At least 90 killed in Sri Lanka battle
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) - April 23, 2008 The rebels claimed they killed more than 100 soldiers and lost
only 16 of their fighters in a 10-hour firefight they characterized
as a rout of the heavily armed government forces.
Either way, the battle was a serious blow to the government's
promise to capture the Tamil Tigers' de facto state in the north,
crush the rebel group and end the 25-year-old civil war in this
Indian Ocean island nation by the end of the year.
As with most battles, the two sides gave very different
accounts.
The military said fighting broke out just before dawn when rebel
forces overran government positions in the rugged Muhamalai region
of the Jaffna peninsula, north of rebel-held territory.
Government troops fought back with small arms, mortars and
tanks, eventually driving off the assault and launching a
counteroffensive that pushed 500 yards into Tamil Tiger territory,
the military spokesman, Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara, said.
Soon after the ground fighting, air force jets and helicopters
destroyed two rebel artillery positions and hit rebel bunkers in
the area, the military said in a statement.
Nanayakkara said 38 government soldiers died and 84 suffered
wounds. The toll was the worst suffered by the military since the
government pulled out of a tattered cease-fire with the rebels in
January and stepped up its attacks.
Rebel spokesman Rasiah Ilanthirayan accused the military of
sparking the battle. "They attempted to get near our positions.
That's when the clashes erupted," he told The Associated Press.
In a later statement e-mailed to reporters, Ilanthirayan said
the fighting began about 2:30 a.m., when troops backed by armored
vehicles and artillery batteries tried to capture rebel
fortifications on the front line.
The guerrillas fought back in a battle that lasted past noon and
eventually forced the troops to withdraw to their earlier
positions, he said. The rebels counted more than 100 dead soldiers
and about 500 wounded troops, he said. Sixteen rebels were killed,
he said.
Both sides routinely inflate casualty figures for the other side
and underreport their own losses. Independent accounts of the
fighting are unavailable because journalists are barred from the
war zone.
Fighting between the two sides has escalated since the
government pulled out of a long-ignored cease-fire with the rebels
and forced out the Nordic truce monitors who were some of the only
observers with access to the war zone.
Senior government officials have vowed to destroy the rebel
group by the end of the year, going so far as to erect billboards
on major roads showing a map of Sri Lanka free of the Tamil Tiger's
de facto state, with a simple promise: "2008."
But diplomats and other observers say the army is facing far
more resistance than it expected, and government officials have
begun appealing to Sri Lankans to have patience with the war
effort.
The Tamil Tigers have fought since 1983 to create an independent
homeland for ethnic Tamils, who have been marginalized for decades
by successive governments controlled by the Sinhalese majority.
More than 70,000 people have been killed in the violence.
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Associated Press writer Krishan Francis contributed to this
report.