And The Jihad Continues

[Poetess]

Thai millitary intelligence is working flatout to keep grim images of dead Buddhists out of the mainstream press to pacify the righteous indignation of the Thai community and thus save the skin of radical Islamists. But in so doing are they shackling the hands of the victims of Islamic terror?

Michael Sheridan, The Times

IT IS the shoes of the murdered bus passengers that everyone remembers. Nine corpses, nine sets of footwear — a girl’s plastic sandals, a boy’s trainers and clean white socks, a woman’s sensible casuals — all lined up by the jungle roadside. The scene marked another grim milestone in an insurgency that has torn apart Thailand’s three majority Muslim provinces for the past three years.

First, the attackers threw a grenade to stop the minibus. Then they shot dead the passengers, one by one. Only the driver survived. The executioners heard him gabbling to Allah for forgiveness, realised he was not a Buddhist and spared him. After that, communal passions erupted. Crowds of Muslims and Buddhists took to the streets to demand protection. Since the ambush a string of killings claiming victims of both faiths has taken the death toll to more than 2,100.

The insurgency is now the bloodiest conflict in southeast Asia. Yet it is a war of shadows. The militants issue no communi-qués. They have no known leaders. They have made no precise demands. If they are connected to the worldwide network of Al-Qaeda and its affiliates there is no proof. There is a sense of siege over the hushed towns and quiet fishing villages in the palmy jungles of the far south of Thailand.

One officer in Thai military intelligence shows visitors photographs recording the eviscerated bodies of Buddhist monks, images so stark that they have been kept out of the Thai press for fear of igniting a pogrom. De facto ethnic cleansing is already in progress. When the Thai-Chinese community celebrated the year of the pig, a feast calculated to incite loathing for the infidels, militants unleashed 50 bomb and arson attacks on their businesses. The targets included a large rubber factory that lost more than £5m of stock.

Many Chinese are planning to sell up and go. But Ah Seng, an elderly Chinese herbalist living with his wizened wife in an open-fronted wooden shop-house, laughed at the thought that he would ever leave. The latest insurgents borrow political and military techniques from Iraq and Lebanon. Their favoured method is the drive-by assassination by a pillion-riding gunman on a motorbike. They also slit throats and cut off heads as examples.

“The coup leaders continue to ask the wrong questions and refuse to take the conflict for what it is — an Islamic insurgency,” said Professor Zachary Abuza of Simmons College, Boston, the leading foreign expert on the struggle. “Many Thais think it’s only about poverty and social justice,” he added. Abuza says that two well established separatist groups, the National Revolutionary Front and the Pattani Islamic Mujaheddin Movement, are the prime movers.

Intelligence officers from Thailand and its allies are not wholly convinced. Interrogations have produced stories of tall, hooded terrorist trainers who are not Thai. Eavesdroppers have picked up radio chatter in Indonesian. There remains little or no documentary evidence of global links, although a lone Arabic website has made its debut extolling the jihad in southern Thailand. Perhaps the greatest mystery is why the militants have stayed on their home ground, refraining from attacks on Thailand’s multi-billion-pound tourist industry.

In an ominous development, however, military intelligence officers recently disclosed that they had picked up two surveillance teams of suspected extremists in Bangkok and Phuket within the past 18 months.

“This is a downward spiral,” said Abuza, “and it could be just a matter of time.”

[Steeler [Crawler2]]

Oh, there is no doubt that the ethnic Malays in southern Thailand are playing with fire. They could find themselves ethnically cleansed in no time.