Sri Lankan troops cleared mines and searched for boobytraps in newly captured Tamil Tiger terrain in the island's northeast yesterday, the military said.
Sporadic artillery fire from the rebels killed one soldier and wounded four others in the eastern Trincomalee area yesterday.
The army captured the southern edge of strategic Trincomalee harbor on Monday after days of artillery battles. It was the first major capture of enemy territory by either side since a 2002 ceasefire.
Fighting has now subsided after the army captured the rebel-held settlement of Sampur, near Trincomalee, after weeks of the most intense battles in the east, and then the north, since the 2002 truce.
"We are conducting search and clear operations in Sampur, clearing landmines from the area," said a military spokesman. "They have withdrawn from the Sampur area. They have not fired any weapons overnight."
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had been able to shell Trincomalee's major naval base and disrupt a maritime supply route to the besieged army-held Jaffna peninsula to the north from their positions in Sampur.
The latest episode in Sri Lanka's two-decade civil war began with air strikes on rebel territory in late July amid a dispute over a blocked water supply. The fighting then spread to Jaffna. A week ago, the army began an offensive to clear the rebels from Sampur.
The military said 15 troops were killed and more than 90 were injured during the Sampur offensive. It estimates dozens of Tigers were killed.
"Let's hope the military have now ended their offensive, because it could completely collapse the ceasefire agreement," said Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission spokes-man Thorfinnur Omarsson.
"The Tigers are asking us if the truce is over. We certainly hope it is not," he said.
The government and the rebels say they continue to stand by the terms of a 2002 truce, which still technically holds.
But the foes each blame the other for trying to force a full-scale return to a two-decade civil war that has killed more than 65,000 people since 1983.
The commander of the Tamil Tiger rebels in the east, S. Elilan, disputed the government's claim that Sampur had been captured.
"The battle is going on for Sampur. The army has come to the area and we are also there," Elilan told reporters.
He said he has written to Nordic ceasefire monitors to rule whether the government's military offensive amounts to a declaration of full-scale war. If the monitors say it does, the Tigers would no longer be bound by a four-year-old Norway-brokered ceasefire, he said.
"We have many people killed and over 46,000 people displaced. This is really a declaration of war," Elilan said.
Hundreds of civilians, troops and Tiger fighters have been killed in the past month, and more than 200,000 people have been displaced and are now living in refugee camps across the island's rural northeast.
Analysts fear the Tigers could strike elsewhere, possibly in the capital Colombo, the site of two bombings, assassinations and a string of abductions in recent weeks.
The violence has already hit the island's tourism industry, and many companies have put investments in the US$23 billion economy on the backburner.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema