Three days of clashes between security forces and ethnic Tamil rebels in Sri Lanka's volatile north and east have killed at least 95 people, the military said.
The military launched a major assault on Sunday to retake a Tiger-held enclave in the east, which it claimed posed a threat to a strategic naval base in Trincomalee district.
The military said 79 combatants had been killed in the combined army, navy and air force operation. The rebels said 82 people, including 20 civilians, were killed in intense shelling and airstrikes.
Military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe said another 16 Tamil Tiger rebels were killed on Tuesday morning when they fired on an army check point in northern Vavuniya district. The soldiers returned fire, killing the 16. He did not say if any soldiers were killed or wounded in the attack.
Also on Tuesday, air force jets bombed a rebel naval base in Tiger-controlled Mullaithivu district, in the northeast. No casualty figures were available.
Both sides routinely inflate the other's death tolls, and independent confirmation is virtually impossible because conflict zones are off limits to outsiders.
The push to retake Sampur, in northeast Trincomalee district, opens a new front in the more than two-decade conflict between ethnic Tamil rebels and the Sinhalese-dominated government, which was temporarily halted by a 2002 ceasefire.
Samarasinghe said the goal of the operation was to loosen the rebels' hold on the area south of Trincomalee naval base and specifically to destroy their fire power.
"Our aim is to neutralize [rebel] artillery and heavy mortar bases. Yesterday [Monday] we destroyed a minimum of three artillery bases," Samarasinghe said on Tuesday.
"These bases are a very big threat. The [rebels] have been firing at the naval base and also at civilians in the area," he said.
Thirteen soldiers and 66 insurgents have been killed since Sunday, the military said. The rebels' political leader for the east, S. Elilan, said that 50 government soldiers, 12 rebel fighters and 20 civilians had been killed.
"They tried to advance into our areas from two directions yesterday and when we counterattacked, they stopped before the forward defense lines," the de facto frontier between rebel and government-held territory, he said.
"Today they started moving again and we have halted them," he told reporters from Trincomalee.
An officer at the National Media Center for Defense said troops were advancing slowly toward Sampur and that heavy fighting was ongoing.
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