Early in the morning of July 18, when Sonaullah Dar and his friends headed to a nearby village for an all-day cricket tournament, they had no idea they were about to be recruited to join a militant group based in Pakistan.

That, at least, is Mr. Dar's story, and he's sticking to it.

Dar and his friends appear to be the only people who were out of the loop. Back in their villages, rumors spread quickly that the young cricketers - some as young as 11 and 14 - were heading to Pakistan to join the 14-year-long struggle to wrest their Himalayan state from Indian control.

"We never intended to go to Pakistan," says Dar, adding that they stayed overnight at a friend's house and returned home the next day to surprised and relieved parents. "If they had taken us we would have returned. If they had taken us at gunpoint, then what could we have done?"

Across the vast and mountainous state of Jammu and Kashmir - which both India and Pakistan claim - the disappearance of some 600 boys and young men over the past year is a grave signal that the 14-year-long insurgency here is gaining energy. Kashmiri officials say that militant groups operating out of Pakistan are more aggressively going after local teenagers to fill their ranks.

Beyond roping in Kashmir's youth, the conflict has claimed nearly 60 lives a week for the past two months in a spate of suicide bombings that ended a five-month peace process between India and Pakistan. For India, this is a worrisome trend, in part because an increasing number of fighters are Kashmiri - undermining India's argument that the insurgency is a foreign (read Pakistani) invasion of their territory.

Since Delhi regards the Kashmir insurgency as an outside aggression, Indian officials tend to downplay the number of Kashmiri militants, many of whom are youths. Indian officials estimate there are 3,000 militants in the valley, and this week the state police inspector general, K. Rajendra, told reporters that 75 percent of the militants killed this year were Pakistani nationals.

Indian Army spokesman Lt. Col. Mukhtiar Singh says that local support for militants has declined over the past decade as militant attacks began to take a heavy toll on civilians, particularly the market-place grenade and bomb attacks by Pakistani groups such as Lashkar-e Tayyaba and Jaish-e Mohammad.

"Kashmiris are used as guides or for providing food to militants, but not as fighters," says Colonel Singh. "Whatever support they have is under the threat of the gun."

But whether from fear or religious fervor or adventure, what is certain is that young Kashmiris are disappearing. In the advertising section of most local papers, wedged between the jobs wanted and the obituaries, are notices of "Boy Missing." Typical is the case of Amir Ah Reshi, son of Ghulam Mohammad of Bandipora. A recent notice described the boy as a ninth-grader who "left for school and did not return.... Amir was last seen in a local market where he had told a shopkeeper he was returning home."

According to local police chief Manzoor Ahmed, Bandipora is a major infiltration and recruitment zone for militant groups. Bandipora is about 30 kilometers from the Line of Control that separates Indian- and Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, but Bandipora's rugged terrain makes it attractive to militants because Indian forces have difficulty operating here.

"They have good local support here," says Mr. Ahmed. "All the boys taken back to Pakistan by Lashkar and Jaish and Hizbul Mujahideen are working with [local] people they have worked with for almost 15 years."

While some boys say they were taken against their will, others may be motivated by an emerging variant of militant Islam preached in the estimated 3,000 new mosques built here in the last decade. Frustrated by the on-again, off-again peace process and fickle separatist leaders, today's "freedom fighters" have turned to something more rigid and dependable: militant Islam.

"Militancy is 14 years old now; all the boys who are joining the militants now were 1 or 2 years old when it began," says Surinder Oberoi, a journalist who has covered the Kashmir insurgency from its inception. "Before, the slogan was freedom, nationalism. Now, it's Islam, and we are starting to see young Kashmiri boys who are willing to do suicide attacks."

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