URI, INDIAN-ADMINISTERED JAMMU and KASHMIR: “My children still shiver at loud sounds. They rush to hide and refuse to open their eyes,” recalls Beenish Ara, a mother living on the Line of Control (LoC) between India and Pakistan.
Ara’s children and thousands of others suffer from the trauma caused by the four-day near war situation between the two countries one year ago.
On the intervening night of May 7-8, 2025, the Pakistan Army engaged in artillery shelling across the LoC, the de facto border that divides disputed Kashmir between the two countries, causing heavy damage to areas such as Kupwara, Baramulla, Poonch and Rajouri in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir.
Pakistan’s firing was in response to a series of strikes by the Indian armed forces on May 7, 2025, which claimed to have targeted and eliminated “terror infrastructure” in Pakistan. India called the attack Operation Sindoor.
India’s operation, which killed scores in Pakistan, came two weeks after a deadly militant attack killed 26 tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir. India blamed Pakistan for the attack and indulged in a series of strikes on sites in Pakistan and Pakistan-ruled Kashmir.
The strikes and counter strikes resulted in injuries, deaths, and despair in both countries, before ultimately being halted by a ceasefire on May, for which U.S. President Donald Trump claimed credit. But a year after the war, border residents in Indian-ruled Kashmir question the damage they endured, as their homes, lives, and futures became casualties of the 70-year-old dispute between the two nuclear nations.
The aftermath of severe shelling in north Kashmir’s Kupwara district. Photo provided by a local source.
Shelled Homes and Broken Hearts
In Baramulla district’s Uri town is the village Bilalabad, a mere six miles from the LoC. Here, Khwaja Reyaz wakes up each morning facing the Haji Peer sector across the LoC, where he can see the rooftops of Pakistani homes. For him and others, the “enemy” is not abstract; it is visible, close, and ever-present.
“We couldn’t imagine that it would happen so swiftly. Our memories of the 1965 India-Pakistan war came alive. That time, firing wouldn’t travel beyond borders, this time even cities weren’t safe,” Reyaz recalled. “Every sound we would hear, would trigger us. The missiles made us feel unsafe in our own homes. People began hysterically emptying homes, packing their belongings, their entire lives in bags.”
As Pakistan engaged in gunfire and artillery shelling on various villages along the highly militarized border, several homes also were damaged in the shelling.
On May 10, over 60,000 civilians were moved out of the border areas to different locations. Residents recalled taking shelter at their relatives’ homes in safer parts of Kashmir, while some moved to government-designated shelter houses. Locals in northern Kashmir’s Uri shared that people living in areas like National Hydro Power Corporation colonies felt doubly threatened, thinking that Pakistan would target their vicinity.
A child displays pieces of shells that hit his home in Garkote village in May 2025. Photo by Tarushi Aswani.
Before May 2025, Uri was significantly shelled by Pakistan in 2019, when tensions escalated along the border after the airstrike by the Indian armed forces in Pakistan’s Balakot. A police station in Uri’s main town and the main market were also hit during shelling in 2019. The Indian forces attacked Balakot after blaming Pakistan for an attack killing 40 Indian soldiers in south Kashmir’s Pulwama in February 2019.
In 2025, when Pakistan responded, Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir saw casualties.
In Uri’s Mohra village, on May 8, 2025, Nargis Begum died from heavy shelling. Begum was killed when a shell hit her car as she and her relatives attempted to escape the volatile region.
“One of our neighbors died. She was leaving to stay alive,” said Sheema Bano, a resident of Mohra.
“We could see shells cutting through our roofs, razing our homes to the ground. We could even see fighter jets making their way through the sky above our heads,” she added. “We had accepted that we would die, we would be buried under the debris of our homes. I still remember the sound shells made while hitting targets.”
Trusting Bunkers Over Ceasefires
In Uri’s Garkote village, Ishrat Sadiq keeps her home tidy and clean. But Sadiq also takes care to clean the home under her home: a grain storeroom under her house, now repurposed as a makeshift bunker.
“We had to create a safe space. We could have been hit by shells had we not used this room to hide. For four days, at least 15 of us stayed in this room, hearing the loud blasts while praying that we would survive” she told The Diplomat.
Ishrat Sadiq stands inside the bunker near her home in Uri’s Garkote village. Photo by Tarushi Aswani.
Several border residents across Jammu and Kashmir, like 39-year-old Sadiq, are no longer waiting for government-sanctioned bunkers that never arrive. Instead, families are diverting their meager incomes to dig private shelters.
“Women were fainting, kids were crying, shivering at the sound of blasts and non-stop shelling. This place has always been a target and this time, it was this storeroom of ours that shielded us,” Sadiq said, recalling the May 2025 shellings.
A few kilometers away from Garkote, in Balkote village, Mohammed Siddiq is suspicious of the ceasefire. “When shelling quietens, the government forgets us. Balkote has 1,200 people, but where are the bunkers to protect us?” he asked. “Since the war, we have been digging to save ourselves, several of us have made bunkers near our own homes since then.”
Zulekha Bano stands inside the bunker she constructed in Uri’s Bandi village. Photo by Tarushi Aswani.
In Bandi, another village in Uri, Zulekha Bano too, has gotten a bunker constructed near her home. Bano, mother to four, said that May 2025 was the worst shelling she has seen in 60 years of her life. “Where will we run if shells hit homes again? Some walls in my home are still cracked,” Bano explained. That is why she got the bunker made: “at least we’d be able to hide there.”
Nearby Bankhodi village is home to Shaheen Begum, a migrant laborer from northern India’s Uttar Pradesh. Begum, who came to Uri almost a decade ago, saw her home hollowed out in front of her eyes during the shelling. With her husband being a daily wager, they had to borrow small amounts of money from different acquaintances to rebuild their home. Begum sold off her only pair of gold earrings to build a bunker underneath their unfinished home.
“I wish my husband gets a better work elsewhere, I just want to leave Kashmir,” she said.
Shaheen Begum sits outside her under-construction home in Uri’s Bankhodi village. Photo by Tarushi Aswani.
In Kupwara district, which was also heavily shelled and suffered grave damage from the four-day war, locals have come up with solutions to survive the 70-year-old conflict, which oscillates from hot to cold and back again every few months.
Syed Aijaz, a resident in Chitterkote village, shared that in October 2025, he built a community bunker near his home, with his own hard-earned money. “Our homes suffered severe damage. Some caught fire, some were hit so hard that they became unrecognizable. We got the bunker made because we know the climate of conflict,” Aijaz told The Diplomat.
Shaheen Kadeer, a resident of Kupwara district’s Karnah village said that the existing community bunkers built by the government cannot accommodate the population in Karnah. “They built bunkers in the 2000s, no new ones after that. The population increases, and so does the risk. We are on our own in that sense,” Kadeer said.
“Not everyone can afford to build bunkers from their own money. Government compensation too has not covered our losses. We lost our homes and we live at a border which may cost us our lives next time. The nearest bunker is 500 meters away from my house,” Kadeer continued.
The outside gate of a bunker constructed by Zulekha Bano in Uri’s Bandi village. Photo by Tarushi Aswani.
Life on the Line of Control
For locals living in the border villages in battleground Kashmir, it’s been a long year since the brief war between the two nuclear nations. The fragile ceasefire is pushing civilians to a state of self-funded survival.
In the past year, Shabbir Ahmed Naik, Garkote’s elected village head, has developed a daily routine. Naik’s day begins with his phone ringing, as people of his village call to ask about the monetary compensation for their homes, which the war devastated. They have yet to receive the money from the government of India.
Mixed in with these calls for compensation, Naik also receives updates from locals who are going ahead with building their own bunkers. “People who live on the border have a very different way of reading ceasefires and conflict. We sit at the edge of crisis with no practical hopes of lasting peace. We can rely on bunkers, but not on ceasefires. They are just a political pastime. Those who decide on ceasefires don’t live on the borders, we do, and we die too,” Naik said.
Naik added that for locals along the LoC, living where they can see Pakistan across the border outside their windows changes their reading of the silence that follows each ceasefire. Even when the guns fall silent, life under the shadow of India-Pakistan tensions remains shaped by fear, scarred homes, memories of displacement, and a constant distrust of ceasefires. Residents describe the present moment not as peace, but as an “uneasy quiet.” Homes hit in May’s shelling remain visibly damaged, a daily reminder of how fragile the calm is for families navigating daily life on one of the world’s most militarized borders.
The town of Uri in Kashmir’s Baramulla district was badly battered when Pakistan began shelling the region. Photo by Tarushi Aswani.
Several locals who spoke to The Diplomat said that they felt confused by the idea that the while India was ready to massively militarize the region, it failed to provide basic war shelter to the region’s residents.
Dr Sajjad Shafi, Baramulla’s elected representative in Jammu and Kashmir’s Legislative Assembly, also understands and echoes the same concerns. “It is a failure of the government of India that the people are building bunkers [with money] from their own pocket. I raised this issue in the Assembly, but these things need budget allocation and cooperation from India’s Ministry of Home Affairs. In the absence of state-sanctioned funds, border-folk are left to fend for themselves,” he said.
Additionally, Shafi said that only 40 percent of those who applied for compensation had received their benefits. Even those who received funds said the amounts were inadequate to rebuild razed homes.
A home in Uri’s Garkote village still bears marks of being hit by Pakistan artillery in May 2025. Photo by Tarushi Aswani.
“This is a clear-cut aftermath of Operation Sindoor. Border people did not wage a war with anyone. So people who suffered after the operation that the government waged, must be compensated in full, by them. We wrote to them, with a list of proposed community bunkers and the involved budget. There has been no movement on that front for one whole year,” Shafi said.
Shafi’s grievances echo the greater loss, trauma, and struggle of living on India’s most volatile border. Over the past year, living and breathing amid shelled walls and lost families, locals say that they are adapting, mentally and materially, to a post-war landscape that is defined as much by memory as it is by geopolitics. Here along the Line of Control, silence doesn’t always mean peace; often it is only a pause in a longer war.
The inside view of a bunker constructed by Shaheen Begum in Uri’s Bankhodi village. Photo by Tarushi Aswani.
