Best known for its spicy food, sex trade, Buddhist monks, and once booming economy, Thailand is now home to one of the world's more brutal jihad wars. For three years, a stubborn and increasingly violent insurgency has grown in the heavily Muslim districts of the country's south, made worse by the clumsy and corrupt response by Thai officials. A just released paper by Southeast Asia terrorism expert Zachary Abuza paints a harrowing picture of the conflict.

"The situation is not improving," writes Abuza. "There is a question of whether the Thai government can salvage anything. Right now, they are losing the south, and 2007 will be a critical year."

Abuza, a professor at Simmons College in Boston, is author of Militant Islam in Southeast Asia and other works on terrorism in the region and has done extensive fieldwork in Thailand's southern provinces. He argues that a disastrous combination of poor intelligence, lack of coordination, corruption, and bad policymaking by Thai authorities has allowed the insurgency to spread. Its attacks are more violent, its bombs more sophisticated, and its operatives almost impossible to track. So shadowy are the insurgents, writes Abuza, that "to date no group has taken any credit for attacks, nor have they publicly stated their goals or platform."

Hope has faded that the September coup ousting hard-line Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra would improve things, and in fact attacks have since spiked to a record high. More than 1,900 people have died in over 3,000 incidents since January 2004, with half the casualties among the region's Buddhists. "This," writes Abuza, "has led to de facto ethnic cleansing. Entire Buddhist communities have fled." Among those slain are over 60 teachers. Others targeted include moderate Muslim village chiefs and religious leaders, state workers, and imams at government-funded Islamic schools. Abuza cites reports of over 24 beheadings and estimates of nearly 60 attempted beheadings.

The result, he writes: "There is a palpable climate of fear in the South. The local Muslims do not trust the Thai security forces who have been abusive and indiscriminant, and yet they fear the insurgents as well. Human intelligence is all but nonexistent because the security forces have so alienated the local population."

You can look forward to hearing more about this mess. Add Thailand to a troubled list that includes Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Kashmir, Mindanao, and Somalia.