When the night fell, we could see in the distance hills dotted with bright white spots, hidden houses on the slopes of the Pakistani side of Kashmir. The city behind us, on the Indian side, was also brilliant.
My friend had hope. “The lights are a good sign,” he said. “It means that nothing will go wrong tonight.”
But as we settle at dinner, an advertisement of a nearby mosque is advised: “Citizens are recommended, especially in border areas, which remain inside.”
As in concert, the lights on both sides of the edge flavored, and the darkness covered the valley. The announcement had sounded worldly, but Kashmira knew what it meant.
The bombing was about to start.
I have spent much of my career covering disturbances in Kashmir. At the end of a report trip on the control line, I hoped to stay with my old friend Irshad Khwaja and his family in Garkote, a town on the side managed by India.
The previous day, on the early Wednesday, the tensions between India and Pakistan had jumped into a Milary clash that would take place when two confrontations were fought in parallel.
The most striking and alarming global global attention and alarming world leaders was an advanced air commitment, since India and Pakistan launched missiles and drones through the border of 2,000 miles they share. The exchange of strikes between nuclear weapons neighbors caused panic, but relatively few casualties.
The other, more brutal, one concentrated in Kashmir. In peoples and peoples along the control line, the border that separates the parts of the Indian and Pakistani territory, an old artillery battle hit the common people trapped in the middle.
The fight was expelled by a terrorist attack last month on the Indian side of Kashmir in which 26 civilians were killed. India accused Pakistan of responsibility for the attack, an affirmation that Pakistan has denied.
The massacre was one of the sausage attacks against Indian civilians in decades, and revived the long -term hostilities. Since 1947, when Pakistan and India were formed at the end of the British colonial domain, the two countries have fought against several people about Kashmir, a region bets on both of them as a whole.
Kashmir has rarely had a voice in his own destiny.
My friend and family knew what to do. They took me through the hill to a safe house where others had already gathered. We had barely arrived when the explosions, sharp, rhythmic, intensifying. Each deaf noise sent a tremor through the walls.
Fourteen of us men, mostly the extended family of my friend, we were curled up in thin mattresses in a corner room on the ground floor, silent exception for the occasional anxious whisper. Women and children had refugee tasks in a concrete bunker behind the house.
Around 11:30 pm, an old man with a thick white beard asked a younger man to stop and recite the Islamic call to prayer. It was not the regular moment for it, but nobody questioned the idea.
The young man’s voice rose, trembling but clear in the dark, while the others repeated his words silently and waited for the bombing.
The youngest men stayed on their phones, sending text messages to friends and family in other villages. “Are you safe?” Just an hour after the bombing began, their phones illuminated with reports that a woman had killed her leg not far from where we took refuge.
“It’s calm here,” I said, pretending to calm down while talking to my wife, who returned to our house in the city of Baramulla, at an hour and a half of the control line. “I am in a very safe place.”
I could listen to women in the nearby bunker singing the Islamic Shahada – “There is no God but God …” – Every time a shell landed. His voices did not break. Every time an explosion is classified, my own body was squeezed.
The bombing stopped at 6 am
He had rained all night; The floor was wet and the clear sky. When we went out, the first thing we saw was the Haji Pir Pass, part of the Pir Panjal mountains. Some of the men with me, speculating as military experts, pointed out the hills and estimated trajectories, trying to make sense of how the shells fell.
The leaders of the community of the adjacent district in the Indian Kashmir hero have counted 13 dead during the four days of bombing. Pir Mazhar Shah, an official on the Pakistani side, said 11 people were killed on Thursday night.
The fight is supposed to end for now. India and Pakistan said on Saturday that they had agreed to stop the fire, although several hours later there were reports of continuous bombing along the border.
But my night at the safe house won to leave me. Not for fear, what happened. What remained was my reverence for the strength of people throughout the control line: for those puppy who live their entire life in the shadow of danger and continue however.
Alex Travelli and Zia Ur-Rehman Contributed reports.
