According to Thai security officials, the Muslim violence in southern Thailand is the work of a growing movement that wants to establish an Islamic state: Adviser: Thai Violence From Movement.

Gen. Kitti Rattanchaya, the south’s top security adviser, said the movement has enlisted hundreds of fighters ready to sacrifice themselves. He said some were trained abroad “at religious schools,” but he did not give the location.

“The target of this terrorist organization is separatism and the establishment of a Muslim state,” Kitti told The Associated Press.

A total of 108 suspected militants — mostly young men wielding machetes — were killed Wednesday when they tried to steal weapons from police and army posts in pre-dawn raids in three provinces. Three policemen and two soldiers also were killed in the bloodshed, the worst in years in this famously placid, tolerant country.

National police chief Gen. Sunthorn Kraikwan said the militants “had clear intention to stock up firearms for their separatist operations.”

Arabic language pamphlets calling for the creation of a Muslim homeland in Thailand were found on several militants killed in the seven-hour shootout, police said.

“This is the evidence that they are fighting for a separate land on religious lines,” said police Gen. Kovit Wattana, the chief investigator into the incident.

Decorative knives, kept only by heads of clans among southern Muslims, also were found on some bodies, he said.

The comments and evidence appeared to contradict Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s claim that drug traffickers and corrupt politicians were behind the region’s troubles and that the militants have no foreign links. He said Friday a small number of separatists were exploiting unemployed and uneducated youths by brainwashing them and feeding their drug habits.

Kitti disagreed.

“Drugs and illegal businesses are not major factors in the south,” he said, adding that the separatists have been boosting their ranks for nearly a decade and have begun an “undeclared war.”

Most of Thailand’s 63 million people are Buddhist, but the southern provinces near Malaysia have Muslim majorities. A separatist movement flourished there for years, but faded after a government amnesty in the 1980s.

Seventeen militants were arrested in the attacks, including an Islamic cleric who said the militants — many of them barely out of their teens — “sacrificed their lives for Allah.”

“We are fighting for a separate Muslim state,” the cleric, Mama Matheeyoh, said as police escorted him to the scene of one attack. “We are not drug addicts and we did not get paid by anyone.”