Troops and police shot dead over 100 gun and machete-wielding Muslim separatists on Wednesday -- including more than 30 in a three hour mosque shootout -- on a day of carnage in Thailand's restive south.
Army chief General Chaiyasidh Shinawatra said 107 "bandits" and five soldiers had died in the fighting, which started when gangs of men launched dawn attacks on army and police posts across the predominantly Muslim region.
Many of those involved in the assaults, which mark a major escalation in four months of violence in the three southernmost provinces, were wearing black or dark green uniforms with bright red headbands.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra vowed to smash what he said were rings of troublemakers motivated purely by crime, rather than religion or ideology, in a region which was home to a low-key Muslim separatist rebellion in the 1970s and 1980s.
But the apparently widespread and coordinated nature of the attacks across the provinces bordering Malaysia suggested something other than pure gangsterism was afoot, analysts said.
"We will uproot them, depriving them of a chance to allude to issues of separatism and religion. In the end, they were all bandits," Thaksin told reporters.
After a three hour gun-battle at a prominent mosque in the provincial town of Pattani, soldiers were dragging bodies from the bullet-damaged building for fear they might be rigged to booby traps, witnesses said.
Troops had been stationed outside the building to keep back crowds.
Elsewhere in the forested, hilly region, television showed a sandbagged police post ablaze after one of the attacks. Burning motorcycles were scattered in and around the compound and the corpses of two rebels lay in the entrance hallway.
One wore a Muslim prayer cap while both had red scarves tied around their heads and waists.
One also wore a green T-shirt emblazoned with Arabic writing and the letters "JI" -- a possible reference to Jemaah Islamiah, the group linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network and blamed for terror attacks across Southeast Asia.
SOAKED IN BLOOD
Television also showed wounded border soldiers, their green battle fatigues soaked in blood, being hauled out of trucks onto hospital stretchers. At least one soldier was seen lying dead in the rubble of a destroyed building.
Thailand's three southernmost provinces have been hit by a wave of shootings, bombings and arson attacks that had claimed at least 60 lives since a January 4 raid on an army barracks that left four soldiers dead.
In Bangkok, Thaksin, who had been due to travel to southern Thailand next week, called an emergency security meeting.
Despite a huge military clampdown in the south, the violence has shown few signs of abating, leading analysts to fear the region's disaffected Muslim youth might become a fertile breeding ground for the likes of Jemaah Islamiah or al Qaeda.
In what looks increasingly like a policy vacuum, Bangkok has so far blamed the trouble on gangsters exploiting disgruntled elements of the local Malay-speaking population, who feel few emotional ties to the predominantly Buddhist country.
"Those who died must have believed they were dying for their religion," said Ahmad Somboon Bualang of Pattani's University of Prince Songkhla. "They must have had an ideology beyond separatism otherwise why would they attack with their bare hands and swords?"
Others said the authorities must come clean as quickly as possible to stave off accusations of staging a massacre.
"This is very shocking," said Bukhoree Yeema, a political scientist in the southern province of Songkhla. "If the government does not produce a clear-cut explanation, there will be massive repercussions from the Muslim community."
Yala Governor Boonyasidh Suwannarat said the coordination of attacks at around 5:30 a.m. (6:30 p.m. EDT Tuesday), and the way the assailants were armed, suggested a degree of training.
"This morning showed they have reached the stage of being confident enough to reveal themselves. Many of them were wearing white or red headbands as identification," he said.
"The type of knives they carried showed they must have been well trained," he added.