How the terror groups get their money

How the terror groups get their money
December 13, 2008
Herald also revealed how official channels funded these groups. Smaller outfits like Tehrik-e-Mujahideen, Jamiat-e-Mujahideen, Al Fatah, Al Jihad, Tehrik-e-Jihad and Islamic Front, received between Rs 400,000 and 700,000 a month.
Bigger ones such as HM, Lashkar, JeM and others received between Rs 2 million and 3 million a month. This 'official funding' was in addition to funds that were paid for logistics, communications, equipment, weapons, and explosives.
The complicity of the State became clear when some terrorist groups were allowed to resurface in April 2008. An American policy research group, Stratfor, quoting the Dawn newspaper, said members of Kashmiri terrorist groups like HuM, al Badr and JeM were 'setting up new offices, changing their names, putting up flags and posters, holding large rallies, and delivering sermons in mosques to publicise the groups' activities'. HuM relocated itself from Islamabad to the outskirts of Rawalpindi and called itself Ansar-ul Ummah. These developments, Stratfor said, could mean 'ISI return to commissioning attacks in Kashmir', part of a new phase in its militant proxy saga.
ISI's linkages with these groups, and the training camps, were reported in detail in the Pakistan media as far back as 2003. Herald (July 2003) documented how, after their training, the new jihadi recruits were 'sent to the ISI which provides trekking kits, communication equipment and weapons for shipment across the LoC. Finally the team goes through the Pakistan army posts which offer them rest and food on their way in as well as out'.
A serious indictment of Pakistan's complicity came in the UN report on Suicide Attacks in Afghanistan, an analysis of suicide bombings between 2001 and 2007. The report pointed at the 'training camps sprouting in and around the heavily forested Shawat region in North Waziristan and the Pakistani Taliban recruiting, training, raising money'.
The report also took issue with Pakistan's 'willingness to tolerate attitudes that encourage and justify the use of suicide attacks' and cited several instances.
Lashkar, which renamed itself as Jamaat-ud Dawa on the advice of the ISI, has been actively recruiting its cadres and training them in several schools and camps even after the global crackdown on such groups repeatedly after the September 11 attacks.