More than 500 Muslim villagers gathered at southern Thailand's Sabaiyoi town March 18 to demand justice after a midnight attack on an Islamic school left two young students dead and eight wounded. Students were asleep at the boarding school when assailants threw grenades and strafed the building with automatic rifle fire. Unidentified assailants also threw a grenade into a local mosque, injuring 11, on March 15, the same day suspected Islamist militants killed eight Buddhist civilians in an attack on a van. Local authorities blamed the schoool-house attack on Islamist militants, but this is disputed by local residents.

Two Algerian Islamist militants were killed and several wounded when a roadside bomb they were planting outside the capital Algiers exploded prematurely, the official APS news agency said March 14. The two bombs were to be buried and detonated from a distance by mobile phone, said the agency. An unspecified number of wounded militants were taken away on a tractor they hijacked from a farmer in the area, witnesses said. The militants are believed to be followers of al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb. (Reuters, March 14)

Rear Admiral Paul Zukunft of the US Joint Inter-Agency Task Force-West claimed evidence that secret laboratories for producing methamphetamine are operating in areas of the Phiilippines where Maoist and Islamic rebels have a strong presence, and that the guerillas are being funded by the trade. "That's one of our biggest concerns," Zukunft told Reuters during a break in meetings with Filipino counterparts at the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA). "It's much easier to stop them at the source than waiting for them to go into global distribution," said Zukunft, based at US Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii.

Just hours after the Somali president Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed moved in to Mogadishu from the provincial city of Baidoa, insurgents launched a mortar attack on the presidential palace, killing a small boy. The president emerged unscathed from the attack. Ethiopian tanks sealed off the area. The attack evidences the government's lack of control over the capital city, which is thought to hold many militants and Islamist supporters.

Eight Thai civilians—all Buddhists—were killed in the troubled south of Thailand when their van was shot upon by suspected Islamist guerrillas March 15. Thai security officials suspect that the attack was meant coincide with the founding of the National Revolutionary Front, a decades-old separatist group in the southern region of Patani.

Dozens of police in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh were killed when their forest outpost was raided by Maoist [Naxalite] rebels March 14. Fighting has intensified between leftist insurgents and police and paramilitary forces in vast swathes of central India. Over 50,000 people have been displaced by ongoing violence.

At least 22 were arrested and several injured in protests March 13 against the visit of President George Bush in the southern Mexican city of Merida, Yucatan. Hundreds also marched to the US Embassy in Mexico City, battling riot police with concrete blocks, metal bars and fire-crackers and tearing down barricades. Police responded with tear gas, pepper spray, and baton charges, throwing back rocks and clubbing demonstrators down. (El Universal, La Jornada, March 14)

Brazil will build a two million dollar wall on its border with Paraguay. Reports say that the government of Brazil contracted the construction of the 3 kilometer wall to begin at the end of March and end within six months. The government stated that the barrier is intended to obstruct the Paraguay-Brazil smuggling industry, which traffics cigarettes and appliances. The wall will be built in the tri-border area where Ciudad del Este (Paraguay) meets Foz de Iguacu (Brazil) and the nearby Argentine city of Puerto Iguazu.