Word: lets
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...confession, Qasab describes a strict regimen of physical training, prayers and religious lectures at Muridke. Former LeT militants who have passed through the center say it was never a training camp in the traditional sense. While would-be militants learned to swim and fight there, advanced weapons training was left for the camps in the Pakistani-controlled section of Kashmir. Only a handful of students were sent out on actual combat missions. Instead, most focused on religious doctrine. Parents in the local village who send their children to the Markaz for school say the education is good, though ideological. Ghulam...
...analyst and academic Ayesha Siddiqa, "is recruiting people and sending them to fight elsewhere." Some are going to Kashmir, she says, but many more are fighting in Bajaur and Swat, in the North-West Frontier Province, where government forces are waging a losing war to contain militancy. Groups like LeT have always been open about their goals for an Islamic state, and few doubt that they would resort to violence to achieve it. Says Siddiqa: "At a later stage, they will bring the jihad home." It may already be happening. In the provincial capital of Lahore on March...
...training of all weapons for 21 days," Qasab says in his confession. In the subsequent four months of training, Qasab learned to fire AK-47s, studied the Indian security agencies and was trained in the "handling of hand grenade, rocket launchers and mortars, Uzi gun, pistol [and] revolver." Other LeT militants have noted the physical demands that accompanied the firearms practice. "The training was really tough," Mohammad Usman, a former jihadi, tells TIME. "But when we went to Kashmir, on my first operation across the Line of Control [which divides Pakistani-controlled Kashmir from the Indian side], I got separated...
Usman, now 36, was one of the founding militants in LeT - and his tale, too, sheds light on the growth of jihadi militancy. As a boy in the Punjabi city of Faisalabad, he often heard accounts of Indian atrocities against Muslims in Kashmir. In the early '90s, Kashmiris toured Pakistan, telling their stories and seeking donations for their cause. Usman was moved by the story of a man whose brother had been killed by Indian soldiers and whose sister had been sexually assaulted. "Then he asked, 'If this was your sister, what would you do?' That's when I decided...
...beginning, Usman joined a Kashmiri militant outfit, but soon he banded together with other Pakistanis, including Saeed, to form LeT. "The Kashmiris appreciated us because we were good fighters," says Usman. "Unlike the Kashmiris, who only did hit-and-run attacks, we stayed and fought for hours." That confidence, he says, came from the training. "We were fearless. The Koran tells us that if we are martyred, we are successful. It is the misfortune of my life that I was not martyred...