Tamil Tiger Terrorists Give Up
After decades of suicide bombings and terrorist attacks, the Sri Lankan military has dealt a decisive blow to the Tamil Tigers.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — The Tamil Tigers admitted defeat Sunday in their fierce quarter-century war for a separate homeland as government forces raced to clear the last pockets of rebel resistance from the war zone in the north.
Far from the battlefield, thousands of Sri Lankans danced in the streets of Colombo, celebrating the stunning collapse of one of the world’s most sophisticated insurgencies. But with rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran still at large, the threat of renewed guerrilla warfare remained.
Several rebel fighters committed suicide when they were surrounded, but it wasn’t clear whether Prabhakaran or other leaders were among them.
The Tamil Tigers once controlled a shadow state complete with courts, police and a tax system across a wide swath of the north. By Sunday, troops had surrounded the remaining rebels in a 0.4-square-mile (1-square-kilometer) patch of land and were fighting off suicide bombs and other attacks, the military said.
A video report from the Associated Press:
