‘I just want to find them’: deadly cloudbursts devastate Kashmir’s mountain communities
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- A cloudburst on 19 July hit Murrah village in Poonch district, sweeping away Haji Mohammad Latief's family home and trapping eight relatives inside; his 16-year-old son Sajjad Ahmed's body was still missing four days later as soldiers and volunteers searched the Suran River by hand.
- At least 28 people were killed across Jammu and Kashmir this month as cloudbursts, flash floods and landslides swept the Pir Panjal mountains, with destruction stretching from Rajouri, where the Manawar Tawi River burst its banks and washed away a bus station, to Gurez Valley near the Line of Control.
- Icimod said the western Himalayas are experiencing frequent bursts of intense rainfall capable of triggering floods and landslides, warning that accelerating glacier melt will increase short-term flood risks before reducing long-term water availability for downstream communities.
- Dr Suheel Rasool Mir, a Kashmir-based sociologist, said Gujjar, Bakarwal and Dard-Shin pastoral communities are losing not only homes and livestock but 'ecological knowledge and ancestral livelihoods that have sustained them for generations' as climate extremes intensify.
- Achoora village in Gurez Valley was hit by a cloudburst on 20 July that damaged crops of 11 families and blocked the valley's only road; resident Aamir Asghar Khan, 26, told the Guardian that 'nothing seems predictable any more' as seasonal rainfall grows erratic.
- Heavy rainfall also triggered devastating floods and landslides in Ladakh and across the border in Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan, reinforcing Icimod's concerns that increasingly erratic weather is affecting communities across the entire western Himalayas.
Why it matters: The 28 confirmed deaths and hundreds of displaced families in the Pir Panjal mountains demonstrate how climate-intensified cloudbursts are systematically dismantling remote Himalayan communities' physical and cultural foundations. ICIMOD and local sociologists both flag that pastoralist groups like the Gujjars are losing ancestral livelihoods and ecological knowledge — generational losses that emergency aid cannot replace.
