94% LeT recruits view J&K as fighting
front: US report
Washington,
April 5: According to a US military
report, 94 per cent of fresh recruits of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) see Jammu and
Kashmir as a "fighting front" and most of them are well educated and
brightest from Pakistan. The eye-opener
report from the US Military Academy in West Point
is result of a multi-year research effort conducted by a lead team of five
eminent authors including C Christine Fair, Don Rassler and Anirban Ghosh, and
is based on a study of over 900 biographies of the deceased LeT militants.
According to the
report that runs into nearly 60 pages, the vast majority of LeT's fighters are
recruited from Pakistan 's Punjab province and are actually rather well educated
compared with Pakistani males generally. “While LeT's recruitment is
diversified across the north, central and southern parts of the Punjab, the
highest concentration of militants have come (in order of frequency) from the
districts of Gujranwala, Faisalabad, Lahore, Sheikhupura, Kasur, Sialkot,
Bahawalnagar, Bahawalpur, Khanewal and Multan. LeT training has historically
occurred in Pakistan
administered Kashmir (PaK's) capital Muzaffarabad and in Afghanistan .
Together these two locations have accounted for 75 per cent of LeT militant
training over time, it said.
It
further said 94 per cent of fighters list Indian Kashmir as a fighting front. “Afghanistan , Chechnya ,
Tajikistan and Bosnia are also
identified in the biographies as other fronts”. "According to our data,
the districts of Kupwara, Baramulla and Poonch in Indian administered Kashmir account for almost half of all LeT militant
deaths since 1989. Kupwara, the district with the largest number of militants
killed, appears to be becoming less important overall as a fighting area, with
its share of deaths declining over time," it said. The report further said
that the number and share of LeT deaths in Baramulla and Poonch have been
increasing.
The
report, “The Fighters of Lashkar- e-Toiba:Recruitment, Training, Deployment and
Death” by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point identified 12 different
channels of LeT recruitment, the most common forms of which include recruitment
via: a current LeT member (20 per cent), a family member (20 per cent), mosque
or madrassa (17 per cent), LeT speech or literature (12 per cent) and friends
(5 per cent). "Since 2000 there has been a strong upward trend in
recruitment via family members and by 2004, this channel contributed to over 40
per cent of LeT recruitment," it said. “Siblings and parents are central
characters in the biographies and they play important roles in a fighter's
entry into and journey through LeT. For example, siblings or other immediate
family members were often the one to drop off a LeT recruit at a training camp
or at the border,” the report said.
It
further said the mean age when a recruit joins LeT is 16.95 years, while the
militants' mean age at the time of their death is 21 years. “The mean number of
years between a LeT militant's entry and death is 5.14 years”.
"The most
common level of nonreligious education attained by LeT fighters (44 per cent of
available data) before their entry into the group is matric (10th grade),
indicating that on average the group's cadres had higher levels of secular
education than other Pakistani males. They do not have high levels of formal
religious education,” the report said.
It further said
uncle of one militant was a Director at Pakistan 's Atomic Energy
Commission, while the father of another was the president of the Pakistan
Muslim League's labor wing in Islamabad/Rawalpindi. The
study says that recruits often become holy warriors with the help of their
families, which admire Lashkar's military exploits in India and Afghanistan and its nationalism and
social service activities at home.
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