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  • Eight soldiers killed in India's Kashmir, attacks escalate

    SRINAGAR, India | Mon Jun 24, 2013 2:44pm EDT

    (Reuters) - Eight soldiers were killed and six others injured in rebel attacks in India's Jammu and Kashmir state, an army spokesman said on Monday, in a sign of escalating violence ahead of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to the state.

    Militants have escalated attacks on security forces since March this year, killing 27 security men so far, with Monday's the deadliest so far.

    The security incidents follow protests in February when India hanged Mohammad Afzal Guru for an attack on parliament in 2001.

    Guru was convicted of helping organize arms for the gunmen who mounted the attack and finding a place for them to stay. He always maintained his innocence.

    On Monday, militants ambushed a vehicle carrying army personnel. They opened fire, lobbed a grenade and fled, Naresh Vij, a Srinagar-based defense spokesman, told Reuters.

    Militant group Hizbul Mujahideen claimed responsibility for the ambush and warned of more such attacks.

    On Saturday, Hizbul Mujahideen militants shot dead two policemen in the heart of Srinagar city despite forces beefing up security before Singh's two-day visit, beginning on Tuesday.

    Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan, both of which claim the region and rule it in part. They have fought two of their three wars over Kashmir.

    (Writing by Mayank Bhardwaj; Editing by Michael Roddy)

    Eight soldiers killed in India's Kashmir, attacks escalate | Reuters

    ===========

    Any particular reason for the spike in violence recently?
    Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission - Jinnah
    https://twitter.com/AgnosticMuslim

  • #2
    Originally posted by Agnostic Muslim View Post
    Any particular reason for the spike in violence recently?
    LeT, JM desperate to make the news.

    Maoist belt remains a lot more violent and lawless than Kashmir.
    Cow is the only animal that not only inhales oxygen, but also exhales it.
    -Rekha Arya, Former Minister of Animal Husbandry

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    • #3
      Originally posted by Tronic View Post
      LeT, JM desperate to make the news.

      Maoist belt remains a lot more violent and lawless than Kashmir.
      Yep. The big massacres by maoists in recent times have made them look pretty weak in comparison.
      So they try and up the tempo.
      RIP to the poor sods killed in that hellhole.
      For Gallifrey! For Victory! For the end of time itself!!

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      • #4
        Originally posted by Tronic View Post
        LeT, JM desperate to make the news.
        I have heard some Indian commentators argue that the LeT played a role, or perhaps even led the operation, but allowed the HM to take credit because the HM is considered to be an 'indigenous insurgent organization' whereas the LeT is obviously linked to Pakistan. Of course the claim itself opens those making it to the counter-argument that alleging LeT involvement in the attack is an attempt to assign blame to 'foreign hands' and distract from the 'indigenous nature' of the insurgency.
        Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission - Jinnah
        https://twitter.com/AgnosticMuslim

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Agnostic Muslim View Post
          I have heard some Indian commentators argue that the LeT played a role, or perhaps even led the operation, but allowed the HM to take credit because the HM is considered to be an 'indigenous insurgent organization' whereas the LeT is obviously linked to Pakistan. Of course the claim itself opens those making it to the counter-argument that alleging LeT involvement in the attack is an attempt to assign blame to 'foreign hands' and distract from the 'indigenous nature' of the insurgency.
          The 'indigenous nature' of the Kashmir insurgency ended with Yasin Malik's JKLF in 1995.

          The only thing 'indigenous' about HM is it's leader Salahuddin. Otherwise, it too is a Pak-based organization with links to the PA:

          "We are fighting Pakistan's war in Kashmir and if it withdraws its support, the war would be fought inside Pakistan," said Salahuddin, who also heads the Muttahida Jihad Council, a grouping of terrorist organisations based in Pakistan.
          Hizb chief Syed Salahuddin warns Pakistan against withdrawing support on Kashmir - Times Of India
          Cow is the only animal that not only inhales oxygen, but also exhales it.
          -Rekha Arya, Former Minister of Animal Husbandry

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          • #6
            Armed resistance reemerging in Kashmir

            India's prime minister toured the disputed region a day after one of the deadliest attacks on Indian forces in years. India is talking up development, but political dialogue is lacking.

            By Zahid Rafiq, Correspondent / June 25, 2013

            Eight soldiers were killed and 14 were injured in the attack, making it one of the deadliest in the resurgent Kashmiri insurgency that is slowly and deftly reemerging on Kashmir’s landscape.

            After a substantial phase of people’s disenchantment with violence and a gradual movement away from an armed struggle toward nonviolent protests and social media campaigns, the gun seems to be returning to the center stage of Kashmir’s fight against Indian rule. New Delhi missed an opportunity to engage with a changed environment where the focus was on nonviolence and instead started terming the absence of violence as peace and silence of guns as Kashmir’s acceptance of the Indian rule.

            The attack yesterday came a day after the killing of two policemen who were shot dead from close range by unidentified gunmen in Srinagar’s busy business hub. This year so far has already seen the death of more than 25 armed forces personnel in the territory, and a much more sophisticated militancy appears to be active in the Kashmir Valley. According to the police and Army, many of these new militants are local Kashmiri youth and they are carrying out a lot of the operations now.

            “Before the Arab Spring, in 2008 and 2010, half a million Kashmiri people marched peacefully on the streets of Kashmir, seeking a solution to the Kashmir dispute and asking freedom from Indian rule. Not a single armed forces personnel was killed in these protests, but the Indian state responded with imposing curfews, stopping the Internet service, and killing more than 170 young unarmed boys, and wounding thousands,” says Asif Ahmad, a young computer science graduate, who was part of these protests and had felt that some solution was finally on its way.

            “But nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Other than thousands of young boys being send to prison for protesting and even for what they posted on facebook,” he says.

            India has pursued a counterinsurgency strategy that merges police surveillance and crackdowns with local elections, jobs programs, and some development. Mr. Singh visited Kashmir today to inaugurate a rail line that will eventually link the Kashmir Valley with India – part of New Delhi's hopes of more fully integrating the disputed region with India. The relative peace of the last few years has also paid nongovernmental dividends in the form of skyrocketing tourism from India.

            Yet India has made few movements toward a political process to address the long-standing Kashmir dispute.


            The Himalayan region is claimed fully by both India and Pakistan, and is de facto divided by the two countries along a military Line of Control. Many Kashmiris, particularly Muslims in the Kashmir Valley, want the right to self-determination to join with India or Pakistan or to be independent. A bloody mass armed uprising, supported by militants from Pakistan, raged from 1989 into the past decade against India, which responded by maintaining more than half a million forces in the region with immunity from the law. The conflict has left some 70,000 people dead, mostly civilian.

            In recent years, India has carried on a slow dialogue with Pakistan that has included some initiatives aimed at boosting trade and travel links between the two countries. But India's public outreach to Kashmiris themselves was limited to a listening tour of the region by three "interlocutors" whose recommendations for a dialogue with separatists, among other steps, went nowhere.

            Without any political process to look to, there is an immense sense of siege in Kashmir and the hopelessness among the youth has increased even more after they witnessed the same violent response from the Indian state for throwing stones and chanting slogans as for picking up arms.


            “The militancy had almost come to an end, and even I had thought that it was a phase that is now over. But Kashmir is a political problem, and violent and nonviolent means are only an expression of the political resentment and aspiration among the Kashmiris,” says Noor Ahmad Baba, a political science professor at Kashmir University.

            Professor Baba was himself a young man during the 1990s when militancy was at its peak in Kashmir, and he feels that this is an altogether new kind of militancy that is coming up. “That time it was a mass movement and everyone picked up gun in anger and passion without knowing what it meant and what it entailed. Now it is much more sophisticated and professional, this one is going to be different,” says Baba.

            Hizbul Mujahideen, a militant outfit based in Pakistan-held-Kashmir and one of the oldest organizations fighting in the region, claimed the attack on the convoy. “The attack was carried out by special squad of the outfit and our militants reached their hideouts safely,” HM’s operational spokesperson Baleeg-u-Din told a local Kashmiri news agency last night.

            Armed resistance reemerging in Kashmir - CSMonitor.com
            Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission - Jinnah
            https://twitter.com/AgnosticMuslim

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            • #7
              AM, why the double standards?

              You've turned down reports from the NYT, Washington Post, and other well known, credible media outlets because of quotes from "anonymous sources". Your 'csmonitor' article doesn't even give that, besides reading like an op-ed.
              Cow is the only animal that not only inhales oxygen, but also exhales it.
              -Rekha Arya, Former Minister of Animal Husbandry

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              • #8
                Attacks on Indian forces in Srinagar and rest of Kashmir townships has direct relationship with ceasefire violations by PA at IB and LOC. Any successful infiltration means attacks in Kashmir.

                Short while ago; Pakistani intruder, carrying explosive device, killed near Indian border in Poonch: Army | NDTV.com,

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                • #9
                  Originally posted by Tronic View Post
                  AM, why the double standards?

                  You've turned down reports from the NYT, Washington Post, and other well known, credible media outlets because of quotes from "anonymous sources". Your 'csmonitor' article doesn't even give that, besides reading like an op-ed.
                  I didn't say treat the article as the gospel - it just offered a different POV than your own. And for the record, I agree that it reads like an 'op-ed'.
                  Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission - Jinnah
                  https://twitter.com/AgnosticMuslim

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