CIAO DATE: 04/2013
March 2013
The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point
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. Although LeT had a storied history on the eve of its high ‐ profile November 2008 terrorist assault on the Indian city of Mumbai, that particular event and the case of American LeT operative David Headley (who conducted the reconnaissance for the attack) thrust the organization and the evolving threat it poses to regional security and Western interests into broader international consciousness. That attack, coupled with 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. This has led to a proliferation of interest in LeT and a desire to learn more about the group’s behavior and how it operates outside of the South Asia region.
Resource link: The Fighters of Lashkar‐e‐Taiba: Recruitment,Training, Deployment and Death [PDF]