MACAU DAILY TIMES: More Thais in radical muslim schools

More Thais in radical muslim schools
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   on 17/10/2009 01:07:00
 
Thais outnumber other Southeast Asians in radical Islamic schools in Pakistan, a
trend that could have an impact on the insurgency in southern Thailand, a
leading terrorism expert said yesterday.
Sidney Jones, a Jakarta-based senior adviser with the International Crisis
Group think tank, said that in one school in the Karachi area, a list showed
that nine Thais, four Malaysians and one Indonesian were among the students.
“Every time we can get a list of Southeast Asians in schools in Pakistan
it’s the Thais that outnumber the Malaysians or Indonesians,” she told the
Foreign Correspondents Association in Singapore.
Jones, an authority on the Jemaah Islamiyah and other Southeast Asia-based
extremist groups, noted however that Pakistan schools where the Thai students
study belong to the Salafi group associated with ultra-conservative Wahabi
scholars in Saudi Arabia.
The more radical leaders of the rebellion in southern Thailand are known to be
anti-Wahabi, she said.
“If we have more and more people coming back from the Salafi schools in
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or elsewhere, I don’t know how that will change [the
Thai insurgency] but that’s something we need to watch,” Jones said.
She said there was evidence in Indonesia suggesting that some Salafi Muslims
were making a “crossover” into radical Islam.
“We need to know much more about what kind of recruiting networks are taking
place abroad where Indonesian students and Southeast Asians – Singaporeans,
Malaysians, Indonesians, Filipinos and Thais – are studying,” she said.
The Muslim-majority southern Thai provinces of Narathiwat, Pattani, Yala and
parts of Songkhla have been gripped since January 2004 by a bloody insurgency,
led by shadowy Islamic rebels who have never publicly stated their goals.
More than 3,900 people have been killed over the past five years in the region,
which was an autonomous Malay Muslim sultanate until 1902, when it was annexed
by predominantly Buddhist Thailand, provoking decades of tension.