Titled The Fighters of Lashkar-e-Taiba: Recruitment, Training, Deployment and Death, is 61 Page Report on Lashkar-e-Taiba Prepared and Published by the Combating Terrorism Centre (CTC) in West Point, New York.
Here I am Posting Interesting Excerpts from that Report Along with Links to Download Full Report and Data. Click on the Hyperlinks Bellow (Which You Will Find in 1st Two Paragraphs in the Beginning) to Download Full Report, Dataset and Appendix.
The Fighters of Lashkar-e-Taiba: Recruitment, Training, Deployment and Death
4th April 2013
Authors: Anirban Ghosh, Arif Jamal, Christine Fair, Don Rassler, Nadia Shoeb
Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point, Occasional paper series.
This occasional paper is an analysis of over 900 biographies of the deceased militants of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a well-established Pakistani militant group that is best known for its November 2008 high-profile attack against a mix of local and foreign targets in Mumbai, India. Instead of evaluating evidence of the group’s internationalism, as many recent studies have attempted to do, this study is more foundational in focus. It is predicated on the assumption that LeT’s local activity and infrastructure are and will remain the key source of its strength, even if the group decides it is in its interest to become more active in the international arena. By leveraging biographical information extracted from four Urdu language publications produced by LeT from 1994 to 2007 and statistical information released by the government of Pakistan, this study aims to provide baseline data about LeT’s local recruits, the nature of the time they spend with the group and how these dynamics have changed over time.
Two other documents – the Dataset from which the paper’s conclusions were derived and an Appendix that explains our coding methodology – are also being released in conjunction with the report, as it is our hope that other interested scholars will build upon our data/work.
AUTHORS’ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This paper is the result of a multiyear research effort conducted by the authors.
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This paper is a study of over 900 biographies of the deceased militants of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a Pakistani militant group that has waged a campaign of asymmetric warfare against Indian security forces and civilians in the contested region of Kashmir for over two decades, as well as other parts of India more recently.
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.... LeT’s recruitment of Westerners and linkages to a number of other international terror plots over the past decade, have heightened concerns that the group’s interests and operational priorities are no longer just regional, but that they are also becoming (or have already become) global.
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.... By leveraging biographical information extracted from four Urdu language publications produced by LeT from 1994 to 2007 and statistical information released by the government of Pakistan, this study aims to provide baseline data about LeT’s local recruits, the nature of the time they spend with the group and how these dynamics have changed over time.
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A summary of our main findings and the some of the related implications follow.
> Fighter Background
- Age: According to our data, 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 an LeT militant’s entry and death is 5.14 years.
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> Residence and Recruitment
- Location: The vast majority of LeT’s fighters are recruited from Pakistan’s Punjab province. While LeT’s recruitment is diversified across the north, central and southern parts of the Punjab, the highest concentration of LeT fighters have come (in order of frequency) from the districts of Gujranwala, Faisalabad, Lahore, Sheikhupura, Kasur, Sialkot, Bahawalnagar, Bahawalpur, Khanewal, and Multan.
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> Training, Deployment and Death
- Location and Level of Training: LeT training has historically occurred in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan and in Afghanistan. Together these two locations have accounted for 75 percent of LeT militant training over time.
The highest level of training reported by most LeT militants (62 percent of available data) was specialized training (Daura-e-Khasa, LeT’s advanced course), the majority of which occurred in Muzaffarabad.
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- Fighting Fronts and Location of Death: Ninety four percent of fighters list Indian Kashmir as a fighting front. Although less relevant, 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 Kashmir account for almost half of all LeT militant deaths since 1989.
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INTRODUCTION
.... While it is difficult to predict the directional priorities of Pakistan-based militant groups after the United States reduces its role in Afghanistan, especially in light of the internal security challenges faced by Pakistan and the state’s own shifting threat priorities, historical precedent suggests that some of these militant groups will reorient to and invest more broadly in the conflict in Kashmir.
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For the past two decades LeT has steadily emerged as one of Pakistan’s most lethal and capable militant proxy groups. Its long-term approach and the scale and scope of its activities, which largely revolve around efforts to conduct da`wa (missionary activism), to reform Pakistani society from within, and to engage in violent external jihad, especially in India, have helped the group develop a domestic political constituency and gain international reach. While the group has historically been used by Islamabad as an agent of regional foreign policy—and one that has been mostly focused on waging a low-level war of attrition in Indian Kashmir—a steady array of incidents tied to the group over the last decade strongly suggest that LeT’s interests are evolving and that its operations in the future might be less constrained.
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Western counterterrorism investigators have been particularly troubled by LeT’s recent attack history, its links to several international terror plots, the group’s transnational footprint, the accessibility of its infrastructure in Pakistan and the two-decade-long spillover associated with its training camps. The group’s active recruitment of U.S. and European citizens and the discovery of a number of LeT operatives and cells based in both places have led some researchers to conclude that a threat to the U.S. homeland by this organization (or an associated splinter group or LeT-trained element) can no longer be ruled out.
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Despite the prominence and enduring presence of LeT in Pakistan, there have been few efforts to collect data on its activists and, in turn, to develop more useful insights into the group’s cadres and recruitment practices. This lacuna is surprising given that the organization has produced and continues to produce massive amounts of materials about itself and its cadres that are available in the public domain, albeit mostly in Urdu.
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..., the research team acquired a collection of biographies of LeT fighters published in several different Urdu-language publications produced by the group over a fifteen-year period.
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DATA AND METHODS
Our data set includes biographical information and other key details about 917 LeT militants killed from 1989 to 2008. The biographies reviewed for this report were derived from four primary sources in Urdu published by LeT.
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.... The most consistent element in the biographies is the wasiyatnama, or will, of the militants, which indicates that LeT may provide militants with a standard template to fill out before their operational deployment.
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IMPLICATIONS
> Recruitment Base and Other Linkages
The Pakistan government insists that Pakistanis are not engaging in acts of terrorism in India or elsewhere; rather, the government claims that it is only providing diplomatic and moral support to the indigenous mujahidin fighting in India. While few entertain these claims as credible, our database indicates that this claim is false. First, the vast majority of LeT fighters are Pakistani and most are Punjabi, not Kashmiri. It is noteworthy that there is considerable overlap among the districts that produce LeT militants and those that produce Pakistan army officers, a dynamic that raises a number of questions about potentially overlapping social networks between the army and LeT. While certainly not the norm, at least eighteen biographies in our data set describe connections between LeT fighters and immediate family members (i.e., fathers or brothers) who were currently serving or had served in Pakistan’s army or air force. In several of these cases, the militant’s father had fought with the Pakistani army in the 1965 war in Kashmir (the Second Kashmir War) and/or during the conflict in 1971 over the status of then East Pakistan (since known as Bangladesh). In one case a militant’s father was described as a senior officer in the Pakistani army.
LeT draws in recruits using a variety of means, both through proactive targeting of potential cadres by LeT recruiters at schools, mosques and madrassas; as well as through LeT’s extensive publication and office infrastructure throughout Pakistan. Indeed, such expansive and overt presence throughout the country speaks to a degree of tolerance if not outright assistance from the Pakistani state. Equally notable is the fact that the vast majority of the fighters in this database died in Indian-administered Kashmir. This truth, taken with the predominantly Pakistani-Punjabi origins of the fighters, collectively puts to rest any of Pakistan’s claims about the nature of its citizens and their activities.
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FIGHTER BACKGROUND
> Age
The mean age when a militant joins LeT is 16.95 years, with the median age being 16.5. The youngest recruit in our data joined at the age of 11.5, while the oldest recruit was 30. Ninety percent of the militants joined LeT before they were 22 years old. ...
Militants’ mean age at the time of their death in our data is 21 years, while the median age of death is 20 years. The youngest militant whose death is recorded in our data is 14 years, while the oldest is 43 years. ...
While our data sample is limited to only those fighters who died and whose death was highlighted by LeT, our data appear to show that militants do not live long after they have been recruited by the group. In our sample, the mean number of years between an LeT militant’s entry and death is 5.14 years, and the median is 4.0 years.
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> Family Dynamics
- Marriage and Children
It is likely that a majority of militants are not married nor have children, ....
.... In several cases, mothers attempted to prevent their sons from fighting by trying to persuade them to marry.
- Siblings
Siblings are central characters in the biographies, and they play important roles. For example, in several cases siblings supported (i.e., provided permission) and opposed their brother’s decision to fight.
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> Education
.... LeT militants are actually rather well educated compared with Pakistani males generally.
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- Nonreligious Education in Pakistan
- Results and Analysis: Most aspiring LeT fighters join the group when they are young, as the mean age of entry into the organization is a little over 16.9 years old.
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... In our data, we see that 63 percent of LeT militants have at least a secondary education (matric or above), suggesting that their educational distribution is slightly higher than the national attainment levels, ....
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- Religious Education in Pakistan
- Results and Analysis: Nearly 31 percent of biographies that were reviewed by the research team provided information about the level of religious education attained by LeT fighters. Based upon that data we find that 56.9 percent of LeT militants have attended a madrassa, with only 4.3 percent of those having received a sanad.
Based upon available data, militants spent an average of 2.77 years at a madrassa.
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> Employment
.... LeT militants are typically low-income workers who come from the poor or middle-lower classes.
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RESIDENCE AND RECRUITMENT
- Home Districts
- Results and Analysis: .... our data confirms that most LeT militants are recruited from Pakistan’s Punjab province. In our data, 89 percent of the militants are from Punjab, with 5 percent from Sindh, and about 3 percent from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. A smaller number of militants originate from Azad Kashmir (about 0.5 percent), while Indian Kashmir, Gilgit-Baltistan and Baluchistan together produced about 1.1 percent of the militants in our sample. Three militants had hometowns in Afghanistan, two came from Saudi Arabia and one from Europe.
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- District-Level Details of Militant Origins
.... As observed previously, the militants were recruited mostly from the Punjab region, but more interestingly, even within Punjab, greater numbers of militants seem to have originated from the areas that border India or are quite close to it.
.... As mentioned previously, the LeT militants in our study often came from densely populated and urbanized districts in the Punjab, with Gujranwala (10 percent), Faisalabad (10 percent) and Lahore (7 percent) producing more militants than any other district in the country. This finding is not surprising, as those three areas have long been known to be locations where LeT is active and has a lot of infrastructure.
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- Relative Concentration of Militants
.... Yet at the same time, our data also highlight that LeT recruitment is diversified across the north, central and southern Punjab districts, indicating that while there are specific districts in which we see a high concentration of fighters, LeT recruitment is not a geographically isolated phenomenon within that particular province.
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- Means of Recruitment
- Background: .... Given the broad range of activities in which the group is engaged, LeT trains far more people than it will ever deploy on any mission.
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- Results and Analysis: There is no one single or centralized method through which LeT members are recruited, but instead, as one would expect, the group uses a slew of methods.
.... We find that militants are rarely recruited through more than one channel, as over 90 percent of our militant recruitment data identify only a single channel. ....
.... The most common form of recruitment is by a current member of LeT, as noted in 20 percent of the cases. The second-most-common form of recruitment is when a family member, almost always a brother or the father, helps an individual to join the group (20 percent of all cases). LeT propaganda, which includes speech or literature, is the channel for the recruitment of 12 percent of militants, which when added to those who are self-initiated (4 percent), can be considered the share of militants who are recruited passively by LeT. Mosques (9 percent) and madrassas and Islamic study centers (8 percent) together account for 17 percent of recruitment. Interestingly, there is evidence of limited overlap between LeT and Hizbul Mujahidin (another militant group historically focused on Indian Kashmir) members, as fewer than 3 percent of individuals are recruited into LeT by that other militant group.
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TRAINING AND DEPLOYMENT
The scale and scope of LeT’s training is extensive. While not all who receive training see combat in places like Indian Kashmir, some estimates suggest that between 100,000 to 300,000 men have received some form of LeT training over the last two decades. This estimate also includes a smaller number of Western jihadists who, after receiving training from LeT, have played active roles in a number of international terrorism plots.
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> Training: Type, Length and Location
- Background: In addition to a number of specialized courses, LeT has three primary types of training, the first two of which are progressive. They include:
Daura-e-Aama (Basic Training) is LeT’s basic three-week training course. During this twenty-one-day course, attendees are given religious instruction (i.e., learn parts of the Qur’an and how to perform Islamic rituals in the Ahl-e-Hadith way), training in light arms, particularly in the use of the Kalashnikov and hand grenades, and instruction in basic guerilla warfare tactics.
Daura-e-Khasa (Specialized Training) is LeT’s advanced training course, which lasts for three months.91 This program is usually reserved for those trainees who are likely to be sent to Indian-administered Kashmir (or even to other parts of India) or to other places to wage armed jihad. This advanced course is “geared towards guerilla warfare, with training in the use of arms and ammunition, ambush and survival techniques.”
Other Named Training includes a number of LeT training courses about which not much is known. These courses are believed to be both physical and ideological in orientation (see below for more information) and to either occur after Daura-e-Khasa or as modules to complement that same course.
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- Results and Analysis: Out of a pool of 627 militants whose biographies provided this type of data, 5 percent of the militants were said to have undergone only basic training (Daura-e-Aama). The highest level of training reported by most of the LeT militants (62 percent) was specialized training (Daura-e-Khasa), and an additional 12 percent were able to name other specific training courses, ....
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- Training Length, and Time Spent Between Basic Training and Death
As mentioned above, the length of training varies across the different types of training LeT provides, ranging anywhere from three weeks to ten months. ....
A review of the biographies suggests that after completing basic training the trainees usually spend the next few years waiting to be deployed. This is consistent with our data, as only 5 percent of the militants studied died within one year of their entry into the organization, with the median amount of time a militant spent between joining the organization and death being 4.0 years.
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- Training Locations
.... LeT training has historically occurred in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan, (47 percent) and in Afghanistan (28 percent). Together these two locations accounted for 75 percent of all LeT militant training in our dataset.
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> Fighting Fronts and Location of Death
- Results and Analysis: LeT’s primary fighting front has historically been Indian Kashmir. Of the individuals for whom we have data in this field, 779 out of 822 list Indian Kashmir as a fighting front, representing 94 percent of the individuals. ....
.... Not surprisingly, over 94 percent of the militants died in India, mostly in Indian Kashmir, which is consistent with our finding that the most active fighting front for LeT militants is Indian Kashmir.
At the district level, we have details on the location of death for 465 militants, which is 51 percent of all the biographies in our data. ....
.... top three districts—Kupwara, Baramulla, and Poonch, all in Indian Kashmir—account for almost half of all militants killed.
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- Changes in Location of LeT Deaths between 1990 and 2004
In addition to the location of death of the militants in our study, we also know the year of their death.
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... areas of LeT fighter deaths in Indian Kashmir have become more geographically distributed over time, suggesting that the group has intentionally pursued this type of strategy or that it is potentially in response to pressure applied—or new campaigns waged—by Indian security services in select districts.
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CONCLUSION
Our data attest to the enduring nature of LeT and its sustained ability to attract highquality recruits from across the Punjab and through a variety of means for operations throughout South Asia. This research contributes to the evolving body of literature that suggests that poverty, limited education and time spent at a madrassa are poor predictors for determining either support for terrorism or participation in terrorism in Pakistan. If our data are at all representative of LeT’s other cadres, they would appear to suggest that some of Pakistan’s best-educated young men are being dispatched to die in this unending conflict with India.
Copyrights: Combating Terrorism Centre (CTC) in West Point, New York / U.S. Military Academy / D0D, United States
