Jammu police chief Bhim Sen Tuti on Tuesday said security forces were conducting 120 anti-militancy operations daily in the region’s 10 districts.

The stunning revelation points to the monumental challenge posed by a resurgent militancy adept in jungle warfare in an area which had remained militancy-free for years before the scrapping of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status in 2019.

A total of 120 operations a day amounts to 44,000 missions annually, and the disturbing reality is that security forces achieve only limited success despite their relentless efforts, which at times require the involvement of troops for days on end.

“Every day, around 120 operations are launched in the entire Jammu zone. This is a daily duty. Whether they are speculative operations or precise, pinpointed information-based operations. It keeps happening continuously,” Tuti, the Jammu zone inspector-general of police, told reporters in Jammu.

“In the last two years, it (strikes by foreign militants) has emerged as an important challenge. We are strengthening our counter-terrorism grid, strengthening the border-protection grid. We will soon succeed in taking the foreign terrorists in these forests to task. I hope so.”

The Jammu region comprises 10 districts spread over 26,000sqkm. The region was a success story for security forces, which, with massive local support, managed to keep militancy at bay for nearly two decades.

But the scrapping of Article 370 in 2019 was followed by a revival of militancy, made deadlier by militants trained in jungle warfare. They succeeded in inflicting significant casualties on security forces, police and civilians before melting into the forests. The success of troops has only been modest.

The forces are tight-lipped about the number of militants operating in the Jammu region or the details of improvisation in their counter-insurgency strategies. But police sources put the number of militants in the dozens.

The last time security forces succeeded in neutralising a militant — Haider alias Maulvi in the Dudi Basantnag forests of Udhampur — was in June. His associates had managed to escape.

Hundreds of operations launched in four months after that have borne no fruit. Instead, one soldier was killed in Basantgarh, Udhampur, on September 20, while the militants involved gave the forces the slip.

Security forces lost several men to militant attacks earlier too. Four policemen were killed in March in Kathua district after militants took a team led by a deputy superintendent of police by surprise.

In the past, top central government ministers or the security forces brass had set lofty targets to wipe out militancy in Jammu.

Rashmi Ranjan Swain, as the then director-general of police, had said last year that the Jammu region would be free of militancy in two to three months.

“You know, from 1995 to 2005-07, they tried and hatched a conspiracy but didn’t succeed. We took some losses (then), but who won finally? Now they (militants) have come with this fight. We should show courage and we are doing that. We are trying, after takingminimum losses, we will destroy them in two to three months,” Swain had told a media conference.

In 2023, Union home minister Amit Shah had told a media conference in Jammu, soon after militants killed seven Hindu residents and injured many, that theforces would form a “complete 360-degree security grid” in three months to secure Jammu.

Instead of containing militancy, it spread to newer areas.

Parts of the Jammu region witnessed a massive upsurge of militancy in the decade up to the mid-2000s. But security forces, with local help, had largely succeeded in restoring calm before the 2019 developments saw Jammu reemerge as a terror hub.

In addition to huge security redeployment in recent years, the Centre has strengthened the civilian Village Defence Guardsmilitia, arming thousands of them with sophisticated weapons.

Tuti was speaking to reporters on Tuesday after leading a wreath-laying ceremony at the Police Martyrs Memorial to pay tributes to policemen who sacrificed their lives for the country on theoccasion of Police Commemoration Day.

The day is observed in commemoration of 10 martyrs of the CRPF who died in the line of duty on October 21, 1959. The men lost their lives to an ambush laid by heavily armed Chinese troops at Hot Springs, Ladakh, at an altitude of 4,681mt.