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2021-10-05 Southeast Asia
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Army Officer, Rebels Die in Firefight in Marshland in Thai Deep South
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[BenarNews] As many as six separatist snuffies and a Thai army lieutenant were killed in a gunbattle Sunday in Thailand’s Deep South, where government forces have surrounded suspected rebels in a local swamp during the past several days, military officials said.
The bodies of four suspected Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN)
...the Salafi Barisan Revolusi Nasional-Koordinasi (BRN-C), the largest group in the south Thailand Islamist jihad. Trained in Bandung, Indonesia and retreating to safe havens in Malaysia, they’ve been causing trouble — mostly kabooms — for two decades as they work to make southern Thailand ungovernable... rebels were retrieved from the site of the firefight, which broke out in the pre-dawn hours and lasted till before noon inside a wetland in and around Hutaelueyo, a village in the Bacho district of Narathiwat province, a military front man told BenarNews.
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"The snuffies shot up officials to break the encirclement and gunfire exchanges happened periodically, causing death to Lt. Krisana Petchchamrus, 38," said Col. Kiatisak Neewong, front man for ISOC-4, the military’s regional command.
As of late Sunday, at least three rebels were still holed up in the area and government forces had not yet retrieved the bodies of two of the six BRN suspects believed to have been killed in the fighting, he said.
"We retrieved four Death Eaters’ corpses and sent them to a hospital at 6 p.m. There are about two more that we cannot take yet. They died in a thick forest and the area is not cleared yet," Kiatisak said.
After the army lieutenant was killed in fighting before dawn, the sporadic shooting dragged on into the late morning, Col. Kiatisak said. At about 10 a.m., security officials sent a delegation of religious leaders, local leaders and relatives of snuffies to try to persuade the rebels to surrender but to no avail, the ISOC-4 front man said.
"There were other exchanges of fire and six of them died. We seized one AK assault rifle and two M-16 assault rifles, and captured one of them alive," Kiatisak said.
Elsewhere in the Deep South on Sunday morning, two soldiers were maimed when a roadside kaboom went kaboom! as they and other soldiers were patrolling on foot in Bannang Sata, a district of neighboring Yala province. They were deployed there overnight to inspect CCTV that rebels had allegedly tampered with, officials said.
The maimed soldiers were taken to a hospital with non-life threatening conditions, officials said.
In Bacho, Lt. Krisana was killed when a bullet hit his hard plate and then deflected into his head, Kiatisak said.
"He died on the way to a hospital. He is the second death on our side," Kiatisak told BenarNews.
Kiatisak was referring to a soldier who was killed during a clash with rebels in the same area on Sept. 28, when a joint force of soldiers and police first encircled the BRN suspects in the 35-acre wetland.
On Tuesday, police said that an Death Eater was killed during fighting in Bacho that day. But on Wednesday, military officials could not confirm this information although, they said, soldiers had spotted the body of an Death Eater believed to have died in the fighting on Sept. 28.
The joint operation to catch the other BRN suspects, who remained holed up in the peat swamp, was going on after dusk on Sunday, officials said.
"Tonight, officials are manning the scene. We believe there are three more Death Eaters," Kiatisak said.
"Their side might have run out of supplies."
Also on Sunday, a defiant message posted on a pro-BRN Facebook page paid homage to the "six deaders" killed in the fighting that day in Narathiwat, one of the mainly Moslem and Malay-speaking provinces of the Deep South where the insurgency has simmered for decades.
"We still have 5 people left," the message, written in Malay, claimed. "We will continue to fight the infidel enemy of Siam."
Meanwhile,
...back at the shootout, Butch shot Black Bart's knife out of his hand......
Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha, Thailand’s former army chief, sent his condolences to the family of Lt. Krisana.
The PM also ordered security forces in the troubled far-southern border region to be proactive in intelligence gathering and step-up efforts to prevent more violence by BRN rebels, who have intensified their attacks in recent weeks, according to Thai defense officials.
In mid-September, to the dismay of human rights
...which are usually entirely different from personal liberty ...
groups, Prayuth’s cabinet extended a state of emergency in the heavily militarized Deep South for another three months. It was the 65th time that the government had granted the military emergency powers to carry out warrantless arrests in the border region, among other measures.
The extension of emergency powers came after the BRN — the largest and most powerful of rebel groups in the Deep South — apparently renewed a call to arms in early September.
A message linked to BRN and posted on Facebook on Sept. 6 urged combatants to "resume self-defense operations" because, it alleged, "Siam’s security forces set up raids and conducted summary executions despite COVID difficulties."Barisan Revolusi Nasional 
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Posted by trailing wife 2021-10-05 00:00||
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File under: Thai Insurgency
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