NARATHIWAT AND PATTANI PROVINCES, Thailand—Habib Hinah didn’t cry out when the bullet pierced the back of his leg, he said. The 10-year-old instantly went into shock. He spent two weeks recovering in the hospital. “I’m not scared,” Habib insisted in August during an interview in his home, where the walls were pockmarked with bullet holes.

Habib was among six civilians injured in a July attack on a security checkpoint that also killed five members of the Thai security forces in Narathiwat province. That incident—involving both guns and pipe bombs—was followed in August by more than 50 coordinated attacks, mainly targeting infrastructure, such as government offices, telecommunications towers, and railways.

Muslim and Buddhist civil society leaders comfort Habib, 10, as he recounts being shot in the leg during an attack on Thai security forces stationed outside his home in Narathiwat province, seen on Aug. 12. Bullet holes are still visible in the wall behind him.

All of this is part of an increase in violence in Buddhist-majority Thailand’s far south, where ethnic Malay Muslims make up roughly 80 percent of the population and talks between the government and Islamist separatists have failed to resolve a decadeslong insurgency. The largest armed group in the area is the Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN), which fights for the region’s independence.

The armed movement is relatively decentralized: Much of the BRN’s leadership is based in Malaysia, with field commanders in Thailand, and many local units broadly operate on their own. Smaller insurgent groups sometimes cooperate with the BRN. No group officially claimed responsibility for the deadly July attack or the August sabotage.

The soldiers who were killed in July were members of the paramilitary Thai Rangers force, which operates under the army’s command; two of them were Muslims. Habib’s mother, Susana Kotanyong, said the slain troops had been stationed near their home for many years, becoming like “cousins” to them. “When there was bad flooding last year, they helped us before they helped themselves,” she said.

Students walk to school in the morning, with a mosque in the background, in southern Thailand on Aug. 10.

In the 20th century, the government of Siam and then Thailand pursued an aggressive nation-building strategy among its various ethnic groups. This process floundered in the deep south, where Thai cultural norms rooted in Buddhism were largely rejected.

The separatist movement in southern Thailand initially flared in the 1960s but fizzled by the 1980s. The BRN spent much of the 1990s rebuilding and relaunched the insurgency with a violent escalation in 2004—around the same time that a power struggle between Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and the military weakened control over the restive south.

Neither side showed much restraint at first, according to Srisompob Jitpiromsri, the head of conflict monitor Deep South Watch and a lecturer at the Prince of Songkla University in Pattani. A spiraling crisis soon unfolded across the region in which the BLN initially targeted civilians. Human Rights Watch recorded nearly 2,400 deaths in the first three and a half years of the conflict; of those killed, nearly 2,200 were civilians.

The state’s crackdown was swift. In October 2004, Thai security forces violently dispersed a protest in Narathiwat, fatally shooting seven people and stuffing hundreds into police vans, in which another 78 people died. Thailand’s three southernmost provinces have been under some form of martial law or emergency decree since 2004.

The riverside area in the town of Pattani on Aug. 11.

From the beginning, there was debate over the religious nature of the violence, including among conflict monitors. However, Human Rights Watch reports that at least 23 Buddhist monks and novices have been killed since 2004, including in gruesome targeted attacks. The BRN maintains that it desires Shariah law for Muslim matters in the region.

The Thai military, meanwhile, was accused of committing extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture amid the conflict. Buddhist vigilante groups sometimes got involved in the violence; in 2007, a volunteer village defense force shot and killed four young Muslim protesters armed with sticks and rocks.

By 2014, there was a noticeable drop in violence, which followed the start of landmark peace talks between the BRN and Thai military the previous year. Jitpiromsri attributed the decline in violence to the talks, which he participated in as a mediator. But after years of negotiations with no real breakthroughs, the violence started to creep up again. “The peace dialogue didn’t have any tangible effects or results,” Jitpiromsri said. “Just meeting and talk, talk.”

According to Deep South Watch, the conflict in southern Thailand ebbed in 2020, with 116 deaths and 161 injuries from 335 violent incidents. By 2025, these figures had increased again to 523 casualties from 608 incidents. Today, the insurgency focuses primarily on security targets—though they may be in public places, like the checkpoint in Habib’s village.

There appears to be a “ceiling” to the level of violence the BRN is willing to use, Jitpiromsri said. It aims to pressure the Thai government without provoking an extreme response. The coordinated attacks on infrastructure in August were perhaps in an indication of that strategy. Despite the soldiers’ deaths in July, the subsequent attacks reportedly resulted in no deaths.

Buddhist monk Toh Waey meets with Muslim civil society leaders on Aug. 12, a few weeks after unknown assailants threw a homemade bomb at a soldiers’ camp on his pagoda grounds in Pattani province.

On Aug. 3, unknown assailants threw a bomb at a soldiers’ camp located on a Buddhist pagoda compound in Pattani province, though no troops were present at the time. The compound’s head monk, Toh Waey, who is known for promoting interfaith harmony, said he thought the attack was launched by people who wanted to cause problems between Muslims and Buddhists.

In the light of day, it appears there are more people trying to bridge the divide than widen it. At the pagoda later in August, Foreign Policy watched a Muslim teacher and the students she had brought to volunteer meet Toh Waey, who introduced them to a rescued elephant he cares for. That same day, he received a delegation of Buddhist and Muslim civil society leaders, insisting that they sit together on the same bench.

Buddhist monk Toh Waey meets with Muslim schoolchildren in Pattani province on Aug. 12.

“Some Buddhists don’t like that I’m friends with the Muslims, but we Muslims and Buddhists are brothers,” Toh Waey said. “We must live together as one family.”

Checkpoints are ubiquitous in the region. Driving from Songkhla, one must pass through three before reaching Pattani, a riverside town with trendy cafes, art galleries, and a craft beer bar that caters to Buddhist students at the university. But while ethnic and religious minorities elsewhere in the country have been absorbed into mainstream Thai culture, that level of nation-building has failed here.

Broader society in the region is conservative, and most women wear head or face coverings. “As Muslims, we cannot do many [Thai] cultural things,” said Muhammad Hayeewaehama, the vice president of an Islamic private school. He estimated that 80 percent of ethnic Malay Muslims send their children to religious schools.

The Thai government has for years suspected such schools of fostering extremism, and since the 1980s, it has pressured and incentivized Islamic schools to combine religious teachings with the state curriculum. Today, the students at Hayeewaehama’s school begin the day by singing the Thai national anthem and saluting the flag.

Malay Muslim students are made to salute the Thai flag and recite the national anthem as part of reforms to private Islamic schools pushed by the Thai government to try to better assimilate them, seen in Pattani province on Aug. 10.

Security is tighter in Yala and Narathiwat compared to Pattani, with checkpoints appearing even in town centers. Traffic regulations are strictly enforced, and security officers often question young men and boys after pulling them over for infractions such as not wearing helmets on their motorbikes—part of a strategy to cast a wide surveillance net.

Martial law in the region allows the military to detain suspects without charge for up to 37 days. “The soldiers use martial law as a tool to get information,” said Soraya Jamjuree, head of the Pattani-based Network of Civic Women for Peace. “They arrest so many people. Maybe they don’t really suspect you, but they say, ‘Give me information and I’ll let you go.’”

After the July attack, the military arrested many people from the surrounding community, including a bus driver from a nearby Islamic school who drove through the checkpoint daily, according to the school’s director, Fakhruddin Boto. A former senator, Boto was shot in an assassination attempt in 2006 that left him in a wheelchair; he had routinely criticized the military’s actions in the deep south on the senate floor. The soldier accused of shooting him was acquitted by a military court.

Fakhruddin Boto, pictured in Thailand on Aug. 12, was badly injured in an apparent attempted assassination in 2006.

This sometimes means the government shuts down non-violent pathways for change. Activist Artef Sohko, 41, is currently on trial for sedition and criminal association related to a talk he gave at Prince of Songkla University on the topic of independence. Sokho’s organization, the Patani, advocates for self-determination but is strictly against violence. The talk was followed by a symbolic vote on whether the region should have an independence referendum.

“If it’s just about the [facts of the] case, we should be safe” from conviction, Sohko said of his trial last month. “But they’re taking things from 10 years ago and connecting it to [the] BRN.” Sohko denies any involvement with the BRN, pointing to the fact that he fled Thailand a decade ago for a year and a half due to tensions with a local BRN unit.

Sohko argues that the use of violence has only put political reform in the region further out of reach. “We have always thought that one day we could be in this position,” he said of himself and his co-defendants. “Because what we are fighting for is trying to shift the struggle from people fighting with weapons to fighting politically, which is then a struggle against the structure of the Thai state.”

A village official shows his scars after he was badly injured by a bomb blast at a train station in Narathiwat province last year, seen on Aug. 12.

Domestic political turmoil has also hampered the peace process. Since then-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was overthrown in a military coup in 2006, the premiership has largely alternated between his political allies and military elites. When Shinawatra’s party returned to power in 2023, some in the deep south hoped for progress. The former leader visited the region in 2025, while his daughter was prime minister, and personally apologized for the deaths of protesters in 2004.

Jitpiromsri, of Deep South Watch, said that Shinawatra was more open to making concessions but had no power over the armed forces. The current government, more aligned with the military, is less open to compromise, he said.

Most of those whom Foreign Policy spoke with said they expect the situation to continue to deteriorate. “There’s no political space,” Sohko said. “It makes people lose faith. It will make the youth turn to BRN, turn to the armed groups.”

To some observers, the cycle of violence seems difficult to break. Jamjuree pointed out that the military tends to isolate the families of slain insurgents, refusing to give them financial support or scholarship, as is mandated for the children of other victims of the conflict. With few other opportunities, this increases the chances of the next generation getting recruited into the insurgency.

On the other hand, the BRN’s sometimes wanton use of violence can backfire: Habib, himself a Malay Muslim, now says he wants to join the Thai Navy when he grows up.