Insurgents in Thailand’s south are recruiting and radicalizing young Muslim men from Islamic schools, but their struggle is independent of global jihad movements, a think tank said yesterday.
Separatist militants are inviting devout, hard-working Muslims mainly from private schools to join indoctrination programs — sometimes disguised as soccer training, an International Crisis Group (ICG) report said.
More than 3,700 people have died in the troubled provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani, Yala and some parts of Songkhla in a five-year insurgency against the rule of the central government.
Recruiters appeal to a sense of Malay nationalism in the mainly Muslim region, which was a Malay sultanate until it was annexed by Thailand in 1902, said ICG’s Thailand analyst, Run-grawee Chalermsripinyorat.
“They tell students in these schools that it is the duty of every Muslim to take back their land from the Buddhist infidels,” he said.
Islamic schools are the “breeding grounds” of the insurgency, where teachers covertly recruit from the thousands of religious young males — the “natural foot soldiers” of the movement, the report said.
The group said the movement was ideologically dissimilar from Islamist groups such as al-Qaeda, although it may use similar words to mobilize support.
“The recruits are driven not by global jihad but by a desire to defend their ethnic and religious identity from what they perceive as oppression by the Thai Buddhist state,” the report said.
Insurgents are drawing in students “moved by the history of oppression, mistreatment and the idea of armed jihad,” who go on to take an oath of allegiance followed by physical and military training, the report said.
The students are then assigned to different roles in village-level operations. Those rejected for frontline service can take on secondary roles, for example in psychological warfare.
ICG said the recruits were fueled by the Thai military’s human rights abuses in the south and that a regional political solution was undermined by policies concentrating power in Bangkok.
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