attacks in the Muslim-dominated region that has been fighting armed secession from India since the late 1980s. Unfortunately, the number of killed people is in the tens of thousands, although there has been a slight improvement in recent times.
The rebels have been demanding the redrawing of borders in the region. At the same time, India often charges that Pakistan is backing and providing the insurgents with weapons, a claim that Pakistan has always dismissed. Both countries are nuclear-power and have fought over the disputed territory of the Himalayas three times, though both have full sovereignty but control only partially.
June witnessed one of the most brutal terror attacks in the region when armed men attacked a bus carrying Hindu pilgrims in the Reasi area; nine people died, and dozens were injured.
Security issues in the Indian-administered Kashmir have been sensitive since 2019, when the special state status of occupied Kashmir was annulled, which deepened the India-administered Kashmiris’ estrangement from the rest of India. The region has since been directly administered from New Delhi, as mentioned above, by the Indian government.
While the attack’s organizers are still on the run, the situation in Kashmir has remained volatile, thus posing a greater threat to India’s stability.
