Pattani (Thailand), April 29 (Reuters): Grieving relatives of slain Muslim militants buried their loved ones in southern Thailand today as the army prepared for a long struggle in the restive region against thousands more insurgents.

“He was a very good lad,” Abubaka Waenawae, 65, said of his nephew Donriya Desulong, whose body lay along with those of several school fellows in a cemetery in Pattani. “There was no sign of any strange behaviour from him,” he said. “He never took drugs. Not even a cigarette.”

After yesterday’s unprecedented eruption of violence, army chiefs ordered two extra battalions of troops into the region. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said 107 “bandits” and five soldiers and policemen died in the fighting, which started when gangs of black-robed young men launched dawn attacks on about 15 army and police posts.

The reports of suicidal attackers and pictures of the bloody corpses of lightly armed men splashed across front pages sparked concerns that the Muslim separatist rebellion which rocked the region in the 1970s and 1980s had returned.

“I would say the military phase has just started,” General Pallop Pinmanee, who presided over the shootout at a mosque in Pattani yesterday, told Bangkok radio.

Analysts fear international militant networks, such as al Qaida, might also find a fertile recruiting ground among the impoverished region’s Muslim youth. Critics questioned the insistence of Thaksin and his cousin and army chief, General Chaiyasidh Shinawatra, that drugs and crime rather than religious or separatist ideology lay at the root of the violence.

“What the two leaders do not see, or pretend not to see, is that this is not about addiction or banditry; this is about a fanatical ideology that none of us knew existed on such a grand scale,” the Nation said.

Troops fired teargas and stormed a centuries-old mosque, killing 34 gunmen holed up inside. An angry crowd gathered to watch as soldiers dragged bodies from the bullet-riddled building.

With Muslim sentiment divided between anger and support for military action at the mosque, Thailand’s top Muslim cleric, speaking on national television, backed the operation.

“The authorities exercised reasonable restraint in dealing with the situation. They were patient and waited for a long time outside the mosque,” spiritual leader Sawat Sumalayasak said. Others disagreed. “If the officers had waited for another couple of days they could have caught them alive, but they didn’t,” Uma Meah, secretary of the Central Islamic Committee of Pattani, said.

As Thaksin called for an urgent development plan, officials fretted in Malaysia. In Kota Bharu, capital of the northeastern state of Kelantan, police criminal investigation chief Salleh Mat Som pledged more men and equipment for all four states bordering Thailand.