A man was rushed to a hospital with shrapnel wounds on his torso after an attacker threw a bomb next to a security booth last in Yala in Thailand’s Deep South, a region with ongoing violence associated to the spiritual separatist insurgency. Earlier that night, gunmen shot one other man on a bike in Bannang Sata, the identical district of Yala the place the bomb attack happened. The man was shot twice in his leg. He was also taken to the hospital. Police continue to analyze the attacks.
Undiscovered of Thailand’s most conflicted area, Yala has been the site of bombings and shootings by separatist militant groups. In November, a parked motorbike exploded on a rural road in Yala and broken vehicles carrying ballot packing containers from a neighborhood election. That month, 86,000 police officers were deployed to keep the peace at polling stations.
Yala used to be a part of the Pattani Kingdom before it came beneath Siamese management in 1785, and formally became part of Thailand in 1909. Like different provinces in Thailand’s Deep South, Yala has deep non secular tensions between Muslims and Buddhists. About 72% of individuals in Yala are Malay-speaking Muslims, and the rest are Thai Buddhists. Islamist separatist teams want Yala and three other Deep South provinces to become an autonomous space with an Islamic schooling system taught within the Malay language.
Read more about the Southern Thailand insurgency HERE..