By C. Bryson Hull
COLOMBO, Sept 7 (Reuters) - Sri Lanka's advance into Tamil rebels' heartland has unleashed the bloodiest combat in a decade and opened a new phase of the 25-year-old conflict, but conventional military success won't mean an end to war.
Over the past three weeks, the army has thrust into territory held by the separatist guerrillas and are within artillery range of Kilinochchi, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's (LTTE) administrative headquarters and symbolic prize for the government.
The advance has provoked some critics to warn things could turn out like 1999, when the army pushed itself deep into Tiger territory only to be shoved back ferociously in a matter of days.
Analysts say this time the military has the upper hand, fighting on four fronts to encircle the rebels while striking the LTTE's naval assets and hitting it with artillery, ground forces and air strikes. It does not, however, mean an easy road ahead.
"They have achieved a small breakthrough but the LTTE are putting up a tough fight," said Maria Kuusisto, analyst with the Eurasia Group in London. "I think it's going to be difficult to beat the deadline of defeating them before the end of the year."
The government annulled a barely observed truce in January and vowed to wipe out the Tigers, fighting since 1983 to establish a separate homeland for ethnic minority Tamils, by 2009.
The rebels this week intensified their resistance after the army steadily took their outposts across the frontline, counterattacking from forward defence lines of trenches and bunkers in the northern jungles.
"Now that the army has come to Kilinochchi and the outer fringes of the rebel heartland, we have come to the most fearsome phase of this separatist war," said Iqbal Athas, a Colombo-based military analyst for Jane's Defence Weekly.
The Tigers "can no longer play a defensive role and continue to retreat because the military is virtually on the doorstep of their strongholds", he said.
The Tigers could not be reached for comment, but have told the pro-rebel website www.tamilnet.com that they are repeatedly pushing back government advances.
WORST SINCE 1999
Already, daily death tolls have climbed. But the figures are difficult to verify because the battle zones are closed to journalists and both sides give widely varying numbers.
"Based on the numbers of dead, you could say this is the worst fighting since 1999," a senior military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters.
Even if the government were to get rebel-held territory back under its control, some analysts said it would have little effect until the government works out a political compromise with the LTTE and the wider Tamil population.
"I think they have taken the approach to weaken them to make them go back to back to the negotiating table, but I think we need a political solution. Whether that is going to happen or not is another question," said Channa Amaratunga, director at the Colombo-based investment analysis firm CT Capital.
So far, President Mahinda Rajapaksa has pledged to develop a northern provincial council, modelled on the one the government put in place in the Eastern Province after taking it back from the Tigers last year. The LTTE has rejected that plan out of hand.
Any plan like that, Amaratunga said, "would have to involve some kind of investment and address the disparity in income".
Rajapaksa last week said he had secured nearly $1 billion in funding for the rebuilding of the east, and said he had been promised aid money when the north was secured.
Besides the military advances and success in securing the east last year, Rajapaksa's government has been emboldened by a solid victory at provincial polls last month -- widely interpreted as a vote in favour of the war effort.
Were the government to capture Kilinochchi it would be more of a symbolic victory. Sri Lanka's stock market and tourism industry would see only slight benefit, Amaratunga said.
"I don't think you are going to see a major jump in the market or tourist arrivals. Sentiment will probably improve, but I doubt that many people would make a claim that the war had ended," he said.
Kuusisto said she anticipated that a government military success would force the rebels to retreat to the jungle and step up their longstanding guerrilla tactics -- suicide bombings and bomb blasts in the capital Colombo.
"There really is no end game yet," she said.
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