At least 25 people, including two policemen, were injured as stone pelting mobs defied curfew and fought street battles with security forces in Srinagar and all across the Kashmir Valley on Sunday.
Almost all the injuries were reported from Beerwah town in central Badgam district, 45 km from Srinagar.
Small groups of young men came on to the streets in the Old City’s Khanyar and Nowhatta areas defying the curfew restrictions.
“The mobs are engaging the CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) and the police. We have used tear smoke and batons. The situation is under control but the army is on standby in case we need their help,” a senior police officer told IANS in Srinagar.
Mobs also gathered in uptown areas like Hyderpora, Rawalpora and Chanapora in Srinagar.
Similar reports of mass defiance of curfew came from north Kashmir’s Handwara town where protesters fought with the police and the paramilitary forces.
The authorities imposed a valley-wide curfew Sunday morning in a desperate bid to preempt Monday’s separatist march to the city centre Lal Chowk. The march has been called by the co-ordination committee of all the separatist groups in Jammu and Kashmir.
The separatists carried out a massive show of strength at the Eidgah grounds here Friday, attracting tens of thousands in what turned out to be one of the biggest gatherings in Jammu and Kashmir’s history.
Sunday’s march and sit-in at Lal Chowk has been called to internationalize the dragging Kashmir dispute.
The authorities here had been allowing the separatist marches since Aug 11 when the ‘Muzaffarabad Chalao’ march ended on a bloody note, leaving senior separatist leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz and five other protesters dead in firing in north Kashmir’s Baramulla district.
An official statement in Srinagar on Sunday said that the curfew had been imposed throughout the valley “as a precautionary measure following intelligence inputs that some vested interests would target senior separatist leaders, Syed Ali Geelani, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq and Muhammad Yasin Malik” during Monday’s Lal Chowk march.
Meanwhile, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, chairman of the moderate Hurriyat group, Sunday reiterated that the march to Lal Chowk would take place despite the curfew.
Mirwaiz Umer also trashed the official statement that the curfew had been imposed to save the lives of separatist leaders.
“We have no such threat,” he said, asserting that the authorities had been unnerved by the massive public response to the calls given by the separatist Kashmiri leadership.
The present turmoil in the valley initially started against the allotment of 40 hectares of forest land to a Hindu board that manages the affairs of the annual pilgrimage to the Amarnath cave shrine in south Kashmir’s Anantnag district.
The land allotment order was later revoked by the authorities, triggering counter protests in the state’s Hindu dominated Jammu region.
The unrest in the valley has since turned into a full scale separatist campaign, resurrecting the demands of Kashmir’s secession from India.
Peace and Justice Post 
Pouring Gas on the Afghanistan Bonfire
August 26, 2008Chris Hedges | Truthdig, August 25, 2008
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind forward with their terrible human toll, even as the press and many Americans play who gets thrown off the island with Barack Obama. Coalition forces carried out an airstrike that killed up to 95 Afghan civilians in western Afghanistan on Friday, 50 of them children, President Hamid Karzai said. And the mounting bombing raids and widespread detentions of Afghans are rapidly turning Afghanistan into the mirror image of Iraq. But these very real events, which will have devastating consequences over the next few months and years, are largely ignored by us. We prefer to waste our time on the trivia and gossip that swallow up air time and do nothing to advance our understanding of either the campaign or the wars fought in our name.
As the conflict in Afghanistan has intensified, so has the indiscriminate use of airstrikes, including Friday’s, which took place in the Azizabad area of Shindand district in Herat province. The airstrike was carried out after Afghan and coalition soldiers were ambushed by insurgents while on a patrol targeting a known Taliban commander in Herat, the U.S. military said. Hundreds of Afghans, shouting anti-U.S. slogans, staged angry street protests on Saturday in Azizabad to protest the killings, and President Hamid Karzai condemned the airstrike.
The United Nations estimates that 255 of the almost 700 civilian deaths in fighting in Afghanistan this year have been caused by Afghan and international troops. The number of civilians killed in fighting between insurgents and security forces in Afghanistan has soared by two-thirds in the first half of this year.
Ghulam Azrat, the director of the middle school in Azizabad, said he collected 60 bodies after the bombing.
“We put the bodies in the main mosque,” he told the Associated Press by phone, sometimes pausing to collect himself as he wept. “Most of these dead bodies were children and women. It took all morning to collect them.”
Azrat said villagers on Saturday threw stones at Afghan soldiers who arrived and tried to give out food and clothes. He said the soldiers fired into the crowd and wounded eight people, including one child.
“The people were very angry,” he said. “They told the soldiers, ‘We don’t need your food, we don’t need your clothes. We want our children. We want our relatives. Can you give [them] to us? You cannot, so go away.’ ”
We are in trouble in Afghanistan. Sending more soldiers and Marines to fight the Taliban is only dumping gasoline on the bonfire. The Taliban assaults, funded largely by the expanded opium trade, are increasingly sophisticated and well coordinated. And the Taliban is exacting a rising toll on coalition troops. Soldiers and Marines are now dying at a faster rate in Afghanistan than Iraq. In an Aug. 18 attack, only 30 miles from the capital, Kabul, the French army lost 10 and had 21 wounded. The next day, hundreds of militants, aided by six suicide bombers, attacked one of the largest U.S. bases in the country. A week before that, insurgents killed three foreign aid workers and their Afghan driver, prompting international aid missions to talk about withdrawing from a country where they already have very limited access.
Continued . . .
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Tags:Afghan war, Afghanistan, Barack Obama, coalition forces, killing Afghan civilians, protests, Taliban, UN estimates
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