Kashmir tourism bears the brunt after tourist massacre and India-Pakistan military strikes

SRINAGAR, India (AP) — There are hardly any tourists in the scenic Himalayan region of Kashmir. Most of the hotels and ornate pinewood houseboats are empty. Resorts in the snowclad mountains have fallen silent. Hundreds of cabs are parked and idle.

It’s the fallout of last month’s gun massacre that left 26 people, mostly Hindu tourists, dead in Indian-controlled Kashmir followed by tit-for-tat military strikes by India and Pakistan, bringing the nuclear-armed rivals to the brink of their third war over the region.

“There might be some tourist arrivals, but it counts almost negligible. It is almost a zero footfall right now,” said Yaseen Tuman, who operates multiple houseboats in the region’s main city of Srinagar. “There is a haunting silence now.”

Tens of thousands of panicked tourists left Kashmir within days after the rare killings of tourists on April 22 at a picture-perfect meadow in southern resort town of Pahalgam. Following the attack, authorities temporarily closed dozens of tourist resorts in the region, adding to fear and causing occupancy rates to plummet.

Graphic images, repeatedly circulated through TV channels and social media, deepened panic and anger. India blamed Pakistan for supporting the attackers, a charge Islamabad denied.

Those who had stayed put fled soon after tensions between India and Pakistan spiked. As the two countries fired missiles and drones at each other, the region witnessed mass cancellations of tourist bookings. New Delhi and Islamabad reached a U.S.-mediated ceasefire on May 10 but hardly any new bookings have come in, tour operators said.

Sheikh Bashir Ahmed, vice president of the Kashmir Hotel and Restaurant Association, said at least 12,000 rooms in the region’s hundreds of hotels and guesthouses were previously booked until June. Almost all bookings have been cancelled, and tens of thousands of people associated with hotels are without jobs, he said.

“It’s a huge loss.” Ahmed said.

The decline has had a ripple effect on the local economy. Handicrafts, food stalls and taxi operators have lost most of their business.

Idyllic destinations, like the resort towns of Gulmarg and Pahalgam, once a magnet for travelers, are eerily silent. Lines of colorful hand-carved boats, known as shikaras, lie deserted, mostly anchored still on Srinagar’s normally bustling Dal Lake. Tens of thousands of daily wage workers have hardly any work.

“There used to be long lines of tourists waiting for boat rides. There are none now,” said boatman Fayaz Ahmed.

Taxi driver Mohammed Irfan would take tourists for long drives to hill stations and show them grand Mughal-era gardens. “Even a half day of break was a luxury, and we would pray for it. Now, my taxi lies standstill for almost two weeks,” he said.

In recent years, the tourism sector grew substantially, making up about 7% of the region’s economy, according to official figures. Omar Abdullah, Kashmir’s top elected official, said before the attack on tourists that the government was aiming to increase tourism's share of the economy to at least 15% in the next four to five years.

Indian-controlled Kashmir was a top destination for visitors until the armed rebellion against Indian rule began in 1989. Warfare laid waste to the stunningly beautiful region, which is partly controlled by Pakistan and claimed by both countries in its entirety.

As the conflict ground on, the tourism sector slowly revived but occasional military skirmishes between India and Pakistan kept visitors at bay.

But India vigorously pushed tourism after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government scrapped the disputed region’s semi-autonomy in 2019. Tensions have simmered, but the region has also drawn millions of visitors amid a strange calm enforced by an intensified security crackdown.

According to official data, close to 3 million tourists visited the region in 2024, a rise from 2.71 million visitors in 2023 and 2.67 million in 2022. The massive influx prompted many locals to invest in the sector, setting up family-run guesthouses, luxury hotels, and transport companies in a region with few alternatives.

Tourists remained largely unfazed even as Modi’s administration has governed Kashmir with an iron fist in recent years, claiming militancy in the region was in check and a tourism influx was a sign of normalcy returning.

The massacre shattered those claims. Experts say that the Modi government’s optimism was largely misplaced and that the rising tourism in the region of which it boasted was a fragile barometer of normalcy. Last year, Abdullah, the region’s chief minister, cautioned against such optimism.

Tuman, who is also a sixth-generation tour operator, said he was not too optimistic about an immediate revival as bookings for the summer were almost all canceled.

“If all goes well, it will take at least six months for tourism to revive,” he said.

Ahmed, the hotels association official, said India and Pakistan need to resolve the dispute for the region’s prosperity. “Tourism needs peace. If (Kashmir) problem is not solved … maybe after two months, it will be again same thing.”

A Kashmiri taxi driver walks past hundreds of tourist cabs parked idle in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, India, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)

Rows of empty houseboats in Dal lake, one of the major tourist destination seen from a mountain in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, India, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)

Surekha Dube, left, and Sunita Kamble, tourists from the Indian state of Maharashtra, take a selfie inside a deserted garden in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, India, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)

A Kashmiri flower vendor rows past anchored Shikaras, or traditional wooden boats, on Dal Lake in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, India, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)

Tables and chairs outside a restaurant wearing a deserted look near Dal Lake in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, India, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin)

ŠIAULIAI AIR BASE, Lithuania (AP) — When NATO's call came, the French fighter pilots scrambled with practiced urgency, already suited up to shorten their response times.

They dashed in vans to hangars where their prepped and armed Rafale jets awaited, clambered into the cockpits and fired up the engines, which puffed and screamed.

Within minutes of takeoff from the Šiauliai Air Base in Lithuania, they were over the Baltic Sea, first intercepting a Russian Il-20 reconnaissance aircraft and then tailing supersonic Russian bombers and their fighter escorts that neared the airspace of multiple NATO countries.

In a conflict situation, things could quickly get heated. But for the moment, with Russia and the military alliance at odds over Ukraine but not at war, pilots on both sides just watched and filmed each other — keeping their distance like wary tomcats with claws unsheathed, their missiles visible but not used.

One of the points of the posturing — in aerial ballets that take place away from public gaze hundreds of times a year — is to try to ensure that the frostiness between NATO and the Kremlin over Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine doesn't tilt into open hostility.

Commanders and pilots flying NATO air-policing missions on the eastern flank of the 32-nation military alliance say that their goal is to deter, not provoke. They believe their presence is reassuring for Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — that border Russia and its ally Belarus but don't themselves have airpower to fight off any Russian attack, if it ever came to that.

“It's a game of cat and mouse, or rather cat and cat,” said Lt. Col. Alexandre, commander of a French air force wing of four Rafales that is sharing the Lithuanian base with another fighter detachment from Romania. Citing security concerns, the French military withheld the commander's surname.

“We watch each other, scrutinize each other and try to make sure that it doesn't go any further," he said.

Alliance members take turns policing Baltic skies around the clock, seven days a week. The French inherited the building that now serves as their temporary headquarters from a Spanish detachment. They will hand it over to Italian replacements in August. Successive teams leave plaques and badges on a wall that records their passage.

NATO scrambles jets to identify and possibly take other action when Russian planes fly in Baltic airspace without switched-on transponders and without filing flight plans or communicating by radio with air traffic controllers.

“There are plenty of times in which, on purpose or not, they’re not really respecting the ICAO — the International Civil Aviation Organization — rules, regarding flight plans and behavior," said Col. Mihaita Marin, commanding the Romanian detachment of six F-16s.

“So obviously we are forced to take off and just make sure that they are who they say they are and their intention is peaceful,” he said.

The arrival of spring, bringing better flying conditions, means French and Romanian flyers have been busy since they deployed at the start of April on four-month NATO rotations.

Marin said interceptions “are getting close to daily" and "that will definitely increase as the weather is getting better."

French aircrews — watched by an Associated Press journalist who was reporting at the airbase — had their busiest day so far on Monday.

Scrambled under NATO command, French Rafales met and observed a pair of Russian Tu-22M3 bombers carrying supersonic, anti-ship missiles from their bellies that Russia has also used in Ukraine, repurposing them to attack ground targets, and which can be equipped to carry a nuclear warhead.

The strategic bombers' more than four-hour flight from an airbase near St. Petersburg, escorted by Su-30 and Su-35 fighters, remained in international airspace but took them past the coasts of NATO countries Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, doubling back when they approached Denmark.

The French detachment said the Russian planes didn’t have switched-on transponders, file flight plans or enter into radio contact. Fighter jets from Sweden, Finland, Poland, Denmark and Romania also went airborne to keep watch, according to the French. NATO didn't respond to requests for comment.

The French commander, Lt. Col. Alexandre, said it isn't clear why Russian pilots behave in ways that could endanger other users of Baltic airspace.

“We don’t know if it’s lack of professionalism or just a means for them to test us," he said.

“But what is sure is that we need to go every time," he added. "We cannot say, 'OK, that's usual, this time we will just let them pass.'”

French air force Commander Dorian (surname withheld by the French military) uses his hands to shield his ears from the scream of the jet engines of a Rafale fighter preparing to take off from the Siauliai Air Base in Lithuania on a NATO air-policing mission on Monday, April 20, 2026. (AP Photo/John Leicester)

Members of a French air force detachment of personnel and Rafale jets stationed on a monthslong deployment at the Siauliai Air Base in Lithuania on a NATO air-policing mission play chess in the detachment's headquarters at the base on Monday, April 20, 2026. (AP Photo/John Leicester)

A member of the French air wing of Rafale fighters jets deployed on a NATO air-policing mission at the Siauliai Air Base in Lithuania wears a mission badge on her arm on Sunday, April 19, 2026 (AP Photo/John Leicester).

Romanian air force Col. Mihaita Marin, commander of a Romanian air wing of F-16 fighter jets deployed at the Siauliai Air Base in Lithuania on a NATO air-policing mission, speaks during an interview on Monday, April 20, 2026. (AP Photo/John Leicester)

A flight-crew member climbs into the cockpit of a French air force Rafale fighter jet stationed on a NATO air-policing mission at the Siauliai Air Base in Lithuania as another member of the French detachment stands at the foot of the ladder on Sunday, April 19, 2026 (AP Photo/John Leicester)