Grieving relatives of slain Muslim militants buried their loved ones in southern Thailand yesterday, as the army prepared for a long struggle against thousands more insurgents.
After Wednesday's eruption of violence, army chiefs ordered two extra battalions into the region as the predominantly Buddhist "Land of Smiles" digested what newspapers described as one of the bloodiest days in Thailand's modern history.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said 107 "bandits" and five soldiers and police died in the fighting, which started when gangs of black-robed young men, some wearing Islamic slogans, launched dawn attacks on about 15 army and police posts.
The reports of suicidal attackers and pictures of the corpses of lightly-armed men splashed across front pages sparked concerns a Muslim separatist rebellion that rocked the region in the 1970s and 1980s has returned with a vengeance.
"I would say the military phase has just started," Gen Pallop Pinmanee, who presided over a bloody shoot-out at a mosque in Pattani, told Bangkok radio.
Analysts fear international militant networks, such as Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, might also find a fertile recruiting ground among the impoverished region's disaffected Muslim youth.
Critics were quick to question the insistence of Mr Thaksin and his cousin and army chief, Gen Chaiyasidh Shinawatra, that drugs and crime rather than religious or separatist ideology lay at the root of the violence.
"What the two leaders do not see, or pretend not to see, is that this is not about addiction or banditry; this is about a fanatical ideology that none of us knew existed on such a grand scale," the Nation newspaper said.
In the worst violence, troops fired tear-gas and stormed a centuries-old mosque, killing 34 armed men inside. An angry crowd gathered as soldiers dragged bodies from the bullet-riddled building.
With Muslim sentiment divided between anger and support for military action at the mosque, Thailand's top Muslim cleric, speaking on national television, backed the operation.
"The authorities exercised reasonable restraint in dealing with the situation. They were patient and waited for a long time outside the mosque," spiritual leader Sawat Sumalayasak said.
Others disagreed.
"If the officers had waited for another couple of days they could have caught them alive, but they didn't. They killed them all," Uma Meah, secretary of the Central Islamic Committee of Pattani, said after a meeting of residents.
A Muslim lawyer said authorities in the predominantly Buddhist country had ridden roughshod over Islamic sensibilities.
- (Reuters)