Word: coasts
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Fifteen years ago, Tamil rebels overran a marshy strip along Sri Lanka's northwest coast. Pooneryn became a headache for Colombo: a strategic redoubt, shored up with artillery, that shielded the base of operations of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.), one of the world's most dogged insurgent groups. But on Nov. 15, government forces seized Pooneryn, giving Colombo full control over its western seaboard for the first time in over a decade. The government called for a week of celebrations...
...Pulled aboard the coast-guard vessel one by one, each man looks around, eyes wide with fear, shivering from the cold. One of the Greek sailors, who wears plastic gloves and a headlamp, speaks to the men in broken English. "Where you from?" he asks. Eventually, one softly responds. "Afghanistan," he says, and the others repeat the word. None have identity documents. It's past 1 a.m., and the coast-guard captain estimates the raft left the Turkish coast four hours earlier. The men have rowed more than halfway across the strait, a few hundred yards into Greek territorial waters...
...another orange speck flickers on the radar screen, the captain gently pushes his twin-engine Lambro up to 30 knots. Two hours into an overnight patrol, the coast guard boat glides nearer its invisible target in the narrow strait separating the Greek island of Lesbos from mainland Turkey. The 36-ft. (11 m) cruiser slows as it draws close to its quarry, and its four Greek sailors gather at the front windshield. One of the men trips the Lambro's floodlights. Bobbing in the open sea 50 feet away are five young men, shielding their eyes from the sudden beam...
...Greece's Aegean waters, where a gaping new hole has opened in the border between Europe and poorer, war-torn corners of Asia and the Middle East. As growing numbers of people flee Iraq, Afghanistan and the Caucasus, human traffickers have begun using the route from the southwest coast of Turkey to several eastern Greek islands as a back door to European territory, adding it to more familiar passages from North Africa to Sicily, Lampedusa, Malta and the Canary Islands. The number of illegal immigrants arriving in Greece has surged over the past year. Interior Minister Prokopis Pavlopoulos estimates that...
...member crew early Saturday morning in the Indian Ocean might trigger new thinking on whether to launch such a strike. It was shocking on two counts. One, the pirates have typically taken vessels within 200 miles of shore, but the supertanker was taken 450 miles off the Somali coast. International navies have been protecting a narrow corridor farther north toward the Gulf of Aden, but this seizure demonstrates the pirates' dramatically expanded reach. Two, the buccaneers have never taken over an oil supertanker, capable of carrying 2 million barrels of oil. It is the biggest ship ever seized...