Word: jaffna
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...colonel in the field, Fonseka led a 1993 operation dubbed Midnight Express to relieve government troops holed up in a fort in the Tamil Tiger hotbed of Jaffna, rescuing several hundred soldiers and winning commendations for his bravery. Accompanying him on the mission was Gotabaya Rajapaksa, brother of the President, and currently Sri Lanka's iron-fisted - and allegedly corrupt - Secretary for Defense...
...Fonseka furthered his reputation during the pivotal Operation Riviresa in 1995, in which he led a brigade that helped finally seize the town of Jaffna, a Tiger stronghold...
...Lanka’s historical tragedies—to enter and tarnish his otherwise halcyon vision of the Indian Ocean. Thus, while the sailor is “a wanderer in a zone of fluctuating kelvins,” he has “been reported as expired at Jaffna,” the largest city in Sri Lanka’s predominantly Tamil north-east and the epicenter of its civil war, and “burned in effigy for interminable wanderings.” Alexander knows well enough that it would be near-impossible to write affectingly...
Prabhakaran, 54, was born to a middle-class family on the Jaffna Peninsula. Incensed by discrimination against Tamils and radicalized by a militant grade-school teacher, Prabhakaran founded the LTTE in 1976, a year after a group he headed claimed responsibility for killing Jaffna's mayor. By 1983 the guerrilla movement--which pioneered suicide bombings and the recruitment of child soldiers--escalated the fighting into a civil...
...Prabhakaran's life as a fugitive began in 1975, with the assassination of Alfred Duraiappah, then mayor of the northern city of Jaffna. A group calling itself the Tamil New Tigers, of which Prabhakaran was a leader, claimed responsibility. The next year, Prabhakaran founded the LTTE. What began as a guerrilla movement escalated into full-scale civil war in July 1983. The LTTE killed 13 Sri Lankan army troops in an ambush in Jaffna. In retaliation, as many as 3,000 Tamils, mainly in Colombo, were killed in several days of violence at the end of July. Human-rights groups...