In Pakistan during May 2008 - A party of Lashkar trainee fighters bumped along in a hand -painted bus that spluttered and lurched into the wooded mountains of Pakistan - administered Kashmir. Qahafa the Bull, the mujahid trainer, and chacha Zaki, the outfit's military commander, had selected them from a much larger pool of recruits, and from this group they intended to choose the final ten -man team for Operation Bombay.
Arriving at the House of the Holy Warriors, on the bowl -like plains high above Muzaffarabad, the men were frisked for cigarettes, opium and tobacco, before being photographed and fingerprinted. No one would be allowed to leave without an instructor for fear of contaminating the outfit, although none of them had any idea as to where they were being assigned.
Anxious and exhausted from the bone - breaking 350 -mile journey, the trainees were shown to their canvas barracks, sixteen in each tent, each one issued with a number to replace his real name.
They would be allowed only one monitored phone call a week. Qahafa the Bull and his instructors regulated sleeping, eating, washing and praying. Chatting about home life was discouraged. All of them did it anyway. One of the thirty - two was Ajmal Kasab, who had no idea that he was on the way to Mumbai.
Born in September 1987 in Faridkot, a scrawny village hugging the highway on the poverty - stricken far eastern fringes of the Punjab, Ajmal's neighbours eked out a living in a landscape dotted with shrines and long - forgotten ruins dating back to the Indus Valley Civilization. This was a historic recruiting ground, with many levies drawn from here by the British, and for centuries before them by warring princes.
But Partition had sent the Hindu and Sikh residents fleeing to India, while their homes were taken over by Muslim refugees, who barricaded themselves inside brick compounds to endure Pakistan's Year Zero. Physically closer to India than to any of the Punjab's great cities, villagers were raised on stories of loss, and grew up despising their looming neighbour. The mosque was the only communal meeting point.
Chacha Zaki, who came from Okara, Faridkot's nearest city, twenty miles away, had left the district to fight in the secret Afghan war of the 1980 s, as did hundreds of thousands of others from the Punjab. Afterwards, he had joined up with a lecturer at Lahore's University of Engineering, Hafiz Saeed, who spun emotive stories of his family having lost thirty - six relatives during the Partition slaughter. In 1990 , the fighter and the lecturer (who was also a cleric) formed Lashkar - e - Toiba to spread a message that those who fled and their descendants could take revenge by destroying India, piece by piece. They fed off the anger, destitution and sense of dislocation that permeated every household.
In Faridkot, Ajmal and his four siblings lived behind a turquoise tin door. The main street was a sump, strung with petrol pumps and mechanical repair shops that serviced passing trade. Once the family had been goat herders and later they had sold meat, giving them their surname, which loosely translated as 'butcher'.
But the Kasabs had fallen on hard times and Ajmal's father laboured 150 miles away on the building sites of Lahore, earning 400 rupees a week. The family home had no toilet or electricity. They drew their water from a communal tap, threw their rubbish over the wall and slept nose - to - toe in the room where they ate, lit by a single kerosene lamp.
The home was ruled by Ajmal's mother, Noor Elahi, who fell pregnant during her husband's occasional visits, but otherwise lived a covered life inside the family compound. With his father absent, Ajmal, the second son, a boy whose name in Arabic meant 'the handsome one', was rebellious. Short and muscly, he grew his hair long, chewed tobacco and hung out at Faridkot's bus stand. But the district was changing, its mood lifting, mainly through the success of Lashkar, which had made its reputation taking on one of the largest security establishments in the world in Indian -administered Kashmir, supporting an insurgency that had exploded there in 1989 .
Forlorn Okara sent so many soldiers on jihad it became feted as a 'blessed city' and Lashkar made sure everyone heard the message: free literature handed out after Friday prayers, the health checks conducted by Lashkar -sponsored doctors, lavish tamasha s hosted for every shaheed , or martyr. Lashkar volunteers would shower the community with sweets and his family with compensation before the deceased's testament was read aloud like a battle citation. Dying for jihad in Kashmir was the highest accolade one could strive for in a bitter landscape where the alternative was living for nothing and it brought respect and dignity to families who previously had none.
Visiting commanders toured like pop idols. Posters of martyrs were pinned in doorways in Okara, where in other cities one would see Bollywood movie posters. Collection boxes fi lled up in the grocer's shop. Graffi ti dominated every village wall: 'Go for jihad. Go for jihad.' Others attested to the new world order: 'Neither cricket stars nor movie stars, but Islamic mujahideen .'
Teenagers like Ajmal read stirring youth publications printed by Lashkar's media wing, which liberally used the testimonies of slain fi ghters to solicit new recruits, even penning a cartoon strip in one, which children nicknamed Shaheed Joe . The outfi t knew what it was doing. 'Children are like clean blackboards,' declared a Lashkar provincial chief. 'Whatever you write will leave a mark on them for ever.'
Ajmal's turning point came in 1999 , the year Pakistan and India went to war in the Kashmir heights at Kargil and his father Amir came home from Lahore sick with TB . From now on, Amir would earn about half of his construction wage, around 250 rupees (£ 1 . 50 ) a week, wheeling a handcart laden with fried snacks around Faridkot's dusty square. He fought with his son, whom he expected to make up his loss, eventually sending the thirteen - year - old to work as a labourer in Lahore. Up at 4 a.m., washing in public toilets, Ajmal grew bitter and exhausted, his ambition blunted, his fear and loneliness pricked at night. He missed his mother and resented his vicious father.
After six backbreaking years in the building trade, Ajmal met a cocky youth who worked for the Welcome Tent Service, a catering business based in Jhelum, a city on the road to Islamabad. He was recruiting cooks, and off ering hot food, safety and more money. The hungry Ajmal moved to Jhelum and made a new friend, Muzaff ar, whose name meant 'victorious'. He had his own ideas about surviving. Rolling rotis by day, he took Ajmal prowling at night, encouraging the smaller teenager to wriggle through bathroom windows, breaking into homes and offices.
With money in their pockets, Ajmal and Muzaffar went to the cinema and watched multiple showings of Sholay, a high - octane Bollywood thriller in which a veteran cop recruits two thieves, one of them played by Amitabh Bachchan, to catch one of their own. In November 2007 , they headed for Pakistan's cantonment city of Rawalpindi to buy a gun, hoping to become fully fledged hoods.
The city was buzzing with a carnival - like atmosphere. Elections were coming, Benazir Bhutto was back in town after an absence of almost a decade and the streets with fi lled with festive shamiana s and fairground rides in preparation for Eid. Wandering around the tents, Ajmal and Muzaff ar met an elderly man, who bought them tea and persuaded them to visit the local Lashkar recruiting offi ce.
They were welcomed like long - forgotten relatives with plates of rice and mutton. 'They asked us our names, telling us to come the next day with our clothes and supplies.' When one of the men in the offi ce wrote ' Daura - e - Sufa' on a chit, telling them to travel to an address in Muridke outside Lahore, they readily agreed. Ajmal could barely read but with those few pen strokes, they had, without realizing it, enlisted on a two - week Lashkar conversion course.
Within twenty - four hours, Ajmal and Muzaff ar had reached Lashkar's global headquarters in Muridke, thirty minutes outside Lahore, a place called Markaz - e - Taiba - the Centre of the Pure. Passing through a succession of checkpoints, they were frisked and relieved of their mobile phones.
Inside, they joined thirty more newcomers, all of them nervous and tired from long journeys across the Punjab, their possessions crammed into tin trunks. A vast site, the Centre of the Pure resembled an expensive private university. There were broad roads and flower - lined pathways, playing fi elds, gardens, classrooms and an enormous concrete swimming pool, close to the back gate. The grandest building was the Abu Harrera mosque, which could hold 5 , 000 and whose parade ground outside was strung with electric fans to keep the observants cool. There was even a girls' school, something that surprised village boys whose sisters never left the family home until the day they married.
The second day they were woken at 4 a.m., and the programme began with prayers, the fi rst words in a religious immersion course. Unlike other groups that sent mercenaries into battle without any indoctrination, but who fought anyone declared as an enemy of the Muslim community, Lashkar rebuilt its recruits in its image to operate under strict religious, political and ideological guidelines. 'We were fi rst converted from Sunni to Ahl - e - Hadith and we were taught the methods of the Hadeethis ,' Ajmal recalled.
At first, he struggled. 'Everything from namaz [prayer] to lunch to dinner happened with clockwork precision,' he said. 'The trainers were very strict.' He preferred the afternoons, when they played cricket, a game that since early childhood had enabled Ajmal to vent his hatred and anger towards India. In these dusty matches on the Muridke grounds, Pakistan was always the winner.
One week in, they were introduced to Qahafa the Bull, chacha Zaki's number two, and from the start the boys were in awe of his fi ghting prowess. After evening prayers, Qahafa gathered the boys in the main mosque to hear stories of sacrifi ce and triumph, screening fi lm of successful fi dayeen attacks on Indian installations in Kashmir. Qahafa and his trainers continuously distinguished between fidayeen and suicide missions. The latter were unthinkable. 'Suicide is to kill oneself in desperation after one fails to achieve that goal which has been set,' Ajmal was told. A fi dayeen squad 'died trying to achieve a virtuous goal'.
They fought to win, and if they died that was a victory, too. Finally, chacha Zaki arrived, driven into the campus in a Toyota pickup packed with armed guards, dressed in his trademark Afghan pakul cap and raw woollen shawl. It was many years since Lakhvi had fought the Soviets, his prominent belly and the zabiba (prayer bump) on his forehead signalling that he spent more time these days in the mosque. Lakhvi welcomed the new recruits and introduced them to a roster of instructors led by Al - Qama.
Originally from Bahawalpur, in the southern Punjab, his real name was Mazhar Iqbal, and until recently he had run Lashkar's Kashmir operation. From now on trainers like Qahafa and Al - Qama would become father fi gures to the boys, as they gradually relinquished ties with their real families. Al - Qama had news. He revealed that he was looking to assemble a special team for a secret operation: 'We are readying to attack big cities in India. We shall start a war from within so that India is hollowed out.'
(Excerpted with permissions from Penguin Books India from the book The Siege: The Attack on the Taj by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott - Clark)
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