Uruphong 4:15-5:15pm April 13th

After Ratchaprarop I decided to head back to Uruphong to see if anything was going on there. On the way I ran into a mixed group of police and soldiers and quite a bit of fire damage including a burned out bus right outside of the Fire Department HQ.

I could see that there were some Redshirts at Uruphong and that there was quite a distance between them and the soldiers.

Once I got into Uruphong intersection I could see that there were quite a few Redshirts there. They had set a lot of fires and were blocking off all the roads into the intersection now. Walking around I thought that this group of Redshirts seemed angrier than ones I had seen previously and the air was more energized. More of them seemed to have weapons (mostly sticks or iron bars) and I also saw quite a few Molotov cocktails here.The Redshirt propaganda truck that I saw at Ratchaprarop was also here.

After about 45 min the group of Redshirts started to withdraw down the road. First the propaganda truck went then a working bus was used to move most of the Redshirts. Within a period of about 5 min Uruphong went from being full of Redshirts to being almost totally empty of them.

The few Redshirts who were left reinforced some road blocks to protect against a group of police down one of the roads.

While this was happening the guy in the picture below ran up to me to ask if someone had just been killed there. He said that a group of Redshirts had told them the government had just killed someone a min or two ago at this location – something that was 100% NOT true as I would have seen it.

Just a few min after most of the Redshirts left the police started to march towards the intersection. The easily removed the roadblocks set up to slow them down as by the time they reached them the last few Redshirts had also run off. As soon as the police reached the intersection the people from the area came out to cheer them.

I would soon realize that the Redshirts weren't far away. They had just retreated to the next intersection over (Yommarat) and there would be quite a bit of fighting there between the Redshirts and the locals which I'll cover in my next post.