FÓRMULA III

Once training is complete, insurgents proceed in an operational capacity to inflict violence throughout the region. When leaders feel that it is necessary for an operation to go forward, the insurgents are directed to meet at specific rally points throughout the south. At the rally points the militants are issued weapons. From there they proceed to carry out the operation, return their weapons, and disperse back into their villages. Until the time that insurgents meet at the specified rally points, they often are unaware of who else belongs to the militant organization. “Sometimes, militants do not even know that members of their own hometowns are part of the extremist organization…” (Maisonti, 2004, p.28).

An interview with Mr. Don Pathan from The Nation newspaper in Bangkok reinforces the details of insurgent operations found in the government document translated by Thammanoon. Pathan describes the operations of one insurgent leader in the south named Ismael Rayalong, also known as Ustad Soh (Ustad or

Ustaz, meaning Islamic spiritual leader or teacher). Soh, according to Pathan, is

one of the individuals that the Thai 4th Army (responsible for the southern

provinces) has suspected as one of the leaders behind the violence today. For four or five years Soh has organized cells, made up of 4-5 men, all recruited from different regions to maintain operational security, to conduct acts of violence (Pathan, D., 2004b).

One insurgent, a 31-year-old Islamic teacher named Abdullah Akoh, operated under the guidance of Soh. Abdullah’s operational cell included four other men, all from different villages. In September 2004, Pathan interviewed Abdullah, handcuffed to his hospital bed after being shot by a security force

officer. Pathan’s report provides details of the April 28, 2004 raid as well as the assassination of a security force officer.

[Abdullah’s] team kept to themselves [sic] and were not permitted to know who was in the other cells. During military training, which included low crawls and simulated assaults using branches in place of guns and knives, Ustad Soh would make sure that each participating cell came from villages that were as far apart as possible in order to avoid further contact.

April 28, 2004, was just around the corner. The date was to mark Hikmahtullah’s [Talekat Hikmahtullah Abandan: a terrorist organization in the south whose translated name means Direction from God Towards Invincibility] first strike against the state that its members so despised. But for Abdullah, the price of this assault was too high. He said he was not willing to walk into certain death no matter how committed he was to the group’s cause.

“I asked Ustad Soh for guns, but he said we would only use knives,” Abdullah said…“He said that what he had been teaching us would be enough to keep us out of harm’s way and that we would be able to take a knife wound or a gunshot [without being hurt],” he added.

By the end of the day, 106 Muslim insurgents lay dead. Most, if not all, had been armed with nothing more than a knife when they attacked 11 police outposts across the region….Abdullah said he was shocked and saddened by the deaths of his comrades and blamed Ustad Soh for their deaths…[But] In spite of his falling out with his mentor, Abdullah said he was still committed to the idea of seeing Pattani liberated.

Three weeks after the bloody incident, Ustad Soh came around again, claiming to have a new set of instructions from his higher ups. This time guns and bombs could be used, Abdullah said. In July, Ustad Soh showed up with a 9mm handgun…“Something has to be done in this area. There has to be an incident, make some noise,” Abdullah quoted Ustad Soh as saying.

The nature of the attack would be similar to many previous hits – a security officer was to be shot with a handgun at close range by a gunman riding on the back of a motorbike. Abdullah said he spent a week monitoring a solider at a nearby outpost, observing how the soldiers moved to and from the nearby markets.

On July 22, Abdullah was prepared to take a life. The target would be a young Thai soldier. To him [Abdullah] it was just a target he had been observing for the past week or so. The act was for a noble cause, the liberation of Pattani from the infidels, Abdullah told himself. Abdullah said he drove up to the young soldier that he had been monitoring and pumped three or four shots into him – he doesn’t remember the exact number – at point blank range. But he wasn’t about to get away with this attack so easily. A soldier in the vicinity grabbed his rifle and shot Abdullah as he was speeding away on the back of his motorbike…“I don’t know how many rounds hit me but I was in tremendous pain,” Abdullah said.

The two sides entered into a fierce gunfight that lasted several minutes. Abdullah was able to catch a quick breath of air when the soldier had emptied his magazine. It was also at this moment that his driver decided to flee, leaving him lying on the roadside in a pool of blood, where he was taken into the custody of security forces (Pathan, D., 2004a).

Reports such as Pathan’s provide a useful insight into not only the operations but the mindset and ideology that motivates insurgents in the south to kill people. For emerging organizations in the south like Hikmahtullah, Sai Buri, and Agot (Ustad Help Ustad), the goal of the violence is not simply to kill Thais or Buddhists or moderate Muslims in order to force a political or social agenda. It also appears that insurgents in the south today do not limit their goals to irredentist action for the purpose of recreating a Pattani free from Siam. Instead the basis for the violence is deeply rooted in fundamentalist Islam: the insurgents are liberating true Muslims from infidels. The target of such a struggle is the state and symbols of the state: all representatives of the infidel. The catalyst for this terrorism, as Tan and others have pointed out, is the global jihad that insurgents witness happening around the world. There is a new sense of militant Islamic freedom and a new call to take action. The result, as seen in the Thai south, is radical terrorism.