SRINAGAR, INDIA (AFP) – Standing on a fortified Kashmir street, an Indian tourist poses triumphantly for her husband’s camera, clutching the national flag in each hand and flanked by two soldiers carrying rifles.

India’s hottest new travel destination is also the site of its deadliest insurgency, where regular skirmishes break out between separatist militants and Indian troops, half a million of whom are stationed in Kashmir.

A big-budget tourism campaign, inaugurated early last year, is luring Indians to Kashmir with the promise of stunning Himalayan scenery, snow-covered hill stations and the remote Hindu shrines dotting the Muslim-majority region.

More than 1.6 million Indian travellers visited the disputed territory in the first six months of this year – a new record, according to local officials, and four times the number that visited over the same period in 2019.

Many fraternise and take selfies with soldiers, and are dismissive of the regular firefights between troops and rebels taking place out of sight from popular destinations.

“Now everything is fine in Kashmir,” Dilip Bhai, a visitor from India’s Gujarat state, told AFP while waiting in queue outside a restaurant guarded by paramilitary forces.

“The news of violence we hear in media is more rumour than reality,” he said, adding that whatever armed clashes were happening “on the side” did not worry him.

Security forces have tightened a chokehold on Kashmir – also claimed and partly controlled by Pakistan – since 2019, when India’s government revoked the limited autonomy constitutionally guaranteed to the region.

That year, thousands of people were taken into preventative detention to forestall expected protests against the sudden decision, while authorities severed communications links in what became the world’s longest-ever internet shutdown.

Public protests have since been made virtually impossible, local journalists are regularly harassed by police and the region is shut off to foreign reporters.

But clashes still break out in the territory almost every week, with officials counting 130 suspected rebels and 19 members of the security forces killed over the first six months of the year.

The constitutional change opened up land purchases and local jobs to Indians from outside Kashmir, and for residents, this year’s influx of travellers is the final insult.

“Promotion of tourism is good, but it is done with a kind of nationalist triumphalism,” a leading Kashmiri trader told AFP, asking not to be named for fear of government reprisal.

“It’s like war by other means,” they added. “The way tourism is being promoted by the government is telling Indians: go spend time there and make Kashmir yours.”

A 1989 rebellion against Indian rule in Kashmir started a long-running insurgency that killed thousands of people and sparked a panicked migration of Hindu residents from the Muslim-majority valley.

Periodic attempts to revive the tourism market faltered, with three popular uprisings between 2008 and 2016 leaving more than 300 civilians dead and scaring off potential visitors.

But after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government revoked Kashmir’s limited autonomy three years ago, authorities again began promoting the region to Indians as one of the country’s premier getaway destinations.

A promotional blitz followed, with festivals, travel marts, roadshows and summits featuring Indian travel operators, sponsored by the local government and 21 major cities across India.

The government announced the opening of a ski resort among 75 new “untapped destinations” for tourists, including some close to the heavily militarised de facto border that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan.

Authorities are also courting investors to build 20,000 hotel rooms in addition to the 50,000 already in the territory, and they eased a homestay policy to encourage residents to host visitors.

Sarmad Hafeez, the local government’s tourism secretary, told AFP that the official budget to promote tourism had “quadrupled” in the past two years.

“We changed past perceptions about Kashmir,” he said. “Events sent out a clear message that Kashmir is safe to travel to.”

India’s drive to open Kashmir’s remarkable landscape to tourism comes as the rest of its established economy languishes after the change in the territory’s status.

Drastic curbs on civic life and an intensified counterinsurgency campaign have stifled local business.

The government has also removed tax barriers that had helped protect local production from outside competition.

“This was the last nail in the coffin of our manufacturing industry,” Shahid Kamili, president of the Federation Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Kashmir (FCIK), told AFP.

Industrial production accounts for 15 percent of the local economy, according to FCIK data – three times the most optimistic figures for the tourism sector.

But 350,000 industrial workers lost their jobs since the region’s autonomy was rescinded, Kamili said.

The region’s potential for growth as a travel destination remains hampered by its violent history and prevailing unhappiness with Indian rule, leaving some visitors unnerved by the heavy security presence.

THE WASHINGTON POST – Danylo Ischenko dreams of walking beside his fiancée on their wedding day.

Bolivia, an English racehorse, is helping him get there.

Ischenko, 34, lost his leg to shrapnel from Russian shelling in a village near Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine that changed his life in a fiery flash. The shards sliced into his left leg, which he lost 11 days later. The military sent Ischenko to a rehabilitation centre in Lviv, in western Ukraine.

He was referred to a horse farm, where he met Bolivia.

“She’s really calm and sweet,” Ischenko said of the dark, chocolate brown horse with a thick, black mane. “I found my connection with her.”

Ischenko is among Ukraine’s wounded undergoing hippotherapy – physical therapy based in riding horses.

The soldier is part of the country’s growing legion of amputees, both civilians and fighters, recovering from wounds seen and hidden.

On a Sunday in July, Ischenko rode Bolivia around an arena with the assistance of a trainer. The two appeared to move as one, Bolivia responding to his signals.

After five sessions, “my mental state is getting better”, Ischenko said. “I feel how the muscles on my legs and back are getting stronger. I like that feeling. My nervous system is calming down. I no longer have nightmares.”

Ischenko’s path to recovery remains arduous. He hopes to travel to the United States in September for a bionic leg, an electromechanical artificial limb, but he still needs the visa. After that, he said, he’ll be ready to walk into marriage.

Horse therapy brought together husband and wife Vasyl Irkha, 50, and Oleksandra Khandodina, 42, who run the farm in the village of Sukhodil, near Lviv.

Before Russia’s invasion, the duo had a farm in Poltava, central Ukraine, and worked primarily with sufferers of post-traumatic stress, often children.

Now they specialise in treating Ukraine’s growing ranks of soldiers with amputated limbs, through a project called Ride to the Future. There are no official figures for how many soldiers have lost limbs in the war: As a rule, Ukraine’s military does not disclose causality counts.

Amputees require specialised care to prevent infections, blood clots, heart problems and phantom pain, among other complications. Hippotherapy uses physical exercises and yoga techniques to help amputees regain strength, flexibility and balance, Irkha said.

Through testing themselves and connecting with animals, he said, participants work to heal psychological traumas and learn to take pride in their resilience. “We show them the possibility,” he said, “that they may have lost a limb, but life goes on.”

Irkha knows from experience. He fought for three years in eastern Ukraine after Russia’s 2014 invasion. He returned with back pain, heart problems and a post-traumatic stress disorder. He needed an anchor.

An acquaintance asked him to help out with a programme at a nearby horse farm, where he was introduced to hippotherapy – as well as to Khandodina, who also worked there. The now-married couple moved west when this year’s invasion began. They started tailoring treatments to amputees.

Every case is different.

Anatoly, 26, who for privacy reasons gave only his first name, lost his right arm from an injury sustained in close combat in Mariupol in April, he said. He had to walk eight days with a tourniquet around his arm before reaching help. He knew after the first day he had lost his arm.

At the horse farm, he is tending to lingering pain, compounded by phantom pain, perceived discomfort in a limb he no longer has.

He first learnt to hoist himself up by throwing his chest over the horse’s side, before moving on to one-handed yoga moves. The greatest feeling, he said, is “the emotion of victory, over myself, that I did something”.

Serheii, 26, who also gave only his first name, said he didn’t care for horses – and came instead for his wife, seven months pregnant, and two-year-old son, Egor.

The toddler screeched in excitement at the sight of them.

Serheii was injured in March in a village near Izyum, now Russian-occupied.

“The missile burrowed into the dirt, exploded and, with the fragments and the shock wave, the leg flew off immediately,” he said. “I flew up, caught fire, fell down. And my leg fell next to me.”

Serheii recently received a bionic limb.

Egor doesn’t know that anything about his father is different. The child sometimes bumps into or bites the prosthetic limb – as he does everything around him, Serheii said. One day, though, Egor will learn what happened.

In the meantime, the child watched his father used a stool to mount a horse, as Irkha held the slack in the lead rope. The horse began to amble.

Egor ran behind, screeching in desire to remain with his father. So Irkha hoisted him up in front of his father, where he sat happily.

The extra weight made the drill harder. But the soldier appeared calm, as did the horse bearing him and his son.