Daily Times

SRINAGAR: Indian and Pakistani soldiers again targeted each other’s posts and villages along their volatile frontier in disputed Kashmir after a day’s lull, officials said Monday.

Fighting erupted overnight as the rivals traded gunfire and shelling until dawn Monday. The two sides resumed intermittent fighting at several places later Monday, officials said.

The recent flare-up has caused extensive damage and sent tens of thousands of residents fleeing from their border homes.

Pakistan did not immediately comment on Monday. As in the past, both also called the violence an unprovoked violation of a 2003 cease-fire agreement and summoned each other’s senior diplomats in their capitals to register their anger and protest. They also issued statements condemning the violence.

Officials say the latest violence has sent tens of thousands of villagers fleeing from their homes in hundreds of affected villages along the border to government buildings converted into temporary shelters or to the houses of friends and relatives living in safer places.

Hundreds of houses have been destroyed and bullets and shrapnel have scarred homes and walls on both sides. Hundreds of cattle and livestock have also perished in the confrontation.

Most of the fighting is taking place along the portion of the frontier which is somewhat-defined and where each country has a paramilitary border force guarding the lower-altitude 200-kilometer (125-mile) boundary separating Indian-held Kashmir and the Pakistani province of Punjab.

But the fighting has also escalated to the contentious frontier that includes a 740-kilometer (460-mile) rugged and mountainous stretch called the Line of Control that is guarded by the armies of India and Pakistan.

India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars since 1947 over their competing claims to the region. Many see the fighting as part of what’s become a predictable cycle of violence, as the region convulses with decades-old animosities between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, where rebel groups demand that the territory be united either under Pakistani rule or as an independent country.

A flare-up last year similarly sent thousands to temporary shelters for days.

India accuses Pakistan of arming and training anti-India rebels and also helping them by providing gunfire as cover for incursions into the Indian side.

Pakistan staunchly denies this, saying it offers only moral and diplomatic support to the militants and to Kashmiris who oppose Indian rule. Nearly 70,000 people have been killed in the uprising and the ensuing Indian military crackdown since 1989.

Published in Daily Times, January 23^rd 2018.