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Tamil Tigers trapped in a square kilometre
COLOMBO: Sri Lankan troops on Saturday seized the country’s entire coastline for the first time in a 25-year war with the Tamil Tigers, the military said, cutting off escape for separatist rebels now facing annihilation.
The Lankan military keeps saying that it's the end for the Tigers. One of these days real soon now that's going to be true ...
Two divisions marching from north and south sealed the coast, while a third completed the encirclement of the Tigers and their leaders, now trapped in barely a square kilometre of land without their umbilical access to the sea.

“Now we have linked up on the coastline and the Sea Tigers’ activities are no more,” military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said, referring to the Tigers’ naval wing. Troops were still closing in on the rebels, he said.

Another 4,500 people fled the sandy spit of land controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), bringing the total to nearly 20,000 since Thursday, Nanayakkara said.

Intelligence reports indicated that LTTE founder-leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran and other senior Tigers were in the remaining LTTE territory, Nanayakkara said.
I thought by now he'd be hob-nobbing and fund-raising with the ex-pat community in, say, Quebec City ...
The Red Cross called the civilians’ plight an “unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe” because of the lack of food, water and medical care in the battlezone, where the United Nations estimates 30,000-80,000 innocent people remain trapped. “My government, with the total commitment of our armed forces, has in an unprecedented humanitarian operation finally defeated the LTTE militarily,” Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa said late on Saturday.

“I will be going back to a country that has been totally freed from the barbaric acts of the LTTE,” he said in a speech at an international gathering in Jordan.
Posted by: Steve White 2009-05-17
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=269928