The clashes between India and Pakistan in May – the closest the two nuclear-armed neighbors have come to a full-blown war since 1999 – hinged over the status of India-bound jihadist groups in Pakistan, led by the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). India struck various sites in Pakistan, which it claimed were training camps of the LeT, the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), and the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM). Together, these groups form the jihadist umbrella dedicated to “liberating Kashmir from Indian occupation.”
New Delhi’s strikes came as reaction to last month’s attack in Pahalgam town of Indian-administered Kashmir, claimed by the LeT-allied The Resistance Front, in which 26 civilians, nearly all tourists, were gunned down. Islamabad denies any connection with the militant raid and points to the fact that both Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are banned in Pakistan.
The LeT was founded by Hafiz Muhammad Saeed in 1990 out of former anti-Soviet jihadists. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the LeT remained aligned with regional jihadist outfits, notably al-Qaida and the Taliban, but dedicated its focus to the Kashmir jihad in the 1990s. The group carried out numerous raids in India with the backing of Pakistan’s security agencies. After being designated as a terror outfit by the U.S. post-9/11, the LeT, along with the JeM, was banned in Pakistan in 2002. However, some of the group’s deadliest maneuvers in India came in the aftermath of the ban, including the Delhi bombings in 2005 and the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Following the Mumbai attacks, and the global attention they brought, the LeT retracted to the backstage, allowing the Hizbul Mujahideen-led United Jihad Council (UJC) to be the vanguards of Kashmir-bound militancy. With many of its militants gravitating to the UJC and HM, the LeT sustained its organizational network – built on around 300 madrassas, some of which doubled as jihadi training camps across Pakistan – via its charity the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD). While the JuD’s terror-listing by the United Nations and the U.S., along with impending sanctions from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), prompted a crackdown against the charity in Pakistan in 2018, members of the LeT and JuD told me in interviews that the continued backing of the Pakistan Army for these groups was “not hidden from anyone.”
Maintaining the LeT infrastructure while avoiding the FATF’s sanctions required a delinking of the jihadi leadership from the group’s organizational and political fronts. So while the Pakistani state has cracked down on JuD-allied charities, and sentenced LeT leaders like Hafiz Saeed, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, and Zafar Iqbal to prison, political parties officially paying allegiance to Saeed have surfaced as part of the military’s mainstreaming of jihadist groups. The LeT-rooted Milli Muslim League (MML) and then the Allaho Akbar Tehreek (AAT) emerged ahead of the 2018 polls, with the latter contesting the elections after the former couldn’t obtain clearance from the Election Commission of Pakistan. The latest political rebirth of LeT is the Pakistan Markazi Muslim League (PMML) which contested the 2024 election.
While the PMML officially denies any connection with the Lashkar-e-Taiba or any involvement with militancy, its leadership says the party backs the armed struggle for Kashmir’s independence. In a statement to The Diplomat, the PMML said the party backs “freeing Kashmir from Indian occupation” as a single-point Kashmir policy. “Not only is India involved in extreme human rights violations in Kashmir, but it is also involved in destabilizing and terrorizing the whole region,” said PMML General Secretary Saifullah Khalid Kasuri. “India’s war-mongering necessitates a return to the ideology of Pakistan and cutting off of all ties with India,” he added.
The Diplomat’s investigations reveal not just the PMML’s political connection with the LeT, but also the party’s spearheading of the madrassa network, including the Markaz-e-Taiba in Muridke, one of the sites hit by Indian strikes. In a video shared with The Diplomat by a student of the Markaz-e-Taiba, recorded days before the Pahalgam attack, a local PMML leader Naseer Ahmad can be heard telling a gathering in Muridke that “the ideological offspring of Hafiz Mohammed Saeed will continue his jihad.”
In March, LeT cofounder Amir Hamza, a close aide of Hafiz Saeed, delivered a Friday sermon at the Markaz-e-Taiba urging “jihad against the kuffaar (infidels) including Israel and India.” The Markaz-e-Taiba frequently hosts Hafiz Saeed’s son Talha Saeed, along with PMML founders Saifullah Kasuri and Tabish Qayyum, both of whom were also cofounders of the Milli Muslim League.
Conversations with those associated with the PMML, and evidence reviewed by The Diplomat, reveals continued advocacy for armed jihad at these madrassas. However, there is little evidence of militant training at these locations, including at the Markaz-e-Taiba, which was once a major LeT camp.
This image, released by the Government of India in a press briefing on Operation Sindoor, shows a satellite image of Markaz-e-Taiba, which India targeted as a “terrorist camp.”
The same is true for the Jamia Masjid Subhan Allah in Bahawalpur, one of the sites hit by India, which along with the connected Madrassa Al-Sabir has been linked with longtime LeT ally Jaish-e-Mohammed. While India’s strike killed 10 relatives of JeM chief Masood Azhar, whose family has been running the affairs of both JeM and its affiliated madrassas, the targeted building in Bahawalpur that was once the most prominent jihadist camp in southern Punjab no longer has any militant infrastructure.
Even so, The Diplomat’s conversations with law enforcement officials reveal contrasting messaging with regards to the policymaking on organizations associated with the LeT or the JeM. In March, the Punjab government issued a list of banned organizations, featuring the LeT, the JeM, the JuD, and groups affiliated with these outfits, for citizens to avoid given donations to. “We have conducted intelligence based operations all over Punjab, arresting terrorists linked to terrorist groups like Daesh (Islamic State), al-Qaida, TTP (Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan), Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, and others. Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are no longer functional in Punjab,” a senior official of the Punjab Counter Terrorism Department said.
Police and security officials, however, reveal that while the militant infrastructures of the LeT and the JeM have largely been uprooted from the province, there remains sympathy for the groups, even within law enforcement institutions. The funeral prayers for those who died in the Indian strike on the Markaz-e-Taiba were led by the LeT-affiliated, U.S.-designated terrorist Hafiz Abdul Rauf, who ran the group’s Falah-i-Insaniat Foundation. Among those praying behind Rauf were senior army and police personnel including the inspector general of police in Punjab, with photos from the funeral featuring in global media.
“The photo shows the Pakistani military officers and the police chief are firmly [at] their back. The Lal Masjid cleric [Abdul Aziz] and his followers openly tout their Kalashnikovs in the heart of Islamabad for several decades now, and we still deny the existence of mujahideen [jihadists] groups on Pakistani soil,” said Arif Jamal, the author of “Shadow War: The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir.”
Senior law enforcement officials do not just pray with the LeT’s leadership, and provide security to rallies carried out by the group’s representatives, they often address the group as well. According to a PMML leader, Abdul Sadeeq, a senior police officer told a rally organized by the party in Multan last week that “jihad is life, and Allah only gives esteem those who dedicate themselves to jihad.”
For the LeT, and its various affiliates, much of the focus of jihad has remained on Kashmir, with its Pakistan-administered section long sustained by the military establishment as an open playground for various jihadist militias since the 1980s. Just like the PMML is the political front for Lashkar-e-Taiba across Pakistan, in Pakistan-administered Kashmir it is the Jammu Kashmir United Movement (JKUM).
“When we prepare our mujahid [jihadi militant], the first Quranic message that we teach him is to be harsh against the kufaar [infidels] to use the gun against the kafir [infidel]. Our war is against the cow-worshippers [Hindus]… we need to get ready for Ghazwa-e-Hind [holy war against India],” JKUM leader Rizwan Hanif said at a rally in Bazaar Khaigala of Rawalakot town of Pakistan-administered Kashmir on April 18, four days before the Pahalgam attack. Hanif is known for his fiery speeches and sermons and is often heard chanting that with regards to Indian-administered Kashmir, “there is only one solution; gun solution.”
Both the PMML and the JKUM have also organized numerous rallies for Palestine paying tribute to Hamas’ jihad against Israel. A PMML delegation led by President Saifullah Kasuri met with Hamas leader Khaled Mashal in Qatar last year. In a recorded video aired by both PMML and JKUM, Mashal thanked Pakistanis for their support saying: “We are one ummah (people), one blood, we have one faith, one God, our cause and future is one. In addition to our own selves, Allah willing we [Hamas] will help others against our enemies… and continue our struggle and jihad… You [Pakistanis] raised the flag of Islam by creating Pakistan, you have the respect of the ummah… so we have very high expectation from you.”
Mashal’s message has regularly featured at PMML and JKUM rallies, as these groups hyphenate Palestine and Kashmir to invoke jihad against India. In a TV interview last month, Chaudhry Anwarul Haq, the prime minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir, the term Pakistan officially uses for its administered section of Kashmir said, “There is no regional or land dispute, the freedom struggle of occupied Kashmir fits every definition of jihad in the name of Allah.”
The LeT’s jihadists, however, have not only targeted the Indian-administered Kashmir but have also sought to radically Islamize the Pakistani section. “They terrorize the pro-freedom voices in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, who want Kashmir to be independent of both Pakistan and India,” Sardar Saghir Ahmad, chairman of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, told The Diplomat.
Where Ahmad accuses the Pakistan army of tainting the JKLF’s nationalist militant struggle with Islamist militias camped in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, he also insists that the erstwhile camps no longer exist in the region. However, mosques and madrassas associated with the LeT, JeM, and HM, openly function, which include some of the buildings hit by Indian strikes this month. Masjid Abbas in Kotli and Masjid Bilal in Muzaffarabad are both affiliated withthe JeM, while the LeT-linked Shawai Nalla camp was also targeted.
“Many activities of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed are carried out inside these mosques and madrassas. While they no longer have open training camps, but the religious fanaticism and jihadi culture once sponsored by the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] continues to flourish inside these mosques and madrassas, which are largely used as recruitment sites [for militants] to be trained elsewhere,” said Ahmad, the JKLF chairman.
The LeT’s Shawai Nalla camp was one of the few sites dedicated to militant training in the region. Locals say that much of the jihadi training takes place along Pakistan’s western front, with the forest area along the Line of Control (LoC) functioning as simulation ground. Funeral prayers in absentia are regularly being performed in Pakistan-administered Kashmir for militants killed by Indian forces across the LoC, suggesting that there continues to be cross-border activity. These prayers often feature family members of those killed in Indian-administered Kashmir and are led by clerics affiliated with the LeT, JeM, or their political fronts such as the JKUM or the PMML.
But while jihadist militancy has continued on both sides of Kashmir, security officials in Pakistan-administered Kashmir have been posed with a new challenge: the emergence of TTP cells in the region. Many of the militants working with the TTP, and plotting maneuvers against Pakistan army installations in Kashmir, have affiliations with the Lashkar-e-Taiba, with one recently arrested member of the Pakistani Taliban revealed to be a former imam of a Jamaat-ud-Dawa mosque. “JeM members are known to have links with some TTP groups [and] some LeT members did switch to groups active in Afghanistan,” noted the author Arif Jamal.
In recent months, Pakistan’s military establishment has increasingly alluded to an Islamic rationale to condemn any jihadist action in Pakistan, officially referring to the TTP and its allies as “Fitna al-Khawarij,” which loosely translates as a heretical uprising launched by those outside the fold of Islam. Pakistan’s Army Chief Asim Munir, recently honored as field marshal, too cited the Two Nation Theory establishing Muslims and Hindus as mutually antagonistic communities in an address last month. There has also been a visible effort on the part of the PMML and the JKUM to condemn jihad against Muslims to quell any militancy aimed at Pakistan army installations. “The militant training given to the mujahideen should only be used against the kafir and never against the Muslim,” said JKUM leader Rizwan Hanif.
Parallel to sections of the LeT overlapping with the TTP, there has also been a surge in targeted killings of leaders associated with the group and its affiliates in Pakistan. While mystery shrouds these killings, given the precision of these shootings, and the accuracy of the strikes earlier this month, there is a growing feeling in the Lashkar-e-Taiba ranks that those who once shielded the group are no longer able to do so. For the next reincarnation, it appears, the LeT might need to look for a realignment beyond relabeling.