Sri Lanka news columns

The fighting between the Sri Lankan armed forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) intensified in the last 24 hours with more than 40 combatants killed in scattered battle across the north. The armed forces claimed a “significant” victory after capturing most parts of a town ‘Mallavi’ considered an LTTE stronghold. The ground forces, the army said, were pushing forward under aircraft cover. The government-run Media Centre for National Security said, “forces brought more than three-fourths of the LTTE’s nerve centre Mallavi... under their control on Monday evening.” “Even today they are sweeping the rest of the area,” military spokesperson Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said. Local media quoted Colombo-based military analyst Iqbal Athas, commenting that the capture of Mallavi, taken together with other army advances near land the Tigers’ claim as a separate state for the ethnic minority Tamil people, was a portend for a new phase of the war. “The fact the troops have gon...

While the military is making gains on the Tamil Tigers, it could become mired in guerrilla attacks. By Jason Motlagh | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor from the August 28, 2008 edition Colombo, Sri Lanka - After 25 years of fighting and 70,000 casualties, Sri Lanka's military has won a hard-fought upper hand against separatist Tamil Tigers – and now vows to break their northern stronghold by year's end. Yet despite these gains, government claims that the end to one of South Asia's longest-running civil wars is near may be premature: Even if the Tigers' conventional fighting forces fall apart, the group can prolong the conflict by turning to guerrilla tactics and feeding off ethnic Tamils' discontent against the government. Meanwhile the military's intensified campaign has caused the humanitarian crisis to swell. "As an organization that started as a small guerilla group, the [Tig...