Army personnel near the encounter site in Tral. Tribune File photo

Azhar Qadri

Tribune News Service

Hayuna (Tral), March 10

The voice notes were sent and shared over phone messengers. The anonymous speakers called for mobilisation of demonstrators to rescue the militants.As the gunfight ensued for the next 16 hours before ending on Sunday afternoon, the site of the encounter was surrounded by angry crowds which came in waves to throw stones at the security personnel manning the outer rings of the cordon. The village of Haffo, where the gunfight took place this week, was surrounded by layers of security personnel and then by another layer of belligerent protesters.It is for the first time in south Kashmir’s Tral sub-district, where the village is located, that such a clash has taken place amid a gunfight. The police called it a “minor” incident. Locals, however, said it was previously unseen here.The new trend where civilians clash with security forces, engaged in battling militants, has swept the districts of south Kashmir and drawn warnings from the top echelons of security forces. It is almost a reversal of what used to happen during the first two decades of militancy in the region when civilians would flee to safety.At Haffo, the protesters made desperate attempts to rescue Aqib Ahmad Bhat, a young man from neighbouring Hayuna village, and Usama, a foreigner — the militant duo which was fighting off repeated assaults on a house which they had barricaded.On an early spring morning on Monday, a day after the gunfight ended at Haffo, Bhat’s body lay motionless on a makeshift stage under the shade of a leafless walnut trees. His face was partly bandaged to hide a bullet wound in his left eye. Next to the dead militant, a bearded speaker raised slogans in support of ‘gun solution’ and eulogising the militant cause. Finally, the speaker read out the names of dead militants to which women responded, “They are alive.” Their colourful scarves, which veiled the faces of many, sparkled in the barren ground at Hayuna, where Bhat’s body was kept for funeral.Some women wore a traditional black veil, including a mother, who moved between rows to find a spot from where she could make her two daughters, aged nine and twelve, have a look at Bhat’s face. For her, it was an act of reverence.The funerals of militants are drawing unprecedented participation in recent years, and, as the crowds of protesters swarm the battle zones, it is also reshaping the region’s political narratives.The last militant funeral in Tral was the largest in recent decade. It was of Burhan Wani, whose killing in a gunfight in July last year had sparked a wave of protests and a long phase of unrest.To reach Hayuna for Bhat’s funeral, men and women walked long distances. A middle-aged woman from Tral’s Amirabad village had walked 5 km. “I am married in Amirabad but I am from this village,” she said. “I have rarely seen him as he had gone to memorise the Koran for three years and then he went in Allah’s ‘path’,” she said.Inside the ground where Bhat’s body was placed before a crowd of mourners, the women raised slogans as men jostled to touch the militant’s body and held mobile phones to shoot pictures and videos. On the road outside the ground, some men gathered in groups, discussing facts, rumours and legends.Bashir Ahmad Mir, a local, recalled the protest that erupted around the site of the gunfight at Haffo village, located almost a kilometre from Hayuna. “Some people had even come from Kulgam to throw stones,” Mir said, referring to a district which is almost 60 km from Tral.Mir, in his fifties, was surprised at the way the new generation had clashed with security forces. “Earlier, everyone would run away, this time, everyone was rushing towards this place,” he said.One of the protesters who clashed with security forces outside Haffo had come from Shopian, nearly 40 km from Tral. “My two brothers have died, they were militants. So, I had to come,” he said as if it was an obligation for this father of two young girls. “Our blood is the same,” he said.

Civilians clashwith forces

• The new trend where civilians clash with security forces, engaged in battling militants, has swept the districts of south Kashmir and drawn warnings from the top echelons of security forces
• The funerals of militants are drawing unprecedented participationin recent years, and,as the crowds ofprotesters swarm the battle zone, it is also reshaping the region’s political narratives