This reporting was supported by the Dart Center for Trauma and Journalism’s Global Early Childhood Reporting Fellowship.
Late one night in 2020, a mortar shell struck a house in Balkote village, in the Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir. A seven-year-old girl living in the house suffered her first anxiety attack that night. When I met her family this year, the girl’s father, Mehraj Ahmad, told me that as they prepared to move to a nearby bunker, the child began howling and pleading for her life. “Since that night, she often wakes up in the middle of the night, shouting the same desperate plea – ‘Please save me, I don’t want to die.’”
Balkote, in the Uri sector of Baramulla district, lies less than two kilometres from the Line of Control, or LoC – the military frontier between India and Pakistan. In 2016, militants attacked a military base in Uri, killing 17 Indian soldiers. This led to a retaliatory attack on Pakistan’s territory by Indian forces, and an escalation of hostilities between the two countries.
Nearly three years had passed but the mortar strike on her house was still fresh in the girl’s mind when I met her in September. She suffered frequent panic attacks. “She won’t even play outside or in the lane during broad daylight,” Ahmad said. “She needs someone from the family to be constantly by her side. She can’t even interact with the other children in the neighbourhood.”