The Amarnath Yatra sits at the intersection of faith and economics in a way that has made it a target for multiple armed groups. The state government imposes a tax on pilgrims, generating revenue, and local Shia Muslim Bakarwal-Gujjar communities earn their livelihood by providing services to the trekkers -- offering pack animals, supplies, and lodging along the route. Islamist Sunni militant groups in Kashmir sought to sever both of these lifelines. In banning and attacking the yatra, they struck not only at Hindu pilgrims but at the Muslim communities whose income depended on them. The violence was aimed at erasing a centuries-old pattern of coexistence between faiths woven into the fabric of the pilgrimage route.

On 2 August 2000, militants opened fire at the Nunwan base camp in Anantnag district in an indiscriminate two-hour assault that killed at least 32 people and wounded 60 more. Twenty-one of the dead were unarmed Hindu pilgrims. Seven were unarmed Muslim shopkeepers. Three were security force officers. The following July, a grenade was thrown into a pilgrim night camp at Sheshnag near the shrine, killing 13 people -- among them two women, two security officials, and three Muslim civilians. Then came 2002. On 30 July, terrorists hurled grenades at a civilian taxi carrying pilgrims in Srinagar, killing two and injuring three. A week later, on 6 August, Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen opened fire at the Nunwan base camp at Pahalgam, killing nine people and wounding 27. Across three years, at least 54 people had been murdered along the pilgrimage route.

What the casualty lists reveal is that the attacks were indiscriminate in their cruelty even when their ideology claimed precision. Muslim shopkeepers at Nunwan died alongside Hindu pilgrims in 2000. Muslim civilians were among the dead at Sheshnag in 2001. The militants framed their attacks as jihad against Hindu religious practice, but the bullets did not discriminate between the pilgrims and the local Muslim families who served them. The Bakarwal-Gujjars who lost their livelihoods to the violence were collateral damage in a campaign that claimed to act on behalf of Kashmir's Muslim population -- a population that had not asked to be represented by massacres.

The repeated attacks on the Amarnath Yatra, combined with the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, contributed to a shift in the international response to terrorism. The organizations behind the Kashmir attacks -- Lashkar-e-Taiba, founded by Hafiz Saeed, and Hizbul Mujahideen -- were designated as terrorist organizations by India, the European Union, and the United States. What had been a largely regional crisis became part of a broader global reckoning with state-sponsored militancy. The pilgrimages continued in subsequent years under increasingly heavy security, but the violence did not end: further attacks struck the yatra in 2017, and the route has remained a flashpoint in the decades-long Kashmir insurgency.