They scouted the Capitol building and killed Americans, now they have our guns.
Lashkar-e-Taiba caught the world’s attention during the Mumbai massacre in 2008 when terrorists trained by the Jihadist group funded by Osama bin Laden unleashed a wave of violence across the Indian city that killed over 150 people including six Americans.
After murdering Americans and scouting potential targets in the United States, including a chemical plant and the Capitol Building, harboring the 1993 World Trade Center bombing operative and a terrorist who opened fire at CIA headquarters, the Islamic terror group is now arming its men with the weapons that Biden abandoned to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
NBC News reported that police in India’s Kashmir region found that Jihadis are “carrying M4s, M16s and other U.S.-made arms and ammunition that have rarely been seen in the 30-year conflict” due to a “regional flood of U.S.-funded weapons that fell into the hands of the Taliban”.
Beyond rifles, an Indian general had previously described “a spillover of high-tech weapons, night-vision devices and equipment, which were left by the Americans in Afghanistan.”
While the weapons and equipment pose a threat to India, they may also enable the Pakistani Jihadist group to pursue its longstanding ambition of staging an attack on the United States.
The House Homeland Security Committee had been previously warned that the Jihadist group poses a threat to the United States. It has not only killed Americans, but recruited them, giving the Muslim group extensive capabilities to carry out attacks inside this country.
During the Mumbai attacks, the American victims included Alan Scherr and his 13-year-old daughter Naomi, who were killed while eating at a restaurant.
The remaining Americans were murdered at a Chabad Orthodox Jewish outreach center.
Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivkah, along with two other Americans, were reportedly tied up and tortured before they were killed. A doctor said that, “it was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again.”
But that was not the only American link to the attacks.
David Coleman Headley, a Muslim terrorist born in America to a Pakistani diplomat and an American mother, had been trained by Lashkar-e-Taiba after 9/11, and scouted targets for the Mumbai attack: including the Jewish community center. Some of the terrorists carried SIM cards from the United States suggesting that there may have been more American Muslims involved.
Headley would later be charged in a terror plot against Jyllands-Posten: a Danish newspaper which had printed Mohammed cartoons that involved taking hostages and beheading them.
Lashkar-e-Taiba had a long history of recruiting Americans: including members of the Virginia Jihad Network. Ali Asad Chandia, a former Muslim Students Association president teaching at an Islamic school in Maryland, was charged with providing material support to the terror group. Ahmad Abousamra, a Muslim operating out of Mansfield, Massachusetts, had sought out Lashkar-e-Taiba before appearing on the FBI’s most wanted list as a key ISIS figure.
During the Virginia Jihad Network investigation, Masoud Khan, one of the men charged, revealed that the terror boss behind the Mumbai attack had asked them to conduct “information gathering” operations in the United States, specifically “an unnamed chemical plant in Maryland”: implying that the group was considering possible attack plots in the United States.
Syed Haris Ahmed and Ehsanul Sadequee, Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants operating in Georgia, were accused of making videos casing the Capitol Building in D.C. and other targets, and sent the videos to a facilitator for Lashkar-e-Taiba. Sadequee was convicted of conspiring to provide material support to Lashkar-e-Taiba.
After Mir Aimal Kansi, a Pakistani Muslim, opened fire at CIA headquarters in Langley, he hid out at a safe house constructed by Osama bin Laden at Lashkar-e-Taiba’s headquarters. That same safe house was alleged to have been used by 1993 World Trade Center bombing operative, Ramzi Yousef.
Figures linked to the terror group reportedly provided aid to shoe bomber Richard Reid and to the 2006 transatlantic plot to bomb airliners headed from the UK to America.
Now Lashkar-e-Taiba, and its partner terror group, Jaish-e-Mohammad, are heavily armed courtesy of Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal. And that may be the tip of the iceberg. The interwoven infrastructure of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Al Qaeda means that the latter will likely have access to whatever the former does. The central role of Lashkar-e-Taiba’s training camps in international Islamic terrorism also means that its weapons or technology will benefit Jihadists around the world. And while the weapons abandoned by Biden in Afghanistan will more immediately show up in the hands of nearby Jihadis like Lashkar-e-Taiba, with time they will spread further to the Middle East and North Africa. And, perhaps, eventually closer to home.
Biden’s destructive actions in Afghanistan not only cost American lives and destroyed our credibility, leading to new conflicts, they directly put weapons into the hands of Islamic terrorists.
For now, Indians are paying the price, but in time Americans will suffer for what Biden has done.
