Things Fall Apart; Thailand's Muslim insurgency is spinning out of control.

Byline: George Wehrfritz (With Am Kumpera in Narathiwat)

Police with guns check vehicles at the gate, and inside the perimeter a siege mentality prevails. Yet this is no army camp: it's a school in the Thai village of Tak Bai. Since Islamist extremists launched a bloody separatist campaign in Thailand's south in 2004, schools and other government outposts have become targets, forcing them to fortify themselves.

Unlike the rest of Southeast Asia, fundamentalist violence here is getting worse. The region is now a patchwork of "red zones"--the military term for areas where insurgents kill with impunity. Experts say that Thailand, a mostly Buddhist country, now faces the worst unrest since it annexed the Muslim region bordering Malaysia in 1902, and that the violence could spread north. Rebels who used simple pipe bombs three years ago have now started deploying much larger Iraqi-style remotely detonated IEDs. "I don't think there's an insurgency outside Iraq that's as lethal," says Zachary Abuza, a professor of international relations at Boston's Simmons College.

The rebels, members of two groups (known by their Thai acronyms, BNR-C and GMIP), want to create an independent Islamist state in Thailand's three Muslim provinces, Narathiwat, Pattani and Yala. In Narathiwat alone, beheadings, bombings and drive-bys now account for an average of four deaths per day. Radicals have gunned down 18 teachers since 2004 and forced 56 schools to close. "They want to destroy our government system," says Sangaun Intarak, chief educator in the area, "and schools are the most obvious symbol of the government."

So far, the country's military leaders--who have staked their legitimacy on the ability to impose order--have been reluctant to acknowledge the scope of the problem; officials blame drug traffickers and criminals, not insurgents, for most of the violence. Now the junta has started hinting it might make an aggressive push to regain control over the south, which could raise the level of bloodshed. Experts fear it could provoke the terrorists to strike tourist sites in the rest of the country.

The ethnic-Malay south has suffered bouts of violence since World War II, but the current insurgency is "qualitatively ...