Sri Lanka claims gains against LTTE

03/10/2008| IslamWeb

Sri Lanka's military says its troops have closed to within 4km of the Tamil Tigers' headquarters in the north of the country.

 

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam has acknowledged that an air strike by the military hit their political head office and nearby homes in the town of Kilinochchi.

 

The LTTE said two civilians were killed and another five injured.

 

The Sri Lankan defense ministry said on Friday that troops had killed 42 Tamil Tigers and injured 53 more in a ground-and-sea offensive aimed at dismantling the LTTE's mini-state.

 

Two soldiers were killed in Thursday's clashes, and another 20 were injured, Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, the military spokesman, said.

 

Ministry's figures

 

The military says the LTTE has lost 7,158 fighters since January, when Colombo pulled out of a Norwegian-brokered ceasefire.

 

The defense ministry has acknowledged the loss of 697 soldiers over the same period.

 

The LTTE did not comment on the ministry's claims, but the sympathetic Tamilnet website said one civilian was injured in a bombardment on Thursday of Kilinochchi.

 

 

 

 

The government has announced plans to raise defense spending by seven per cent to $1.6bn in 2009, from $1.5bn this year, to maintain the offensive against the LTTE.

 

The surge in fighting comes amid the arrival of a UN convoy in the country's north, carrying an estimated 800 tones of food for 200,000 civilians displaced by the conflict.

 

This is the first convoy of food supplies for civilians since the government ordered aid workers out of the region at the beginning of September.

 

The government said it was trying to avoid a repeat of the August 2006 killing of 17 local aid workers employed by the French aid agency Action Against Hunger.

 

Thousands displaced

 

The UN estimates as many as 230,000 people have been displaced around Kilinochchi and the LTTE stronghold of Mullaittivu, in Sri Lanka's Vanni region.

 

"The fighting has become increasingly severe in the past three months - it affected our own operation in the area which is why we withdrew," Gordon Weiss, who is helping organise the UN relief efforts in Sri Lanka, told Al Jazeera recently.

 

He said the renewed aid convoys into the Vanni required the co-operation both the government and the LTTE.

 

"The government, in fact, is intimately involved in this convoy - they support the effort to move supplies into the Vanni ... The government is making up half of the convoy that is going into the Vanni this week," Weiss said.

 

"It's not going to be sufficient in and of itself but its the first of a number of convoys. This is going to be a supply line."

 

PHOTO CAPTION

 

 

 

Sri Lanka map

 

 

 

Al-Jazeera