India has lost at least 337 security personnel since 2018 in terror strikes that have happened in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Those who were killed were with the Indian Army, the paramilitary forces and the state police. This means that every year, 56 security personnel lost their lives to terrorists in the UT in the last six years.
The numbers include: 29 deaths in 2023; 32 in 2022; 42 in 2021; 63 in 2020; 80 in 2019; and 91 in 2018. While the number of fatalities has shown a decreasing trend, yet the fact that one security personnel is losing his life in terror attacks every 12 days in Jammu and Kashmir has come as a concern for the government.
On Thursday, four soldiers were killed in an ambush setup in Rajouri district, ostensibly by the People’s Anti-Fascist Front (PAFF), which is seen as an offshoot of the terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammad. PAFF and other similar organisations like The Resistance Front (TRF) have come into existence in the last few years in view of the scrutiny that Pakistan was facing from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) for giving space to Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and Jaish-e-Mohammad.
Earlier in November, five soldiers, including two captains, lost their lives in Rajouri. In September, four security personnel lost their lives in a terror ambush at Kokernag, Anantnag in south Kashmir.
The worrying trend that has caught the attention of officials is that unlike in the past, where terrorist groups would target security personnel in Kashmir, now more such attacks are happening in Rajouri and Poonch districts in Jammu. Most of these attacks have been executed in broad daylight and the entire shootout and ambush captured on camera for use as propaganda material later on. As per reports, at least 34 fatalities related to the security forces have happened in these two areas since October 2021.
Another common pattern that has been identified in these incidents is that the terrorists, rather than trying to flee, make their location and movement known to the security forces and then wait at a vantage point in small groups for the soldiers to arrive to carry out cordon and search activities.
However, the soldiers are caught unawares, with the terrorists themselves “inviting” the security forces to the location that has been carefully selected by the latter.
Earlier the terrorists would challenge the security men while taking shelter in residential areas, but now they are using forested areas where they wait in hiding behind trees and under foliage. In dense forest areas, the security forces lose the advantage of having a higher number of men on their side against the 4-5 terrorists. As a result, some of the counter-terror operations take 5-7 days to reach their intended conclusion.
Tactical tools like drones that are sent ahead by the Army to locate the terrorists before any counter-terror operations are also removed from the equation by these terrorists as tall and dense trees restrict the movement of drones.Sources said that footage of the shootouts analysed clearly indicates that the terrorists are well trained in infantry modules and are not merely misguided youths who have picked up arms.
Official sources told The Sunday Guardian that it is emerging that after units of the armed forces were shifted to Ladakh in view of the situation with China, the deployment became less in these areas and the terrorist groups used this period to regroup themselves. Sources said that it is now clear that declaring these areas as “terrorism free” is too optimistic.
“The geography in these areas requires good tactical moves and not to act on every input without tactical manoeuvres and in haste. Secondly, all the ambushes were at a certain distance from the civilian population centre, all were set at road bends or near it, where vehicles had to slow down. Our boys were travelling in administrative vehicles and not bullet-proof vehicles. Efforts are now ongoing for them to travel in good quality bullet-proof vehicles, so that incidents similar to the recent ones do not recur. The loss of each of our boys is a tragedy for the nation, and the lives of every one of them needs to be protected”, an official source added.
A new counter-terror strategy, keeping in mind the challenges that have emerged in Jammu and Kashmir, is likely to be deliberated upon by officials in Delhi in the coming days as the harsh winter sets in these areas, which will restrict infiltration attempts by Pakistani terrorists for some days.