YALA (Thailand) - WHEN a gun appeared through an open window in her small wooden house, Patimoh Pohitaedaoh knew the insurgents had come to kill her.

She had already seen four family members shot dead in her village by shadowy assassins over the past five years.

Now, her time had come.

'They shot at me, I knew they would come after me,' said Ms Patimoh, a Muslim villager from Yala, one of three southernmost provinces plagued by five years of unrest.

'I ran to hide and defence volunteers heard the shots and chased the gunmen away. I was lucky to survive,' she told Reuters.

Similar stories are told daily throughout the predominantly Muslim region bordering Malaysia, where nearly 3,500 people have been killed since 2004, among them teachers, soldiers, Imams and Buddhist monks.

The conflict remains shrouded in mystery, with no credible claims of responsibility for the bloodshed in a once independent Malay Muslim land with a history of rebellion to Buddhist Thai rule.

The violence adds to image problems that could affect foreign investment and tourism in Thailand, rocked by sporadic political turmoil and violence in other areas as well in recent years.

In the Muslim south, a place where fear and intimidation have become part of daily life, Ms Patimoh, like most people here, is reluctant to speculate as to the identity of her attackers, or what they are fighting for.

'I didn't see them clearly - no one knows who these people are,' said Ms Patimoh, 29.

'All I know is they are here in the villages, every day, all around us,' she said. -- REUTERS