In the early hours of 3 August, rebels encircled a small Thai military outpost in Narathiwat province on the land border with Malaysia, before launching pipe bombs and opening fire with M-16 and AK-47 assault rifles. After a 15-minute gun battle, one Thai soldier was dead while four others had been injured before the insurgents fled across the Kolok River. Authorities suggested the attack may have been revenge for the killing of a suspected rebel by government troops in Pattani the previous day.

The night-time assault was one of a series of incidents of localized violence in the past few months, which typify the sporadic nature of the insurgency in Thailand’s Deep South. Muslim rebel groups in Thailand’s four Malay-speaking southern provinces have fought for independence for decades, with their motivation rooted in the conquest of the region by the Kingdom of Siam in 1785, and the 1909 Anglo-Siamese Treaty which first marked the border between Thailand and neighbouring Malaysia.

Violence is far from the scale of past years, with the last surge coming in the mid-2000s when then-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra ordered a military crackdown. An ongoing state of emergency and intermittent peace talks with rebel factions have since kept the conflict under control—though the current dialogue process between the government and the Barisan Revolusi Nasional stopped at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, placing this uneasy partial stalemate at risk.

Pattern of insurgent attacks

Amidst the pandemic, violence has remained at a low level, with fighters linked to Barisan Revolusi Nasional and a collection of smaller factions engaging in shootings and bombings, usually targeting security forces. It is often the case that one incident—such as a military raid, or rebel ambush—will spark a wave of retaliatory violence before the conflict recedes, only to later re-emerge somewhere else in the affected regions of Narathiwat, Pattani, Songkhla, and Yala, triggering another response.

A series of connected incidents in recent months evidence this trend. On 21 June, the military shot dead two suspected insurgents holed up in a hotel at a beach resort in the Yaring district of Pattani. Authorities said the men were tracked down after their involvement in an ambush in April that had killed three civilians as they traversed a highway in a nearby district. A motive for that incident was not uncovered, though police suspected it was in retaliation for the shooting of a rebel days earlier.