A Year After the War: Kashmir’s Border Civilians Sit Between Shelled Roofs and Self-Made Bunkers |
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A Year After the War: Kashmir’s Border Civilians Sit Between Shelled Roofs and Self-Made Bunkers
“We can rely on bunkers, but not on ceasefires.”
A Kashmiri man looks at Balkote village in Kashmir’s Uri town, which was badly hit during the India-Pakistan clash of May 2025.
URI, INDIAN-ADMINISTERED JAMMU and KASHMIR: “My children still shiver at loud sounds. They rush to hide and refuse to open their eyes,” recalls Beenish Ara, a mother living on the Line of Control (LoC) between India and Pakistan.
Ara’s children and thousands of others suffer from the trauma caused by the four-day near war situation between the two countries one year ago.
On the intervening night of May 7-8, 2025, the Pakistan Army engaged in artillery shelling across the LoC, the de facto border that divides disputed Kashmir between the two countries, causing heavy damage to areas such as Kupwara, Baramulla, Poonch and Rajouri in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir.
Pakistan’s firing was in response to a series of strikes by the Indian armed forces on May 7, 2025, which claimed to have targeted and eliminated “terror infrastructure” in Pakistan. India called the attack Operation Sindoor.
India’s operation, which killed scores in Pakistan, came two weeks after a deadly militant attack killed 26 tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir. India blamed Pakistan for the attack and indulged in a series of strikes on sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-ruled Kashmir.
The strikes and counter strikes resulted in injuries, deaths, and despair in both countries, before ultimately being halted by a ceasefire on May, for which U.S. President Donald Trump claimed credit. But a year after the war, border residents in Indian-ruled Kashmir question the damage they endured, as their homes, lives, and futures became casualties of the 70-year-old dispute between the two nuclear nations.
The aftermath of severe shelling in north Kashmir’s Kupwara district. Photo provided by a local source.
Shelled Homes and Broken Hearts
In Baramulla district’s Uri town is the village Bilalabad, a mere six miles from the LoC. Here, Khwaja Reyaz wakes up each morning facing the Haji Peer sector across the LoC, where he can see the rooftops of Pakistani homes. For him and others, the “enemy” is not abstract; it is visible, close, and ever-present.
“We couldn’t imagine that it would happen so swiftly. Our memories of the 1965 India-Pakistan war came alive. That time, firing wouldn’t travel beyond borders, this time even cities weren’t safe,” Reyaz recalled. “Every sound we would hear, would trigger us. The missiles made us feel unsafe in our own homes. People began hysterically emptying homes, packing their belongings, their entire lives in bags.”
As Pakistan engaged in gunfire and artillery shelling on various villages along the highly militarized border, several homes also were damaged in the shelling.
On May 10, over 60,000 civilians were moved out of the border areas to different locations. Residents recalled taking shelter at their relatives’ homes in safer parts of Kashmir, while some moved to government-designated shelter houses. Locals in northern Kashmir’s Uri shared that people living in areas like National Hydro Power Corporation colonies felt doubly threatened, thinking that Pakistan would target their vicinity.
A child displays pieces of shells that hit his home in Garkote village in May 2025. Photo by Tarushi Aswani.
Before May 2025, Uri was significantly shelled by Pakistan in 2019, when tensions escalated along the border after the airstrike by the Indian armed forces in Pakistan’s Balakot. A police station in Uri’s main town and the main market were also hit during shelling in 2019. The Indian forces attacked Balakot after blaming Pakistan for an attack killing 40 Indian soldiers in south Kashmir’s Pulwama in February 2019.
In 2025, when Pakistan responded, Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir saw casualties.
In Uri’s Mohra village, on May 8, 2025, Nargis Begum died from heavy shelling. Begum was killed when a shell hit her car as she and her relatives attempted to escape the volatile region.
“One of our neighbors died. She was leaving to stay alive,” said Sheema Bano, a resident of Mohra.
“We could see shells cutting through our roofs, razing our homes to the ground. We could even see fighter jets making their way through the sky above our heads,” she added. “We had accepted that we would die, we would be buried under the debris of our homes. I still remember the sound shells made while hitting targets.”
Trusting Bunkers Over Ceasefires
In Uri’s Garkote village, Ishrat Sadiq keeps her home tidy and clean. But Sadiq also takes care to clean the home under her home: a grain storeroom under her house, now repurposed as a makeshift bunker.
“We had to create a safe space. We could have been hit by shells had we not used this room to hide. For four days, at least 15 of us stayed in this room, hearing the loud blasts while praying that we would survive” she told The Diplomat.
Ishrat Sadiq stands inside the bunker near her home in Uri’s Garkote village. Photo by Tarushi Aswani.
Several border residents across Jammu and Kashmir, like 39-year-old Sadiq, are no longer waiting for government-sanctioned bunkers that never arrive. Instead, families are diverting their meager incomes to dig private shelters.
“Women were fainting, kids were crying, shivering at the sound of blasts and non-stop shelling. This place has always been a target and this time, it was this storeroom of ours that shielded us,” Sadiq said, recalling the May 2025 shellings.
A few kilometers away from Garkote, in Balkote village, Mohammed Siddiq is suspicious of the ceasefire. “When shelling quietens, the government forgets us. Balkote has 1,200 people, but where are the bunkers to protect us?” he asked. “Since the war, we have been digging to save ourselves, several of us have made bunkers near our own homes since then.”
Zulekha Bano stands inside the bunker she constructed in Uri’s Bandi village. Photo by Tarushi Aswani.
In Bandi, another village in Uri, Zulekha Bano too, has gotten a bunker constructed near her home.........