A group of foreign conservation volunteers sailing off the coast of Kep province late on Friday night were set upon by a flotilla of illegal fishermen who attempted to pelt them with rocks and other projectiles, only disbanding after Cambodian maritime police fired warning shots into the sea...

http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/v ... keps-coast
It's not clear whether these fishing boats were Cambodian or Vietnamese. What we do know is that a lot of this illegal fishing is covered by Cambodian maritime authorities.
https://cambodiaexpatsonline.com/post785 ... ing#p78553

World War III

Article on the Marine Conservation Cambodia (MCC) group who are operating off the coast of Kep, chasing off illegal fishing trawlers.(I thought it had already been posted here somewhere, but I can't find it so maybe not.) Gives you some idea of why the foreigners might have been attacked:

... Ferber figured that the only hope of preserving Cambodia’s rapidly-deteriorating inshore ecosystems was to physically chase the trawlers away himself.

If you want a thing done well, as the saying goes, do it yourself – or as Ferber describes his thinking, “Well I thought: Fuck it, I’ll do it then. Somebody’s gotta do it.”

So Ferber collected a patrolling team. He recruited Cambodians, a few Westerners, and also six Khmer-American deportees – Cambodian refugees who came to America as children but have been, for one criminal reason or another, deported back to their birth country. Many belonged to street gangs in the States and, though they are ethnically Khmer (the predominant ethnic group here), most struggle to assimilate into Cambodian society. Hardened, untethered and in need of a purpose, they make for good patrolmen...

http://narrative.ly/on-a-mission/the-fe ... ed-waters/
Illegal fishing vs illegal vigilantes, fighting it out at sea, at night. They also take well-meaning backpackers out on their "patrols", which seems to have been the case when the fishermen attacked/struck back.
What could go wrong ?

Idiot barang will get someone killed. He tried to join the Police in his home country and they would not have him. Says a lot.

frank lee bent wrote:Idiot barang will get someone killed. He tried to join the Police in his home country and they would not have him. Says a lot.

I bet he smokes Hero's

Building a refuge where trawlers now ravage Cambodia’s marine life
by Matt Blomberg on 14 December 2017
In Cambodia’s Kep Archipelago, fleets of trawlers dragging weighted, electrified nets have reduced the area’s once sprawling seagrass meadows to a sludgy underwater wasteland and sent fisheries into a tailspin.

KEP ARCHIPELAGO, Cambodia – It’s not long before midnight and an outlaw trawler has been spotted. The captain — a weather-gnarled old fisherman wearing just boxer shorts — winces as flashlights illuminate his face. He takes a drag of a cigarette and grins as his crew hauls in their catch. “Here he is with all the seagrass in his net,” says Paul Ferber, the founder and head of Marine Conservation Cambodia (MCC), as his boat pulls alongside the trawler to take video evidence during a patrol for illegal fishing. “Same guy. He just doesn’t care.”

For nine years, the NGO MCC has been documenting the decline of marine ecosystems off the southern coast of Cambodia, where fish stocks have plummeted as once-thriving habitats are reduced to a sludgy underwater wasteland. The main perpetrators of the destruction are fleets of trawlers that drag weighted, electrified nets through the shallow waters here almost every night. Their main target is shrimp but their methods are indiscriminate. Like a bulldozer through forest, they cut swathes of life out of the sea and scars into the ocean floor. Sunken a few inches into the seabed, the nets churn up and electrocute everything in their path, including the seagrass meadows that once sprawled the bay.

After more than a decade of intensive trawling, the ecosystem is at the brink of collapse by MCC’s assessment. “There’s not much left out there,” said Ferber, 40, a British diver who has been living on Koh Seh, the most remote island in the Kep Archipelago, for almost four years. “In some places, there are no signs of life at all. It’s just dead.”
Full article : https://news.mongabay.com/2017/12/build ... rine-life/