Operation Sindoor shelling in Uri left children like 5-year-old Amaira traumatized, homes and shops damaged, one civilian dead, and led to calls for safer civilian bunkers.
In her small home in Bandi village of Uri, located on the foothills of a hill that still echo with distant memories of gunfire, 5-year-old Amaira keeps a tiny box. Inside it are not dolls or crayons but jagged pieces of metal: Shrapnel from artillery shells fired last year during Operation Sindoor from behind the mountains of her house. Fragments of a clash she doesn’t fully understand yet has already lived through.
One piece, the one she holds most often, is dark and twisted, its edges sharp enough to cut. It landed near her home during the days of Operation Sindoor, when the skies roared and the ground trembled. Her mother remembers the night: the panic, the rush to safety, the deafening blasts as shells fell indiscriminately, many striking civilian areas. But Amaira remembers the sound as “scary thunder.”
“The shells were falling,” she recalls on being questioned about that night while she holds the heavy box with both hands.
“My mother, father and I had collected them and now I keep them with me,” the 5-year-old says.
When asked what she remembers by these shrapnels, she replies “I was crying that night when shells were falling, I still recall. I can’t catch sleep.”
In the village, other children have similar collections, unspoken reminders scattered across courtyards and fields. What should have been playgrounds became impact sites.
Amaira’s world has quietly shifted. She still smiles, still plays, but the impact of knowing bombs and shells has a visible impact on her young mind. The shrapnel in her hand is cold, lifeless metal. But the mark it has left is not. It lives in the questions she asks, in the fears she cannot yet name, and in the childhood that now carries the weight of something far too heavy.
For Amaira and many like her in Uri, the shelling did not end when it stopped. It lingers, in fragments and in memories.
A Persian cat at her house pauses at the boundary, sniffing a small crater as she steps back in. The home still carries last year’s scars. Its walls are pocked with a dozen marks, some shallow, others deep. The rooftop that shelters them is riddled with tiny holes, courtesy splinters and shrapnels, thought them light slips in, casting an almost artistic pattern inside. Each opening, however, is a reminder of the day. The family is yet to recover from what transpired.
“Around 11 that night lot of shells exploded. We felt death was near,” says her cousin. Her elder sister says they were given Rs 1.3 lakh by the government, but the relief feels insufficient.
“All the glasses were also broken. Our roof was also shattered and now we have repaired it partially,” she says, pointing at the polythene-covered windows.
A few kilometres away, near a temple, a once-standing wooden grocery shop lies reduced to memory, its presence marked only by a few charred blocks of wood left behind.
Next to it, the wall of a vegetable seller silently narrates its own story of destruction. The iron shutter is punctured with shrapnel, each hole a stark imprint of that night.
In Uri, Nargis Bano was the only civilian to lose her life in shelling from Pakistan. She was fleeing in a Scorpio when a shell exploded nearby. A single piece of shrapnel struck the vehicle, piercing her near the throat, while the others inside escaped unhurt. Though there were additional injuries in the Uri, most of those affected have since recovered.
At Sub-District Hospital Uri, an underground bunker has been constructed on the lawn in the aftermath of Operation Sindoor, reflecting a long-felt need.
During the shelling, several rounds landed in the vicinity, triggering panic among patients and medical staff. With no bunker at the time, many were forced to take cover under beds and tables.
