Azhar Qadri & Majid Jahangir in Srinagar

When the first shot rang in Sirnoo village, Pulwama, was quiet on a mid-December’s cold wintry morning. The security forces had swooped on the village and cordoned off an orchard where three militants, including a former soldier who had deserted his unit last year, were hiding in an underground bunker.

After a brief but fierce gunfight, the three militants and a soldier were killed and the security forces entered a concluding phase. “It was an open orchard and any operation takes time to conclude. We had placed improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which had to be removed,” a police official said.

At 9 am, 70 minutes after the first bullets were fired, people from across Pulwama, a district in the volatile south Kashmir region, swarmed the site. The shaky videos, recorded by civilians on their mobile phones and later shared on social media, captured the scenes: a pale orchard, a narrow road, armoured vehicles, staccato gunfire and young men in long winter cloaks battling heavily armed security forces with stones and sticks. In one of the videos, a boy runs close to an armoured jeep and falls back. The video is then slow-motioned while a burst of blood gushes out from his chest where he is apparently shot.

Of the seven civilians who died at Sirnoo last week, some had walked from nearby villages and some had travelled long distances. Suhail Ahmad had travelled 5 km from Bellow village; Liyaqat Dar 10 km from Parigam village. Abid Hussain Lone, 26, lived just 500 metres away in Karimabad.

The killings marked one of the bloodiest days in Kashmir with the civilian fatalities near the sites of gunfights rising to 42 this year. Ever since the first fatal clash in Pulwama’s Lelhar village left a teenaged boy and a young woman dead three years ago, the toll has risen to 168 as undeterred civilians have rushed to save militants. “When people come to sites of gunbattles and pelt stones, it becomes inevitable...” says a police official in south Kashmir.

At Sirnoo, one police official described the number of civilians rushing to the site of gunbattle and throwing stones at security forces to be “huge”, “running into thousands”.

In a Srinagar hospital, where several injured civilians were brought for treatment, one protester described the scene. “The boys (a reference to the protesters) came very close and were just a few feet from the soldiers and the policemen,” says the young man attending to an injured boy.

In its official statement on the Sinroo gunfight, the police described the killings of seven civilians in two terse paragraphs without going into the details. “...a crowd that came dangerously close from different parts to the encounter site got injured... The injured were taken to a hospital where, unfortunately, seven persons succumbed to their injuries,” it reads.

Civilians rushing to cordoned-off sites of gunfights and throwing stones at the security forces in a desperate and often fatal attempt to save militants is a new phenomenon in an ageing insurgency that will complete three decades next year. In 2016, 48 civilians were killed during protests near the sites of gunfights in the Kashmir valley; the number spiked to 78 last year.

The first sign of this phenomenon emerged in July 2014 when, in an isolated incident in Pulwama’s Tral sub-district, protesters stopped two vehicles of police’s Special Operations Group at Aripal village. One of them was carrying the body of Madni, a foreign militant. The protesters snatched the body and torched police vehicles. It was taken to Handora village for burial but residents of Pastuna village clashed and demanded that his body be handed over to them as the militant had died in the gunfight in that village. That was the first public display of fanatic and violent affection for the militants and their cause. The sentiment across south Kashmir had overwhelmingly turned in favour of militants by February 2016 and a new generation of youth was willing to take the deathly plunge.

In addition to civilians killed near the sites of gunfights, nearly three dozen civilians were killed by militants this year on suspicion of being informers. The most gruesome of these killings took place in November when a young man from Shopian was slaughtered and his execution recorded on camera and later released on social media. “The civilian killings by militants this year is more in comparison to last year,” says a police officer.

A few separatist activists, including a close associate of Syed Ali Geelani, were also shot dead, with the police claiming militants were involved while the separatists blamed the security agencies for targeting them.