A checkpoint in downtown Pattani, in Thailand’s deep south, where attacks occur weekly amid ongoing clashes between the Thai army and armed Islamist groups.
A man is searched and arrested with a blade concealed in his trousers, on the road between pattani and narathiwat, in Thailand’s deep south.
A Thai soldier behind bulletproof glass, in Thailand’s deep south.
The Jihad Wittaya religious school was ransacked and burned down in 2016 by the Thai army, which suspected its teachers of having ties to Islamist insurgents and of training future fighters. Amid the rubble, the son of the former headmaster — now living in exile abroad — reads the Quran. A campaigner for the promotion of Malay culture, he himself has been arrested and imprisoned numerous times by the Thai authorities.
Military patrol aboard a Thai army armoured vehicle in the Narathiwat region, under martial law due to bomb attacks, in southern Thailand.
Lieutenant General Paisal Nusang, director of Internal Security Operations Command Region 4 (Southern Thailand), aboard an American Black Hawk helicopter after a security meeting at a military base.
A wanted poster issued by the Thai army, featuring individuals suspected of belonging to the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN), the country’s main terrorist group, displayed at a military checkpoint in southern Thailand.
At the Pattanapanyapawa Islamic orphanage, widows and orphans of fighters from "PULO", a Muslim armed group in southern Thailand, gather in preparation for Eid.
This mother says she wants her two children to become martyrs, like their father who was killed by the Thai army. He was a member of the "PULO" terrorist group, whose leader is now hiding in Sweden.
Three Malay women, whose two husbands and brother have been arrested and are held by the Thai army, visit a Muslim law firm in Yala, southern Thailand. The three men are suspected of belonging to the "BRN".
Temduang Wongsa, 53, who works for the Thai administration in the south of the country and whose military husband is deployed in the region, is being treated at Pattani hospital after her car bomb exploded in an assassination attempt targeting officials by Muslim insurgents.
Temduang Wongsa’s sisters wait in the Pattani hospital waiting room. The family is believed to have been targeted by Islamist terrorists because several of their members work for the Thai state in the southern provinces.
Patum Nakthong, 58, stepped on a landmine in August 2023 in the rubber field where she was working with her daughter. Here she is at home, in the village of Ban Cho Wha, in southern Thailand.
Patum Nakthong is believed to have been targeted because she is Buddhist.
Narum Sak, a former Buddhist monk turned Thai soldier, points to a bullet hole he attributes to Islamist terrorists, in a temple in Sungai Kolok province. Back when he was still a monk, he was the one who found Patum Nakthong gravely wounded and saved her life the day she stepped on a landmine.
Abu Malek, 36, a BRN fighter since the age of 16, carries out bomb attacks on Thai soil. Here he is during a meeting at a safe house in the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Nikmatullah Bin Seri, one of the leaders of the BRN, an armed Islamist movement operating in southern Thailand, during an interview at a safe house hotel in the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Harun Bin Ishak, a member of the BRN since 1983 and now a recruiter and trainer of new fighters for the organisation’s armed wing, had his son tortured and killed by the Thai army in 2008 in the south of the country. Harun Bin Ishak lives in hiding in Malaysia, here in the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur.
These Thais, originally from Surin and Buriram in northeastern Thailand, were relocated by the government to the village of Ban Ai Ka Po in the far south of the country to blend in with the Malay population in 1976. In the 1970s, the Thai government pursued an assimilation policy by providing housing and employment to northern Thais in the Malay provinces of the south.
Victim of Islamist terrorists:
Suyanee Seeba’s mother visits her daughter, who lies in a coma in the emergency ward of Hat Yai hospital. The 40-year-old, a member of the Volunteer Defense Corps—a civilian force committed to peace—was the target of a car bomb assassination attempt by Islamist insurgents a few days earlier.
Victim of the Thai army:
The wife and young daughter of Malay activist Roning Dolah point to the spot where he was gunned down by a masked commando, just outside their home in a village in Thailand’s Pattani province.
The day of Eid al-Fitr in narathiwat.
