Thailand: Tough Times For Terrorists

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August 12, 2008:  In the south, Islamic gunmen fired on a family in a truck, killing the mother and two children. The killings continue in the south, as do the police making arrests and the army flushing Islamic terrorists out of camps in the bush. Time is working against the Islamic radicals, as several years of violence down there has angered the Moslem population. Islamic terrorist attacks on actual, or seemingly, "disloyal" Moslem civilians, merely made more southerners angry at the radicals. While there are no big breakthroughs here, the trends are going against the Islamic radicals.

August 9, 2008: Islamic terrorists beheaded a man in the south, apparently suspecting him of being a police informant. Elsewhere in the south, Islamic radicals fired on an army base, wounding a soldier.

August 2, 2008: In the south, seven small bombs (usually dropped into trash containers) went off. Most were near convenience stores (7-11s), and two people were wounded. The two towns are frequented by tourists, and these bombs are a rare attack on the lucrative tourist trade. Police soon arrested 13 teenagers believed responsible for planting  the bombs. The Islamic terrorists appeared intent on spreading fear, not causing casualties.

July 30, 2008: Several hundred Cambodian Karen tribal villagers  have begun showing up at the Thai border. In this case, they were not driven out by the Cambodian army, but by fighting between different tribal factions.

July 29, 2008: Cambodia and Thailand are negotiating an end to the border dispute that led to troops confronting each other since July 15th.

July 25, 2008: The political violence is largely between urban and rural populations, so the two groups rarely encounter each other in person. But in the city of Udon, 650 kilometers northeast of the capital, saw 150 anti-government demonstrators attacked by 700 of the governments rural supporters. Over a dozen people were injured (most of them anti-government city folk), two of them critically.

 

 

 

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