The Horror of Pahalgam Terrorist Attack: 22 April 2025

The date of 22 April 2025, was a day of Horror that nobody was aware of. Tourists were full of enthusiasm to explore the beautiful meadows of Kashmir but that day was not ordinary. Everything was normal until the first shot of the bullet was heard by the people in the region.

Let’s take a brief of events that happened in the recent past among India and Pakistan. All these conflicts started with the terrorist attack on civilian tourists in Kashmir’s Pahalgam region on 22 April 2025. Pahalgam is famous for its beautiful geographical meadows and that place is also known as mini-Switzerland of India. This terrorist attack of Pahalgam was different in its nature because this time terrorists just not want to spread terror in the region but they specifically asked for the religion of the person present their, command them to recite “Kalma”, in some cases they ask the victims to open their pants to prove their religion (they check circumcision of penis because in non-abrahamic religions circumcision is not a common practice). In this attack, 5 armed terrorists attacked particularly Hindus and other tourists in Indian Administered Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam region in Anantnag district. In this attack they killed 26 civilians cold bloodedly, including 24 Hindu men, 1 Christian and 1 local Muslim youth who tried to save the tourists and fight with one of the terrorists, in this attack nearly 20 people were injured. Terrorists use M4 Carbines and AK-47s to attack innocent civilian tourists.

The images that came from Pahalgam were shocking for all people in the nation and people were full of anger. Everybody at that time in the nation wants justice to the victims of this Pahalgam terrorist attack. In between The Resistance Front (TRF) claimed that they did that attack but after some time they pulled back their claims of attack on civilians. This time every Indian was in anger, Indian Muslims along with other ethnicities of India, also supported the Government of India to take some decision to make it an example for all the terrorist community and the hub of terrorism that is located in Pakistan.

Aftermath

The most heart wrenching statement that one terrorist said to the wife of the victim was “go and tell Modi” (Jaa kar Modi ko Batao), when asked the terrorist to kill her as well. The images and videos of the incident that spread through social media in all over the nation and foreign nations as well, impacts drastically and creates a situation of pressure on the Government to take some serious steps to take action against terrorists. The situation of panic among tourists started in the region. They start taking shelters in nearby localities to save themselves from the terrorists, some local pony handlers rescued 11 injured tourists on their ponies. Two injured patients were taken to the district hospital at Anantnag and critically injured patients were taken to Srinagar by helicopter for emergency treatment.

During this time, the army launched joint search operations with Indian Army, Paramilitary and Jammu and Kashmir Police. In the meantime authorities conducted searches in the local region of Indian-administered Kashmir including Pir Panjal Ranges. Authorities detained more than 1500 persons for questioning about the incidents. They prepared sketches of the militants involved in the attack. Authorities also demolished houses of 10 suspected militants.

During this time, the government of India at the central level was preparing for something big to attack the root cause of these attacks. Now the important question arises is, what do the people of India want? And this question can be answered with the statement of DMK MP Kanimozhi,”People of India did not want revenge from Pakistan but they wanted to make Pakistani sponsored terrorists accountable for these terror situations” (She was a member of the Indian delegation to Madrid, Spain). This statement is enough to describe the Indian Standpoint of common people in this conflict.

This day was the starting point for the new developments that impacted the diplomatic relations of India and Pakistan, after that India and Pakistan both took some serious steps. Finally on 07 May 2025, India conducted Operation Sindoor. We will discuss in detail in the chain of next articles, what happened in this operation and what are the repercussions of this operation?

Now another important aspect that we all should know first, is about terrorist organisations that participated in this attack and their history in the region. In the next article we will discuss about those terrorist organizations involved in this attack and their brief backgrounds.