Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists helped a Muslim insurgency carry out audacious attacks on 21 schools and on security forces in Southern Thailand, the country's new security adviser told reporters.
It was the first acknowledgment by a senior Thai official that foreign militants have helped local separatists stage hit-and-run attacks over the past two years, resulting in the killings of 56 police and soldiers.
The government had previously dismissed violence in the Muslim-dominated south as the work of "bandits" and criminal gangs. But the organization of the firebomb strikes on the schools Sunday indicate the attackers are foreign-trained extremists, officials and experts said.
PHOTO: AP
"At present international terrorists are linked together like a network, with Al-Qaeda at the core," retired General Kitti Rattanachaya, a special security adviser appointed after the assaults, said on Thursday. "They might give moral, ideological or tactical support to each other. These groups know each other well, they were comrades-in-arms in Afghanistan."
The general, a former army commander for the Southern region, said he believes the school attackers were from a local separatist group, Mujahideen Pattani. The assailants' organized manner shows they had help, possibly from the Kampulan Mujahideen Malaysia, which has ties to the Al-Qaeda-linked regional terror network Jemaah Islamiyah, he said.
Even Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, long worried about tarnishing Thailand's image by association with terrorism, acknowledged the perpetrators of the school attacks were insurgents rather than common criminals. He has played down, however, any foreign links.
Thailand is a predominantly Buddhist country. Islamic insurgents seeking a separate state fought in the provinces for decades before fading away in the late 1980s. Narathiwat, Pattani, Yala and Satun -- which border Malaysia -- are the only Muslim-majority provinces.
The genesis of new terrorism in Thailand lies in the Afghan war when many Thai Muslim youth went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet-aided communist government in the 1980s, the general said.
After the war ended in 1989, Thai fighters returned home -- just as Malaysian, Indonesian and Filipino Muslims did -- and "formed their own organizations" to conduct insurgencies, the general said.
The Thai government took no notice of the development, said the general, who retired seven years ago. "So we have come to the current situation. This problem happened because they do not accept the truth," he said.
In Sunday's attacks in Narathiwat, 21 schools in a radius of about 10km around an army engineers' camp were set ablaze almost simultaneously with military precision.
The attackers then moved on the camp, firing automatic rifles to keep troops pinned down. Four soldiers were killed.
Roads leading to the camp were blocked by felled trees, tires and nails to slow rescuers. After 20 minutes, the attackers vanished into the night with more than 100 stolen assault weapons.
Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert and author of a book on Al-Qaeda, offered a grim analysis: "It's difficult to identify the exact perpetrators but certainly these are violent Islamist groups," he said by telephone from Singapore. "The fact that they have taken weapons shows they will use the weapons against the Thais."
Most southern Thais interviewed said they want only to lead peaceful lives. Many who visited the burnt-out hulls of the schools this week were shocked at the devastation.
In one school, only the concrete frame of the two-story building remained. A pile of charred Arabic and Thai-translated textbooks lay in one corner, still wet from the water used to doused the fire.
Jehissmail Jehmong, an opposition Democratic Party member of Parliament for Pattani province, said some Thai militants who have returned home could be training young Thais in jungle camps in Thailand.
He said that Muslim youths are dissaffected partly because of the government's insufficient funding for education in the south.
Religious schools in the south are overflowing because there aren't enough government schools, which continue to emphasize the Thai language instead of Yawi, the Malay dialect spoken by local Muslims.
"The people who don't go to school here, go abroad," Jehissmail said. "Then the influence from abroad seeps in."
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