The primary difference is that jihadi violence is more of a social phenomenon. The torture, murder, dismemberment of victims becomes something like a "team-building exercise."

Mobile phones seized in restive southern Thailand depict gruesome videos

Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - PATTANI, Thailand - Police in insurgency-wracked southern Thailand said Tuesday that mobile phones seized from an attack site contain video clips showing suspected insurgents beheading their victims and in one case, cutting off a soldier's sex organ.

Investigators found two mobile phones in a bag left behind in an area of Yala province where suspected insurgents killed a police officer over the weekend, said police Col. Sompien Eksomya from Yala's Bannang Star district, where the attack occurred.

"We sent the SIM cards to be checked out and found gruesome video clips," he said by telephone.

One video clip taken Jan. 2, 2006 showed a suspected insurgent beheading a soldier, then severing his penis and laughing with the person taking the video, Sompien said.

The second clip was made on May 14 of this year, showing the beheading of a Buddhist man after he and his wife were shot. A third video clip filmed June 15 shows the bullet-ridden bodies of seven soldiers.

Sompien said that police were searching for the men seen in the videos.

More than 2,400 people have been killed in the Muslim-majority southernmost provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat since a long-simmering Islamic separatist insurgency flared up in January 2004. At least 29 Buddhists have been beheaded in the past three years.

Kinda makes you wonder what goes on back at the safe house or base camp after the lights go out at night...