Hajin in shock over hostage incident

Azhar Qadri

Tribune News Service

Hajin, March 24

In Hajin, which defended militants in recent years, people are angry over the abduction and killing of a young boy as foreign militants face serious erosion of public sympathy in this north Kashmir town which was fiercely supportive of them.

A rare hostage crisis on Friday in which two militants refused to let go of a 12-year-old boy — whose charred body was foundafter a gunfight, which ended when security forces blasted a house — has shocked Hajin where residents had shielded militants during manycounter-insurgency operations.

The act of holding the boy hostage now threatens to erode the sympathy which the militants enjoyed for the last three years, when the first group of mainly foreign militants settled in the densely populated town which has a tribe-like social structure.

“The militants committed a big blunder. Hajin had become a paradise for them. e protected them with our blood but they ruined it all,” a shopkeeper in Hajin’s main roundabout said.

Even as people talk with reverence about militants who stayed and died in Hajin, like a foreigner code-named Musaib, whose body locals had refused to handover to the police, the shock from the hostage incident is overwhelming.

Atif, the young boy who was taken hostage, was the only son of a well-settled orchardist, Mohammad Shafi Mir, and Shareefa Jan, who also have three daughters. His cousin Abid Hamid Mir, alias Arhaan, was among the two Hajin youthswho became militants in 2017, the first from Hajin in more than two decades. His uncle Hilal Ahmad Wani from Sopore was also a militant and had died in 2008.

A distraught Mohammad Shafi, who attended to the mourners at a tent pitched in a neighbour’s courtyard, told The Tribune he did not know why his son was kept hostage. “The militants came three or four days ago. I don’t know why they did it,” he said.

Hajin’s history is chequered with violence. It was the home to Kashmir’s most feared counter-insurgency militia commander, who turned the town into a base for his ruthless campaign against militants, their sympathisers and civilians.

The dreaded militia was disbanded by the government and its members hunted and killed, and, by 2013, Hajin was forgotten as conflict moved to different arenas.

More than a decade later, a group of foreign militants — which failed to reach south Kashmir where they were to reinforce a resurgent wave of populist militants — settled in Hajin in late 2015 and found sympathy, support and protection among its people, who were eager to shed the tag of association with the militia.

Ali, the militant who held the boy hostage, is believed to be either a part of that first group or the second group that followed into Hajin two years later.

In Hajin, like anywhere else in Kashmir, the new generation of militants is seen with reverence and their deaths are celebrated as martyrdoms. However, Ali, described by residents of Hajin as a seven-foot tall Baloch and athletic, was killed on an ignominious note.

“Satan had overtaken him,” said a resident of Hajin’s Mir Mohalla, where Ali had held the boy hostage. Another man, a next door neighbour of the Mir family, said the crime was unforgivable. “No matter what, he should have let the boy go,” he said.

Such was the impact that for the first time since 2016, there was no stone throwing in the area even as the gunfight dragged for two days. The shutdown that was later observed was specifically for Atif and not for Ali and another foreigner Hubaib, residents said.

Three days after the incident, neighbours volunteered on Sunday to clear the debris of Mohammad Shafi’s blasted home as anger against militants continued to deepen in the neighbourhood.

A young man from Mir Mohalla, who was sympathetic to militants, said Ali had become “frustrated and rogue” and wanted to marry the daughter of the house owner. “When it was refused, he lost his mind,” he said.

“They (militants) would knock on any door in Hajin and it would be opened for them because it was out of love. This will not happen now,” he said. “They came here for a cause and we trusted them but for now, the trust is broken,” he said.