When the night fell, we saw in the long -distance hills dotted with glowing white spots – houses inserted into the slopes of the Pakistan side of Kashmir. The city behind us, on the Indian side, was also shimmering.
My friend hoped. “The lights are a good sign,” he said. “It means nothing goes wrong tonight.”
However, when we settled at dinner, the announcement rang from the nearby mosque: “Citizens, especially in border areas, are recommended to stay in the interior.”
As if in agreement, the lights on both sides of the border slipped out and the darkness covered the valley. The announcement was secular, but Kashmir knew what it meant.
The shelling began to begin.
I spent most of my career by covering riots across Kashmir. At the end of the news on the control line, I was looking forward to staying with my old friend Irshad Khwaja and his family in Garkote, a village on the Indian side.
The day before the start of Wednesday, the tension between India and Pakistan expanded to a military conflict that would be played as parallel to two confrontations.
More violent-drawing global attention and the alarming world leader-the advanced air engagement, because India and Pakistan have released missiles and drones on the border of 2,000 miles they share. The exchange of strikes between the neighbors of armed nuclear weapons caused panic, but relatively few victims.
The other, more brutal, one was concentrated in Kashmir. In villages and cities along the control line, the border separating the Indian and Pakistanic part of the territory, the old -fashioned artillery battle pounded ordinary people stored in the middle.
Last month, the fighting was launched by a terrorist attack on the Indian side of Kashmir, in which 26 civilians were killed. India accused Pakistan of responsibility for the attack, claiming that Pakistan denied.
The massacre was one of the worst attacks on Indian civilians in decades and ruled long -term hostility. Since 1947, when Pakistan and India were created at the end of the British colonial government, both countries have fought several wars with Kashmir, the region wedged between them, which both claim overall.
Kashmiris rarely had a word in his fate.
My friend and his family knew what to do. They tied me uphill to a safe house where the others gathered. We barely arrived when the explosion began – sharp, rhythmic, intense. Each cunning sent trembling through the walls.
Fourteen of us, mostly extended family of my friend, were curled up on thin mattresses in the corner room on the ground floor, quiet except for the occasional anxiety whisper. Women and children hid in a concrete bunker behind the house.
Around 23:30 he asked the elder with a thick white beard a younger man to build and present an Islamic challenge to pray. It wasn’t a regular time, but no one has questioned this idea.
The voice of the young man rose, trembling, but clearly in the dark when the others quietly repeated his words and waited bombing.
Younger men stayed on their phones, text friends and relatives in other villages. “Are you safe?” Hardly an hour after the start of shelling, their phones lit up with the news that a woman was killed near the place where we hid.
“It’s silence,” I said, pretending to be on the phone when I talked to my wife, who returned to our house in Baramulla, an hour and a half after checking. “I’m in a very safe place.”
I have heard that women in a bunker near the Islamic Shahad – “There is no God, but God …” – Every time a shell landed. Their voices did not fail. Every time the explosion rang, my own body tightened.
The shelling stopped at 6 o’clock
It was raining all night; The country was wet and the sky was clean. When we got off, the first thing we saw was Haji Pir Pass, part of the Pir Pirjal Mountains. Some of the men speculated as military experts, pointing to hills and estimated trajectories, and tried to understand how the shells dropped.
The leaders of communities from the neighboring district in Kashmir, India, counted 13 dead during a four -day shelling. Pir Mazhar Shah, an official from the Pakistani side, said that 11 people were killed on Thursday evening.
Fighting is supposed to end so far. India and Pakistan said on Saturday that they agreed to the ceasefire, although a few hours later there were reports of continuing shelling along the border.
But my night in a safe house won’t leave me. Not because of fear – it passed. My respect remained the power of people along the control line: for those cashmeters who live their whole life in the shadow of danger and yet continue.
Alex Travelli and ZIA UR-REHMAN The report contributed.
