The Story of Kaneeza, The Eight-Year-old Who Never Woke Up

SRINAGAR: Her mother woke up to the sound of gunshots in the neighbourhood. But eight-year-old Kaneeza was fast sleep. Makhini Begum didn't try. It was always quite a task to wake her up, and it seemed safe to stay still. And then, another bullet pierced through the wooden house, and hit her little girl in her chest. She died, in her sleep. Outside the gun-fire continued, inside the cries. Their mother told Kaneeza's brothers, who were also sleeping in the room, to hide themselves. They tried.

The gunfight ended eight hours later.

A combined team of the Rashtriya Rifles, CRPF and police commandos had located three terrorists in a house on the foothills of Kunnard forests in Kupwara district, about 100 kilometres north of Jammu and Kashmir capital Srinagar. The terrorists clearly weren't going to surrender. And the security forces were not going to let them get away; they didn't. The three terrorists were eventually killed.

About 100 metres away, on the first floor of the two-storied dilapidated wooden house that Kaneeza called her home, lay her tiny body. And the family that paid the price.

"My sister was sleeping here... The firing started, a bullet hit her... she died," her elder brother Zafar, 10, said in short, scared breaths as he spoke about the nightmare that had unfolded before his eyes.

"We hid ourselves but another bullet hit my brother who was injured" he told NDTV. The bullet had hit seven-year-old Faisal, who was later taken to a Srinagar hospital for treatment. Their home was no shield for the bullets, only nature.

Added Aslam Chechi, the eldest of the four brothers who made it: "Firing was going on and we could not come out. We were hungry without food, my brother (Faisal) was in a shock and sister was already hit by bullets" he said.

Shamsher Hussain, Kupwara district's senior superintendent of police, said the police had taken the standard precautions. Houses in the vicinity of the encounter site were evacuated before the first shot was fired.

But Kaneeza's house seemed so far away, and safe. A hundred metres is the distance between goalposts of a football field.

"Unfortunately, the girl was killed after a stray bullet hit her. The house was far away," Mr Hussain said.

Kaneeza isn't the first child in the line of fire in Kashmir. Over the last one week, a 15-year old boy Amir Nazir was killed near an encounter site in Pulwama district. On March 5, four more were injured after an explosive device went off near a security camp in Sopore.