He left home on a rainy Wednesday morning, walking through the gate of his solid middle-class house and into the narrow streets of Srinagar, Kashmir's largest city. He needed to pick up some medicine for his elderly father.

It was the summer of 1996. Ali Mohammad Mir was 40 years old, a gentle-spoken building contractor and a father of three. In a lush Himalayan valley savaged by cycles of guerrilla attacks and government crackdowns, a place where politics and violence almost always went together, he was utterly apolitical. Desperately nonpolitical.

His family never saw him again.

Here, in this quiet mountain village about 60 miles away, is where Mir may have ended up, in a grave marked only by a mound of dirt, surrounded by the graves of hundreds of other unidentified men. Or perhaps he's in the cluster of unmarked graves in the forests of Parra-Gagarhill, or among the bodies buried in the cow pasture in the village of Kichama.

"He is out there somewhere," said Mir's son, Zahoor Ahmad Mir. He has spent years researching his father's final hours, and now believes he was killed by a militia tied to the Indian army. "They killed him and they threw him aside. Now he is buried somewhere. He must be."

Dozens of these anonymous burial fields have been identified by human rights workers over the past 18 months, nameless graveyards where Indian security forces dumped nearly 2,400 nameless corpses.

In a region struggling to emerge from two decades of violence that have left 68,000 people dead, the graveyards have deeply shaken Kashmir, digging up memories of the estimated 8,000 people who disappeared at the height of the militancy. At a time when support for separatist violence has waned, and many Kashmiris have become more focused on jobs than politics, the graveyards brought waves of renewed anger against the government. Days of rioting broke out after rights workers released the first list of burial fields.

The graves have also become constant reminders that while violence is down, it is far from over. Bodies have been buried as recently as the past few months.

"There is no place in Kashmir where innocent blood has not been spilled," said Zareef Ahmed Zareef, a Kashmiri poet

But who were the dead? Security officials dismiss them as Muslim militants killed in gunbattles, and some, certainly, were fighters. But rights workers say most were innocent civilians who fell into the maw of the security forces.

They were young men grabbed for their money or killed to settle personal scores. Some were mistaken for militants by terrified Indian soldiers.