Mountain of war: The India-Pakistan conflict’s deadliest battle zone

Islamabad, Pakistan – Deep in the Karakoram mountain range, where the borders of India, Pakistan and China converge at heights the human body was not built to endure, lies a glacier the people of Baltistan and Ladakh have long called Siachen: "land of wild roses".

A frozen river of more than one trillion cubic feet of pristine ice, stretching over 70km, it has been a battlefield since April 1984 . India and Pakistan have fought over it ever since.

But it’s unlike any other contested real estate. In the 42 years since 1984, India and Pakistan have waged war against each other in the mountains, exchanging deadly fire across their de facto border in Kashmir, with a furious battle later erupting in 1999 in Kargil, about 100km (62 miles) to the southwest of Siachen.

And in May 2025, they traded missiles and drones over four days in the worst military confrontation between the two countries since Kargil, after 26 civilians were killed in an attack in Pahalgam, a resort town in Indian-administered Kashmir. India blamed armed groups it said were backed by Pakistan, a charge Islamabad denied.

Through each of these crises, there was silence on the Saltoro Ridge, the jagged, 110km-long range of peaks west of Siachen where both armies have faced each other since 1984. Not a shot was fired.

Yet peace hasn’t returned to the glacier, either. When a ceasefire was announced on May 10, 2025, following their brief war, Indian and Pakistani soldiers remained firmly in place on Siachen.

The fight for Siachen is not simply a frozen conflict. It is a conflict that has, over time, acquired its own logic of persistence.

On February 3, 2016, when 10 Indian soldiers belonging to the 19 Madras Battalion returned to their camp after concluding their patrol past midnight, they did not know it was the last time they would walk into bone-freezing temperatures of minus 30 degrees Celsius.