Al Qaeda linked terrorists helped a Muslim insurgency carry out attacks on schools and security forces in southern Thailand, the country’s new security adviser told The Associated Press.
| Gee. Golly. Thaksin and I thought they were local bandidos... |
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 early Sunday indicate the attackers are foreign-trained extremists, officials and experts said. "At present international terrorists are linked together like a network, with al Qaeda at the core," retired Gen. Kitti Rattanachaya, a special security adviser appointed after the assaults, told AP. "They might give moral, ideological or tactical support to each other. These groups know each other well, they were comrades-in-arms in Afghanistan."
| My guess is that the bad guys in this case are a start-up, an independently owned and operated local affiliate that has the eventual objective of merging with or being acquired by the international giant in the field... |
Kitti, 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 show they had help, possibly from the Kampulan Mujahideen Malaysia, which has ties to the al Qaeda-linked regional terror network Jemaah Islamiyah, he said.
| As well as to PAS, which is its legitimate political face... |
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. 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, Kitti said. After the war ended in 1989, Thai fighters returned home and "formed their own organizations" to conduct insurgencies, Kitti said. The Thai government took no notice of the development, said Kitti, 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.
| As Lenny Bruce once said, "What is, is. What should be is a dirty lie." |
In Sunday’s attacks in Narathiwat, 21 schools in a radius of about 6 miles 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.
| The number of schools attacked implies a fairly large force, not your local bandido gang. |
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 by AP 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.
| That's to be expected. The Afghan-trained gunnies are the seeds from which jihad is supposed to grow. |
He said that Muslim youths are disaffected partly because of the government’s insufficient funding for education in the south.
| If you look hard enough, you can always find some reason to be disaffected... |
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.
| That could be because they're in Thailand, where they speak Thai, not in Malaysia. What language do they expect to speak under the caliphate? I guarantee it won't be Yawi. |
"The people who don’t go to school here, go abroad," Jehissmail said. "Then the influence from abroad seeps in." In a bid to thwart such problems, Thailand’s justice minister on Thursday won agreement of Indonesian authorities to monitor Thai students attending Islamic schools in their country in order to keep tabs on possible terrorist recruits. |