31 soldiers killed in Sri Lanka clashes

Sri Lanka’s military has lost 28 soldiers in three days of artillery attacks as it advanced on Tamil Tiger rebel strongholds, officials said today.

A further three soldiers were killed today in a bomb blast blamed on the rebels, in the northern district of Vavuniya.

The rebels began firing artillery at troops manning defence lines in Muhamalai at the base of the army-controlled Jaffna peninsula on Thursday, prompting a military response, spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe said.

He said the military was trying to destroy the rebels’ artillery positions.

A Defence Ministry official said troops continued to move today at a slow pace amid heavy artillery from both sides.

Twenty-eight soldiers were killed and 119 wounded in three days of fighting as government ground troops advanced 1,980 feet and captured the rebels’ forward line of bunkers, the official said.

Rebel official Seevarathnam Puleedevan denied that the Tigers’ bunkers had been overrun and said his cadres continued to resist the troops.

He said six rebel cadres have died in the past three days and 13 others wounded.

The fighting came less than a week after the army claimed to have routed Tamil Tigers from Sampur, a rebel-held village in the north east.

Samarasinghe said Tamil tigers today set off a roadside bomb killing three soldiers who were on foot patrol in Vavuniya – the northern-most government-held garrison town before the start of rebel-held territory. There was no immediate comment from the rebels.

While neither side has withdrawn from a 2002 ceasefire, weeks of escalating battles along borders separating rebel and government-held territory in the north east have left it in tatters.

The Tigers have threatened retaliation and a resumption of war unless the army withdraws from Sampur.

The military pounded rebel-held territory in the north with air strikes and artillery after the Tigers stepped up their attacks on government troops, Samarasinghe said yesterday.

“The (rebels) began attacking us with artillery fire on Thursday. We have been retaliating since then. This is a limited operation to neutralise their artillery bases,” Samarasinghe said.

The pro-rebel TamilNet website said the military has been shelling rebel bunkers in Muhamalai for two days. It said there were no rebel casualties.

Jaffna has long been a flash point for violence in Sri Lanka’s 19-year war between the Sinhalese-dominated state and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who claim it as the cultural homeland of the country’s 3.2 million ethnic Tamil minority.

The Tigers want to carve out a separate state for predominantly Hindu Tamils, citing decades of discrimination by the mostly Buddhist Sinhalese majority.

The conflict – one of Asia’s longest running – cost the lives of about 65,000 people before the truce.

Hundreds of combatants and civilians have been killed and about 220,000 displaced since April, when the military launched air strikes on rebel territory in north east Trincomalee in retaliation for a failed suicide attempt on the life of a top-ranking general.

Transportation to and from the peninsula remains largely cut, stranding thousands of people, including foreign aid workers, students and business people, and leaving the region short of food, medicine and other basic goods.

A naval ship carrying 795 civilians from Jaffna reached the north eastern port of Trincomalee late last night, the military said.