Word: pattani
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...ideological war now rages within the south's Muslim communities. Militants disseminate their radical creed through leaflets hand-scattered at night in villages or stuck to lamp-posts in towns and cities. One found recently outside a mosque in Pattani's Yarang district excoriates the NRC and "Siamese infidels" who corrupt young Muslims with drugs and money. It warns the "people of Pattani state" to reject all efforts of reconciliation by non-Muslims. "A dog is still a dog, even if it befriends a goat," it says. "People read the leaflets and then destroy them," says a Muslim aid worker...
...mobile phones, ripped through a hotel, a shopping center and an airport in the city of Hat Yai, killing two people and injuring more than 70, including four foreigners. The attacks came as a shock in part because Hat Yai, a regional commercial center 150 km north of Pattani, one of the provinces hardest-hit by the insurgency, had seen none of the violence that has claimed as many as 800 lives in the South since the beginning of last year...
...Even Buddhist monks and temples have been targeted. Across the south this year, four monks have been murdered (one was beheaded) and temples have been bombed, burned and shot at. Soldiers now routinely accompany monks on their morning alms round. At Pattani's Lak Muang temple, barefoot monks pad past sandbagged bunkers while soldiers keep fit and earn merit by jogging around a giant whitewashed stupa. But monks are quietly fleeing, say local Buddhists, and some soldiers have taken leave to be ordained as monks in a desperate attempt to bolster monastic numbers...
...must understand we had limited trucks and there were a lot of men arrested. Also, if they were normal people?and not fasting or on drugs, as I suspect many of them were?they would probably not have died." The men were taken to the military base at Pattani 150 km away. By the time the convoy arrived about six hours later, 78 of the men in the trucks had suffocated to death...
...Violence is not a new phenomenon in the three southern provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat. In the 1970s and '80s, the region was buffeted by bouts of unrest, but those then taking up arms had independence as their goal?not jihad. By the 1990s the handful of guerrilla bands fighting for a separate state had been largely marginalized by the central government's conciliatory approach. Bangkok pumped development funds into the south, started governing through local leaders, including Muslims, and pardoned a host of insurgents. Relative calm returned, until this year. Now, say experts, what used...