Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir – Javaid Iqbal opens a photo on his mobile phone. It shows a little girl sporting a pink woollen beanie, a grey trinket slung loosely around her neck – her face beaming in a wide smile.
Five-year-old Maryam, his daughter, who happily posed for the photo only last month. Today, she is no more.
Maryam was killed on the morning of May 7 when an explosive landed on their home in Sukha Katha, a cluster of some 200 homes in Poonch district of Indian-administered Kashmir, some 20km (12 miles) from the Line of Control (LoC), India’s de facto border with Pakistan in the disputed Himalayan region.
“Oh, Maryam,” Iqbal, 36, cries out, clutching the phone to his chest. “This is a loss I cannot live with.”
Maryam was among at least 21 civilians – 15 of them in Poonch – killed in cross-border shelling in Indian-administered Kashmir in early May as the South Asian nuclear powers and historical enemies engaged in their most intense military confrontation in decades. For four days, they exchanged missiles and drones, and stood on the precipice of their fifth war before they announced a ceasefire on May 10.
That truce has since held, even though tensions remain high and both nations have launched diplomatic outreach initiatives to try and convince the rest of the world about their narrative in a conflict that dates back to 1947, when the British left the subcontinent, cleaving it into India and Pakistan.
But for families of those who lost relatives in the cross-border firing, the tenuous peace along the LoC at the moment means little.
“My heart bleeds when I think of how you [Maryam] died in my arms,” wails Iqbal.
‘The earth rattled beneath us’
For decades, residents along the LoC have found themselves caught in the line of fire between India and Pakistan, who have fought three of their four previous wars over Kashmir. Both control parts of the region, with two tiny slivers also administered by China. But India claims all of Kashmir, while Pakistan also claims all of the region except the parts governed by China, its ally.
In 2003, India and Pakistan agreed to a ceasefire along the LoC that – despite frequent border skirmishes and killings of civilians on both sides – broadly held, and was renewed in 2021.
This story was originally published in aljazeera.com. Read the full story here.
