Sri Lankan troops advanced yesterday on the military headquarters of the Tamil Tigers, a day after capturing the rebels’ de facto political capital in the north of the island.
The Sri Lankan Defense Ministry said forces were moving towards Mullaitivu, the jungle district along the northeastern seaboard, where the Tigers are known to have their main military facilities.
“The battle for Mullaitivu has already begun,” the ministry said in a statement.
PHOTO: AFP
The air force used Mi-24 helicopter gunships to carry out two bombing raids yesterday in support of the advancing ground troops, a military spokesman said.
He said 10 such missions were carried out on Friday.
The ministry said that government troops were also moving further north of their positions in Kilinochchi in a bid to retake the strategically vital Elephant Pass, which was lost to the Tigers in April 2000.
Elephant Pass lies at the entrance to the Jaffna Peninsula, which security forces wrested from rebel control in 1995.
On Friday, after months of intense fighting, the military finally captured Kilinochchi, where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had gathered all the political trappings of a mini-state.
Military officials said the fall of Kilinochchi had cleared the way for security forces to re-establish control over a vital highway linking the northern Jaffna Peninsula with the rest of the country.
Jaffna, which has a population of nearly half a million people and a considerable military presence, used to be supplied by air and sea because the Tigers controlled the land route.
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse called the army’s capture of Kilinochchi an “unparalleled victory” for the entire nation and urged the rebels to lay down their arms and end their decades-old struggle for a separate homeland.
Street celebrations took place in the capital Colombo and elsewhere as news of the town’s capture broke.
But just hours later, a suspected Tiger suicide bomber attacked an air force base in the capital Colombo, killing at least two airmen and injuring 36 others.
The Tigers admitted losing Kilinochchi, but argued that the town had been abandoned rather than captured.
“The Sri Lanka army has entered a virtual ghost town as the whole civilian infrastructure as well as the center of the LTTE had shifted further northeast,” the Tigers said through the pro-rebel Tamilnet Web site.
While losing Kilinochchi is a major setback, the Tigers have shown in the past that they have the ability to rebound.
The Tigers initially lost Kilinochchi in 1996 and retook the area two years later and controlled it till they were driven out on Friday.
Barely six months after government troops captured the northern Jaffna Peninsula in 1995, the Tigers overran a military base in Mullaittivu, killing more than 1,200 soldiers.
The guerrillas also reversed military gains of 19 months in a matter of five days in November 1999, going on to dislodge the military from their Elephant Pass base at the entrance to Jaffna.
In his annual speech in November, LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran vowed to defend his territory and suggested that the rebels would revert to guerrilla-style, hit-and-run attacks as their area shrank.
The Tigers have been labeled a terrorist group by the US, the EU and India, but had the backing of the international community when Oslo-backed peace talks got under way in 2002.
The peace process virtually ended when the government formally pulled out of a moribund truce last January.
The Sri Lankan conflict over the Tigers’ demand for a separate Tamil homeland has claimed tens of thousands of lives since 1972.
‘ABSURD MISTAKE’: The election commission said that there had been a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations ran short of ballot papers South Korean riot police yesterday cleared protesters from a Seoul polling station after a 35-hour blockade sparked by a shortage of ballot papers during local elections earlier this week. Wednesday’s election was the first nationwide vote since South Korean President Lee Jae-myung took office following the ouster of Yoon Suk-yeol over his short-lived martial law declaration. Lee’s ruling Democratic Party swept most races, but failed to flip the crucial Seoul mayoral seat. The South Korean National Election Commission apologized, blaming a failure to anticipate turnout after 14 polling stations in Seoul ran short of ballot papers. Some polling stations stayed open until 10pm to
France experienced its hottest spring on record, the French weather service said on Tuesday, after an exceptional early heat wave that also broke highs for the season in England and Wales. Meteo-France said the average nationwide temperature over March to May was 13.8°C — about 1.7°C above the norm, and surpassing records set in 2011 and 2020. “The warmest spring since records began in 1900,” it said in a bulletin. All three months were warmer than average, but the onset of an “unprecedented heatwave” late last month pushed the mercury to highs typically seen at the height of the summer. “Our country had never
A Sherpa guide was found crawling to base camp on Mount Everest a week after he went missing and was reunited with his family, who had given up hope he would return. Dawa Sherpa was last seen on Friday last week descending the mountain, but he did not reach base camp even though his client did. The pair were among the last climbers on the mountain as the climbing season came to an end and the route was dismantled. Dawa was located by a cleaning crew on Thursday morning as he was crawling down the snowy slopes around the Khumbu Icefall, just above
Chinese authorities are snuffing out any remembrance of the deadly 1989 military crackdown on student-led pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, which happened 37 years ago yesterday, in a further tightening of a years-long campaign to erase what happened from public memory. Police told relatives of the victims they would not be allowed to visit a cemetery in Beijing on the anniversary of the crackdown, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Relatives of the victims visited the cemetery on the anniversary for more than 30 years to read memorial statements with police keeping watch, Amnesty International said. Hundreds of people,
RSS