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| India-Pakistan | ||
| LeT recruits drawn from middle-class | ||
| 2013-04-06 | ||
| A staggering 94% of fresh recruits of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) see Jammu and Kashmir as a "fighting front" and hail mostly from Pakistan's Punjab province from families having links with the powerful army and intelligence network, according to a US military report. The eye-opener report from the US Military Academy in West Point
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-occupied Kashmir's capital Muzaffarabad and in Afghanistan. Together these two locations have accounted for 75% of LeT militant training over time, the report said. "94% of fighters list Indian Kashmir as a fighting front," the report said. 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 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 added that the number and share of LeT deaths in Baramulla and Poonch have been increasing. The report 'The Fighters of Lashkar- e-Taiba: 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%), a family member (20%), mosque or madrassa (17%), LeT speech or literature (12%) and friends (5%). "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, the report said. 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 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. Interesting. I've read somewhere that the mean age of users of heavy drugs and the time of their death is also around 5 years.
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| Posted by:tipper |
| #2 "Most of the jihadis who infiltrate into Kashmir are dead within 20 months" Oh, dear. That's a shame. The Indians need to try harder. (To make that time shorter.) |
| Posted by: Barbara 2013-04-06 14:16 |
| #1 Most of the jihadis who infiltrate into Kashmir are dead within 20 months |
| Posted by: john frum 2013-04-06 11:11 |