After years of claiming that simmering violence in its Muslim south was simple banditry, Thailand is now coming to grips with a scourge that has long plagued other parts of Southeast Asia: terrorism.
A frighteningly coordinated guerrilla assault on an army camp that left four soldiers dead has shaken this mainly Buddhist country.
PHOTO: AP
Thailand's new security adviser General Kitti Rattanachaya yesterday blamed Sunday's attack on the local separatist group, Mujahideen Pattani, with help from outsiders, possibly the Kampulan Mujahideen Malaysia.
Analysts say that militant organization is tied to the regional terror network Jemaah Islamiyah, that is in turn linked to al-Qaeda.
"I believe these groups are certainly linked. They might give moral, ideological or tactical support to each other. These groups know each other well; they were comrades-in-arms in Afghanistan,'' he said.
Sunday night's mayhem started with a ring of fire when 21 schools in a 10km radius around an army camp were set ablaze simultaneously.
Using the arson as a diversion, a gang drove brazenly into the unprepared army camp and pinned down baffled, sleepy troops with automatic weapons fire.
"It was just like in the movies," said Pornpich Phuntamdet Patanakullert, a local legislator.
Roads leading to the camp were blocked by felled trees, tires and nails to slow down reinforcements. The shooting stopped 20 minutes later when the attackers vanished into the night with more than 100 guns stolen from the armory.
Sunday's attack represents the biggest internal security challenge for Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra -- a valued ally in the US-led war on terror since his forces captured a top regional Muslim extremist suspect, Hambali, an al-Qaeda pointman and Jemmah Islamiyah commander, who had been hiding out in Thailand in August.
No one has claimed responsibility for Sunday's raid.
"It's difficult to identify the exact perpetrators but certainly these are violent Islamist groups," said Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert and author of a book on al-Qaeda.
"The fact that they have taken weapons shows they will use the weapons against the Thais," he said in a telephone interview from Singapore.
While the government now says it believes that local Muslim separatists are to blame, Thaksin dismisses suggestions that they might be linked to "international terrorism" -- code words for Hambali's Jemaah Islamiyah or its parent group, al-Qaeda.
But some analysts disagree, citing reports that young Thai Muslims may have been trained abroad by Islamic extremists.
The violence has put the spotlight on the grievances of ethnic Malay Muslims in southern Thailand, who have long complained of poor treatment by the Buddhist-dominated government in Bangkok.
The deep south provinces of Pattani, Narathiwat, Yala and Satun are the only Muslim majority areas in Thailand.
The region was a hotbed of an Islamic separatist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the 20,000 Islamic fighters gave up arms after a 1987 government amnesty, but the unrest began brewing anew in December 2001 with hit-and-run attacks on police and army and bombings.
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