Thursday’s attack is the latest in a series of incidents in which armed militants have killed Indian soldiers.

Four Indian soldiers were killed and three others injured after suspected rebels ambushed Indian military vehicles in the southernmost border district of Rajouri in Indian-administered Kashmir, officials said on Friday.

An Indian Army official told Al Jazeera that the attack took place on Thursday afternoon when two army vehicles – a mini-truck and a gypsy – with nine soldiers on board drove to a location where a search operation was underway to locate the suspects Rebels found in Rajouri.

In a statement on Thursday evening, the Indian Army said its “troops retaliated immediately.”

Following the attack, the Indian Army launched a major operation in the area to nab the attackers, who were believed to be hiding in the dense forest area. Surrounding areas were also cordoned off. However, so far the army has not reported any casualties among the armed rebels.

Rajouri and Poonch districts are the hilly areas near the Line of Control (LoC), a demarcation line between the Indian- and Pakistan-administered parts of Kashmir.

The armed insurgency in Kashmir, claimed entirely by both India and Pakistan but partly ruled by the two neighbors, has been ongoing against Indian rule since the 1990s. India accuses Pakistan of financing and arming the insurgency.

New Delhi has struggled for decades to completely suppress anti-India sentiments in Kashmir.

In August 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government stripped the region of its rights semi-autonomous statusguaranteed by the Indian Constitution when the former King of Kashmir joined the Indian Union in 1948. Earlier this week, India’s Supreme Court ruled confirmed the Modi government’s decision. India has also divided the formerly full state into two federally governed territories: Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.

While the Kashmir region has been a hotbed of dissent for decades, districts such as Rajouri and Poonch in the Jammu region have seen a rise in rebel attacks on Indian soldiers since 2021, and 2023 has been particularly deadly for Indian soldiers.

In total, 34 Indian soldiers have been killed in Kashmir since 2021, 19 since April.

A little-known rebel group, the Peoples Anti-Fascist Front, which officials say is the proxy of the Pakistan-based armed group Jaish-e-Muhammad, has claimed responsibility for the attacks, including the most recent one.

Observers said the renewed attacks posed a new challenge to the government in New Delhi, which claimed its controversial policies had improved the security landscape in the region.

In November, five soldiers, including two army captains, were killed in an operation in the same district in Kalakote, Rajouri. In September, four army personnel were killed in a shootout in Kokernag forests near Anantnag district. Ten soldiers were killed in the two districts in April and May this year.

“Safe haven”

A senior security official in the southern city of Jammu, who was not authorized to speak to the media, told Al Jazeera that the difficult terrain in south Kashmir was a safe haven for armed militants to launch such attacks.

“Forests give enemies anonymity, space to operate and hide to outwit security nets,” he said.

Ajai Sahni, executive director of the Delhi Institute for Conflict Management, told Al Jazeera that most of the recent killings of army soldiers have occurred in army-initiated operations. “This appears to be the pattern followed by most recent incidents in which security forces lost their lives,” Sahni said.

Asked about the government’s claims about normalcy in Kashmir amid the increase in attacks on the soldiers, Sahni said, “I don’t think normalcy has returned after the abrogation of Article 370,” referring to the constitutional provision, which gave greater advantages to Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomy than other states.

“What is normality? The [Kashmir] is a theater where up to 4,000 people died in a single year in 2001,” said Sahni. “So it is unrealistic to expect that there will be no incidents. The government has made extremely unrealistic forecasts and claims about the situation in Jammu and Kashmir. “