On February 5th, Waseem Ahmad, a truck driver by profession, was murdered by the Indian military in Baramulla district for failing to stop at a checkpoint due to a brake failure. Waseem was the sole breadwinner of his family, a hardworking man from a lower-middle-class background who toiled through the night, transporting Kashmir’s famous apples to cities across India. According to his neighbors, he was a deeply pious man, devoted to his work and family, with a simple dream of building a concrete house and serve his parents. But dreams do not flourish under occupation. Here, in a land suffocated by over a million foreign military and paramilitary forces, death arrives swiftly, unannounced, and always unjust.

The Indian military, in its predictable charade, claimed that “shots were fired aiming at the tyres to deflate” the truck. But everyone knows that the bullets of an occupying soldier, no matter which direction they are fired in, always find a Kashmiri body. Who will hold them accountable? Who will ask how bullets supposedly aimed at tyres tore through Waseem’s flesh? Who will demand to know why they resorted to gunfire when they could have easily stopped and questioned him? Or, perhaps the most important question of all—why the hell are they here in the first place?

But this is Kashmir. Here, lives do not matter, and neither do questions. Even after executing Waseem, they barred journalists from visiting his home, forced his grieving family to wait for hours before they could receive his lifeless body, and used force to prevent people from attending his funeral prayers.

On the same day, 25-year-old Makhan Din took his own life after enduring horrific torture in police custody. In a video recorded before his death, he placed the Holy Quran on his head and swore that he had been brutally tortured for no reason. But who was there to believe him? His only escape from the cycle of torment was to consume poison and end his own suffering. I do not know how the world sees this, but I will call it what it is—cold-blooded murder and an act of the most barbaric cruelty. And, as expected, nobody has been held accountable. The SHO responsible for his torture still walks free and is protected by the machinery of occupation that thrives on Kashmiri suffering.

This is the reality of our existence—where murder wears a uniform and injustice is law. Where even in death, our bodies are not left in peace. Where the occupier not only kills us but decides how we grieve, how we mourn, and how we bury our dead. But let them know that we may be surrounded by their guns, but we are not defeated. The blood they spill does not drown us—it waters the roots of our resistance. The voices they silence do not vanish. They echo louder in the valleys and the mountains. And one day, when the final page of this occupation is turned, it will not be written in ink, but in the unyielding spirit of those who refused to bow. May Allah elevate the ranks of these martyrs and those who gave their lives before. Aameen