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.
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘BODIES EVERYWHERE’: The incident occurred at a Filipino festival celebrating an anti-colonial leader, with the driver described as a ‘lone suspect’ known to police Canadian police arrested a man on Saturday after a car plowed into a street party in the western Canadian city of Vancouver, killing a number of people. Authorities said the incident happened shortly after 8pm in Vancouver’s Sunset on Fraser neighborhood as members of the Filipino community gathered to celebrate Lapu Lapu Day. The festival, which commemorates a Filipino anti-colonial leader from the 16th century, falls this year on the weekend before Canada’s election. A 30-year-old local man was arrested at the scene, Vancouver police wrote on X. The driver was a “lone suspect” known to police, a police spokesperson told journalists at the
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has unveiled a new naval destroyer, claiming it as a significant advancement toward his goal of expanding the operational range and preemptive strike capabilities of his nuclear-armed military, state media said yesterday. North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said Kim attended the launching ceremony for the 5,000-tonne warship on Friday at the western port of Nampo. Kim framed the arms buildup as a response to perceived threats from the US and its allies in Asia, who have been expanding joint military exercises amid rising tensions over the North’s nuclear program. He added that the acquisition
An American man identified as the son of a deputy director of the CIA was killed in eastern Ukraine last year while fighting under contract for the Russian military, an investigation by independent Russian media said. Michael Alexander Gloss, 21, died on April 4 last year in “Eastern Europe,” an obituary published by his family said. He was the son of Juliane Gallina, who was appointed the deputy director for digital innovation at the CIA in February last year. The story of how the son of a top-ranking US spy died fighting for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of
RSS