March 24, 2007: The army and police admit
they are facing a new enemy in the south. In the past, there were sometimes
Moslem separatists groups in the south that got violent. But these outfits,
which still exist, wanted to negotiate. So there was someone to talk to. The
current group of terrorists take their cues from al Qaeda. They only
communicate with the local Moslems, telling them that non-Moslems will be killed
and driven out, and a religious dictatorship will be established. Any Moslems
that disagree will be killed. The Islamic terrorists don't take credit for
their attacks, and don't want to negotiate. The police have discovered that
some of the several hundred religious schools are bases for the terrorists
(raids have yielded weapons and documents.) The schools were founded over the
last few decades with money and missionaries from Islamic charities based in
the Persian Gulf. These charities espouse a very conservative, militant version
of Islam.
March 19, 2007: Islamic terrorists attacked a
group of Buddhist widows (their husbands had earlier been killed by Islamic
terrorists) and killed three of them.
March 18, 2007: A lone gunman shot up a
Moslem village at night, using an assault rifle. Two people were killed and ten
wounded. The next day, Islamic militants distributed leaflets in the area,
claiming that the gunman was a soldier.
March 17, 2007: Ten Islamic terrorists,
riding motorcycles, drove by a ranger base in the south, firing their weapons.
Some rangers were able to fire back before the attackers rode off into the
night. One ranger was wounded. Meanwhile, an Islamic school was attacked, three
students were killed and seven wounded. The army said the Islamic terrorists
did it, in order to blame the army and get Moslem civilians angrier. The
Islamic militants, of course, said the army did it.
Elsewhere in the south, police arrested six
teenagers as suspects in the attack on a bus last week.
