NEW DELHI: India has pulled out 30,000 troops from Kashmir following a fall in militant attacks in the Himalayan region bordering Pakistan, the Indian army announced Friday.
An army spokesman said the ground forces were withdrawn from Kashmir’s southern Rajouri and Poonch sectors two months ago.
The pullout was one of the biggest since 1999, when India and Pakistan fought a six-week undeclared war in the Himalayan peaks in which some 1,000 soldiers on both sides died.
The Indian troops’ presence in the revolt-hit Kashmir region has been a major irritant for many among its Muslim-majority population.
The soldiers who were withdrawn had been responsible for internal security in the scenic region where militants have been waging a battle against New Delhi’s rule for two decades, the army spokesman said.
‘We have moved out two divisions of infantry formations who were on internal security duties in Rajouri and Poonch and approximately the number of soldiers pulled out is 30,000 men,’ spokesman Colonel Om Singh said in New Delhi.
The spokesman said the number of soldiers deployed along the Line of Control — the de facto border that divides the territory into India- and Pakistan-administered Kashmir— had not been reduced.
‘They cannot be moved from there because that is a permanent deployment,’ he said, declining to disclose the number of troops holding ground along the 746-kilometre control line.
Experts and independent sources estimate the number of Indian troops along the Line of Control at around 120,000. The total number of Indian forces in Kashmir is unknown but it is believed to number in the hundreds of thousands.
The government has been promising since June to reduce the military presence as part of a bid to reduce tensions in the region, where fighting has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
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