Air force jets attacked a rebel intelligence base deep in northern Sri Lanka early yesterday, stepping up a punishing wave of airstrikes a day after Tamil Tiger fighters launched a surprise attack on a military base, the military said.
The Tamil Tigers said the bombs hit a civilian settlement in the rebel’s administrative capital of Kilinochchi, destroying 12 houses.
Separate battles between the two sides killed 19 rebels and two soldiers, the military said.
The air force has conducted a series of bombing raids over rebel-held territory in the north since the Tamil Tigers attacked a military complex in Vavuniya early on Tuesday with a massive artillery barrage, aerial bombing and a ground assault conducted by suicide attackers.
The military said that attack killed 13 troops, one civilian and 11 of the attackers. The rebels said at least 20 government troops and 10 rebel fighters were killed.
The raid also injured two Indian technicians who were servicing a radar system at the base, said Dinkar Asthana, a spokesman for the Indian High Commission in Colombo.
“They are out of danger and they are being treated,” he said, providing no further details.
Independent verification of the fighting is difficult to obtain because most journalists are banned from the war zone. Both sides routinely exaggerate enemy losses and underreport their own.
Violence along the war zone in the north has escalated as the government pressed ahead with its promise to crush the separatists and end the 25-year-old civil war by the end of the year.
In recent weeks, a reinvigorated military offensive seized large areas of land from the rebels.
Battles along the war front in the Kilinochchi, Welioya and Vavuniya areas killed 19 rebels and two soldiers on Tuesday, military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said.
With the fighting worsening, the government announced it was barring all foreign aid workers from rebel areas, and the UN said on Tuesday it would be pulling its staff out this week.
In the sweltering streets of Jakarta, buskers carry towering, hollow puppets and pass around a bucket for donations. Now, they fear becoming outlaws. City authorities said they would crack down on use of the sacred ondel-ondel puppets, which can stand as tall as a truck, and they are drafting legislation to remove what they view as a street nuisance. Performances featuring the puppets — originally used by Jakarta’s Betawi people to ward off evil spirits — would be allowed only at set events. The ban could leave many ondel-ondel buskers in Jakarta jobless. “I am confused and anxious. I fear getting raided or even
Kemal Ozdemir looked up at the bare peaks of Mount Cilo in Turkey’s Kurdish majority southeast. “There were glaciers 10 years ago,” he recalled under a cloudless sky. A mountain guide for 15 years, Ozdemir then turned toward the torrent carrying dozens of blocks of ice below a slope covered with grass and rocks — a sign of glacier loss being exacerbated by global warming. “You can see that there are quite a few pieces of glacier in the water right now ... the reason why the waterfalls flow lushly actually shows us how fast the ice is melting,” he said.
Eleven people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died. The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on Nov. 1, 2024 in a disaster widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight. It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of then-Serbian prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government. The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths. In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into
RISING RACISM: A Japanese group called on China to assure safety in the country, while the Chinese embassy in Tokyo urged action against a ‘surge in xenophobia’ A Japanese woman living in China was attacked and injured by a man in a subway station in Suzhou, China, Japanese media said, hours after two Chinese men were seriously injured in violence in Tokyo. The attacks on Thursday raised concern about xenophobic sentiment in China and Japan that have been blamed for assaults in both countries. It was the third attack involving Japanese living in China since last year. In the two previous cases in China, Chinese authorities have insisted they were isolated incidents. Japanese broadcaster NHK did not identify the woman injured in Suzhou by name, but, citing the Japanese
RSS