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Fighting rages in north S.Lanka, army says winning

Posted on: Sunday, 13 August 2006, 00:08 CDT

By Peter Apps

COLOMBO (Reuters) - Heavy fighting and artillery fire raged on Sri Lanka's northern Jaffna peninsula on Sunday as the army said it had pushed back a Tamil Tiger rebel offensive in the heaviest fighting since a 2002 truce.

On Saturday the Tigers broke through army defences on the army-held peninsula, where some 40,000 troops, mainly from the Sinhalese majority, are based in a Tamil-dominated area cut off from the rest of the island by rebel territory. Telephone contact with the area is extremely difficult. A senior army source in the area said that the night had been relatively quiet but that the military had launched a major operation around first light. Aid workers reported heavy shelling.

"The area is now totally under control," an army spokesman said, although analysts were sceptical. "We have pushed them back behind their FDL (forward defense line)."

Aid workers reported an unknown number of civilians from rebel territory fleeing south toward the rebel headquarters in Kilinochchi as air force spotter planes flew overhead. Most relief staff sheltered in clearly marked compounds.

Truce monitors said they believed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were trying to cut supply lines to Jaffna, which has changed hands several times in two decades of a bitter war that has killed more than 65,000 people.

The birthplace of most of the rebel leadership and cultural center of their fight for a homeland for minority Tamils, Jaffna has long been seen as a key rebel objective. Devastated by fighting, it had begun slowly to rebuild.

AIR SUPPLY THREATENED

"Last night, it was looking pretty grim," said Janes' Defense Weekly analyst Iqbal Athas, pointing to unexpected Tiger artillery fire on the main air base. "With the air base under fire, one of the umbilicals to Jaffna has been cut."

The military said 27 personnel had been killed and 87 wounded so far in the Jaffna battle, which erupted after days of fighting further south initially sparked by the July closure of a rebel-held sluice gate providing water to government territory.

Aid workers reported some outgoing artillery fire from the northeastern port of Trincomalee overnight as well as fighting in the eastern district of Batticaloa, where police said Special Task Force commandos had attacked a rebel camp.

The fighting has been accompanied by killings and attempted assassinations in the island's south, well away from the front lines. On Saturday evening, gunmen shot the deputy head of the government peace secretariat Kethesh Loganathan, an ethnic Tamil, in the capital. He died overnight in hospital.

The government blames the rebels, who have long targeted dissenting Tamil voices. Loganathan supported the government's military campaign against the rebels and last week told Reuters the international community was "mollycoddling" the LTTE.

Most diplomats had blamed the Tigers for an escalation of violence this year that killed more than 800 people even before ground fighting began. But many now blame the government for triggering all-out war by over-reacting to the water dispute.

During the fighting, the Tigers are accused of massacring fleeing Muslims and using civilians as human shields, while truce monitors say the government is obstructing a probe into the execution-style killings of 17 mainly Tamil aid staff. Some of the families already blame the military for the murders.

Source: REUTERS

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