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Militants are buried in Srinagar's many martyrs' cemeteries, some of them large adjuncts to regular graveyards, others crammed into small corners across the city. They are crowded with almost identical concrete gravestones, covered in Arabic inscriptions in green lettering. A few bear English place names—"Birmingham" was one I noted—an indication of Kashmir's appeal to disaffected Western-born Muslims looking for a cause.

But exactly what that cause was, beyond the single word azad, was unclear. As I looked at the gravestones in one of the smaller cemeteries near Dal Gate one day, a group of boys gathered around me and laboriously translated the inscriptions. They were eager to show me significant graves—Islamic warriors from faraway countries, or men whose spectacular deaths had stuck in their memories. They pointed out professionals—lawyers, teachers, doctors—and men who had died under torture. They called all the dead "martyrs," but they couldn't always tell me what they had died for—whether they were martyrs to Kashmiri independence, or to the union with Pakistan, or simply to Islam. One grave that was pointed out to me belonged to Aafaq Ahmed Shah, who, at the age of eighteen, had become briefly famous for inaugurating a new phase of the militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed's war, that of the suicide bomber. I had earlier visited his family in the old city.

His mother had opened the door and stood on the doorstep looking at me. She was a small, middle-aged woman with dar
, and she knew, before I explained, what I had come for. She remained immobile, tears flowing down her face, reluctant, it seemed, either to turn me away or to admit me to what she knew would be a painful rehearsal of her grief.

Still sobbing, she let me in, and I sat on the floor of a freezing room, waiting for her husband to return from the market. Mohammed Yusuf Shah was a thin, elderly man, a retired college teacher, dressed in a brown pheran. He settled beside me as his wife brought blankets and fire baskets and poured us cups of chai from a thermos flask.

"My son was nearly nineteen years old," Mohammed said. "He wanted to be a doctor. There's a photograph of him"—he waved his hand vaguely—"somewhere, wearing a stethoscope." He made no move to get it, as though already discouraged by the effort. His wife had begun to cry again.

"Mysterious are the ways of God," he said. There had been no warning that his son would join the militants. "He willed it. He did it. That is all. He was a good, silent, obedient boy. He was my son, but, more than that, he was my friend. He was here, dawn to dusk, every day, day and night."

On March 25, 2000, the boy disappeared. The family searched for him, fruitlessly. Three days later, he telephoned. "Father, I left," he said, and hung up.

On April 19th, dressed in an Army uniform and carrying an Army I.D., Aafaq tried to ram his car through a heavily fortified gate of the Army's XV Corps headquarters, near his home. The car exploded after a soldier started firing at it. Five soldiers were injured; only one person was killed—Aafaq, who was blown to pieces. The family read of his death in the newspapers.

I found another family of a young martyr in a village some thirty miles outside Srinagar. We drove along long straight roads lined with tall poplars, past fields of saffron that were just showing a first flush of green shoots, past empty paddy fields, waiting to be planted. The village itself was along a muddy track, buried among trees, peaceful in the chilly morning. "Ignora
 evil" was carefully painted on the wall of the village school.

I sat on the floor of the family's small living room as villagers crowded in, competing to tell the story of Nazir Ahmed Khan.

"Nazir was in the tenth class," a young neighbor told me, and also wanted to be a doctor. "His hobbies were gardening, photography, and cricket."

Nazir's elder brother, Mohadin, drove a taxi to support the family. There was a skirmish in a nearby village, and the Army appeared at the door, convinced that Mohadin had driven a wounded terrorist to the hospital. Mohadin was not at home, but Nazir and his father were. They were interrogated, but the soldiers were not satisfied, and the father and son were both beaten, and then their limbs were held over a fire. Afterward, Nazir ran away. "He could not bear being tortured for no reason," the neighbor said. He had gone to join the militants.

Mohadin was summoned to the Army barracks, and he, too, was tortured and then imprisoned. The family sold the taxi to bribe the Army for his release; it was their only asset. And then Nazir was killed.

I went to see where he had died. We drove back to the main road, past a sign that read, "Our job is to make everybody see the beauty of Kashmir," then turned down a muddy track to the village. We inched along the narrow streets until a villager pointed to the house: the roof at one end had collapsed, and its supporting wall was a pile of rubble. I scrambled up the slippery lane and pushed open the ramshackle corrugated-iron gate. A small crowd followed me in.

The boy had joined two other militants, and the three of them, the villagers told me, were hiding in this house. An informer told the Army. The cordon search lasted for three days and three nights, and the entire village was made to squat in the cold on the recreation ground. Fire baskets and the old men's woollen hats were confiscated. Ten thousand soldiers came, I was told. I said that ten thousand soldiers is a very large number. The villagers insisted.

Cornered, the militants gave
f them fired on the soldiers from an upper room—and the Army ordered seven villagers to walk up to the house and put two explosive devices inside. Everyone knew that the villagers wouldn't be harmed. It was, they said, a frequently used tactic. "The militants don't fire on civilians," a villager explained. "If you refuse to do it, the Army shoots you." The villagers got out before the devices were detonated. Nazir was eighteen, and had been a militant for a week.



Later this year, there will be elections in Kashmir—the opportunity, in principle, for the people to express their political will. But, after years of vote rigging and intermittent direct rule, Kashmiris have lost their faith in India's secular democracy. For the politicians in the loose coalition of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, there is no point in even standing. To do so would require their swearing an oath of allegiance to the Indian state, which they do not wish to honor. And, at the very least, they want an autonomy that they believe India's current government—dominated by the Bharatiya Janata Party, an organization with an aggressively pro-Hindu ideology—will never grant. On February 12th, the Hurriyat announced that it would boycott the Indian elections and hold an election of its own—to choose representatives who will sit at a negotiating table with India and Pakistan. But India is not going to give up Kashmir, and the negotiations have no hope of succeeding.

President Musharraf, too, has called for negotiations, and on February 6th the U.N. Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, offered to mediate. For Musharraf, negotiations could be the key to his survival. He has declared his wish to make Pakistan a more secular state, attempting to dismantle the networks of Islamic extremists who, for the past twenty years, have systematically infiltrated Pakistan's government, Army, and, especially, its intelligence services, the I.S.I. These people are viscerally opposed to Musharraf's ambition. If he is to succeed—if, at the very least, he is to put a
t for cross-border Islamic terror—he needs to show that the cause of the indigenous Kashmiri struggle has not been abandoned. India, meanwhile, has not taken up the offers for negotiations.

In Kashmir, an end to the struggle seems ever more remote. Nazir, like Aafaq, had joined the ranks of the martyrs in a war that has lost its way, a war that now feeds on itself—each act of violence generating a new response that generates more recruits. For some of the valley's young men, it can seem as though there were little else to do—the war is their occupation. The Kashmiriyat is now a forlorn memory, and has been replaced by the cult of the gun. The people of the valley believe they are trapped in a war without end, in which anyone can become a victim. Tens of thousands have died. Scarcely a family in the valley is untouched.