SRINAGAR: For years a magnet for ideologically-driven Islamists with computer and engineering skills, the Lashkar-e-Taiba has now started to fish for recruits amongst Srinagar's urban underclass, using cash as bait.

An investigation by The Hindu has found that the profiles of the 12 Lashkar operatives arrested for their role in a six-month-long terror campaign here demonstrate a marked change in the Islamist group's recruitment strategies. None of them received weapons or explosives training at the Lashkar's camps in Pakistan. There was also no indoctrination at seminaries.

The Lashkar drew from the ranks of ill-educated and low-skilled Srinagar artisans and vendors, offering them cash in return for their participation in grenade attacks, assassinations and a murderous May 21 suicide-squad attack on a Congress rally that was to have been attended by Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad.

Profiles in terror

Mohammad Yusuf Dagga, the principal organiser of the Lashkar cell, was perhaps its only operative with any significant operational experience. Dagga was pulled out of school after sixth grade by his father and put to work as a vegetable vendor. In 1994, when he was 12, he turned courier for the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen ferrying weapons and explosives, working under the direction of an operative named Roshan Khayal.

Dagga's parents promptly handed him over to the Border Security Force, and, after a brief stint in jail, he resumed selling vegetables. However, the work just didn't yield the kind of income Dagga had hoped for. In January, Javed Sofi, an old associate from his Hizb-ul-Mujahideen days, approached Dagga with a simple offer: Rs. 1,000 for each grenade thrown at Indian forces.

Wasim Zargar, who after Dagga and Sofi was perhaps the most important member of the cell, also dropped out of school in 1999. He had succeeded in passing his eighth-grade examinations only at the age of 16. Zargar then worked as an apprentice shawl weaver until 2001, when he agreed to start supplying cell phone SIM cards to a Srinagar-based Lashkar operative, Ijaz Ahmad Kital.

Part of the funds from this enterprise went into setting up his own cosmetics store. More cash was promised when he was recruited by Dagga to execute grenade strikes and shootouts in Srinagar.

Like Dagga himself, though, Zargar was paid only small sums for his actions. Most of the dozen grenade strikes and shootouts he participated in between January and May this year brought in just Rs. 1,000 each.

Others like Bilal Ahmad Mir seem to have been driven by personal frustration. The eldest of the five sons of a National Conference-affiliated municipal politician, Mir dropped out of school after the fifth grade. He apprenticed with a local tailor from 1989, but was unable to make a living. Moreover, Mir's three younger brothers continued their studies with some success — a fact that further eroded his self-esteem.

Like Mir, Mohammad Yaqoob Sheikh was the least successful of four brothers. A copper-work artisan, Mir dropped out of school after the third grade to learn his trade.

However, the slow decline in demand for hand-made utensils meant that his brothers, all of whom worked as truck drivers, made a far better living.

Desperate for cash, Sheikh agreed to throw a grenade at a bus carrying tourists in late May.

For the Lashkar, which has suffered a series of command-level losses in counter-terrorist operations, such tactics make eminent sense. While conserving its leadership and crack fidayeen-squad personnel for high-profile operations, the Lashkar's cash-driven cadre help the organisation execute enough attacks to demonstrate its presence and resolve to audiences in urban Jammu and Kashmir.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail