More Kashmiri youth are embracing militancy and outlawed groups drew 29 recruits this year; last year, the figure was 147.

Mohammad Ashraf Malik (45) vividly remembers the night of March 29 when his 20-year-old son came home bleeding in the abdomen.

Asif, a Hizbul Mujahideen militant, was trying to escape a police cordon when his car was sprayed with bullets. His two associates were killed, but Asif managed to limp his way home in Shopian of south Kashmir.

Aware that security forces were looking for his son, Mr. Malik decided to take a chance and rush him to hospital in Srinagar, an hour’s drive from the village. Asif survived. The State police helped keep him alive. They moved him from the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences to the police hospital in the fortified complex of the police control room. The police spent an estimated ₹1 lakh a day for the treatment. He was discharged on Sunday and sent to police custody for trial.

The police say that in the past year-and-a-half, most militants were killed in and around their villages. Thirty-nine militants were from Shopian. This year, 29 men joined the outlawed groups. Last year, 147 joined militant ranks. There has been a surge in the number of local Kashmiri youths joining terror groups after Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani was killed in an encounter with security forces on July 8, 2016. In the past one week, an Army jawan, an M.Phil. student and an engineering graduate have joined Hizbul Mujahideen.

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The spike came after 13 militants were killed as security forces launched “coordinated,” multiple operations in Shopian and Anantnag in south Kashmir on April 1. Three Army men lost their lives in the operations. All militants who were killed in multiple operations in Jammu and Kashmir that Sunday joined the terrorist outfits post-2016. A senior police officer said educated youths formed 10% of the militant recruitments.

Abdi Nazir, an engineering graduate who had cleared a written test to join the armed forces, joined Hizbul on April 20.

A senior police official said that one of the militants, Yawar Itoo, killed in an encounter on April 2 at Dragad in Shopian was a childhood friend of Nazir and this could have influenced him. Meer Idrees Sultan (23), soldier at the Jammu and Kashmir Light Infantry (JAKLI), joined the Hizbul on April 15 after one of his neighbours, Yawar Majeed, was killed in the April 1 encounter.

Multiple causes

S.P. Pani, Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Kashmir Zone, said: “We are trying to contain militant recruitments. At times, because of peer pressure and local environment, people tend to join the militant groups. You see a spike then,” he said.

He said the police were working on strong counter-terrorism measures and there were multiple dimensions to it.

“There is a shift in the earlier pattern. We have been able to get some boys back. Since November 2017, we were able to get a dozen boys back to the mainstream. We dissuaded many from joining the militant groups by involving the parents among other things,” he said.

Mr. Malik said Asif, the eldest of his three children, was pursuing a BCA course in the Government Degree College in Pulwama, when he went missing on October 19 last year.

“He said he was going to the neighbourhood mosque to pray. When it turned dark, we started calling him. The phone was switched off. The next day, his photographs were all over social media announcing that he had joined the militants,” Mr. Malik said.

He insisted that Asif never showed any militant inclination.

A police officer said one of the reasons for the militant recruitments going up was the increase in the number of operations.