Word: lankans
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...spite of how relatively obscure their rebel cause is on the world stage, the attacks by Sri Lanka's Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (L.T.T.E) always seem to draw lots of attention. Such was the case Thursday when a squadron of speedboat suicide bombers rammed into a Sri Lankan navy troop carrier convoy off the country's northern coast, killing 17 sailors. The Sri Lankan government claimed to kill more than 50 Tamil Tigers in return, but the deadly operation had already reminded the world that the Tigers are the fathers of modern-day suicide bombing - not only masters...
...heard of Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda, the Tigers were pioneering a new method of guerrilla warfare in their fight against Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese for a tiny separate state in the north of the small Indian Ocean island. The first Tiger killed himself attacking the Sri Lankan army in 1987. Hundreds followed, and when they signed a cease-fire with the Sri Lankan government in February 2002, the Tigers accounted for around a third of all suicide attacks in the world. A Western diplomat based in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo describes the Tigers...
...Those efforts have largely failed, and despite the 2002 cease-fire, this year the island has appeared poised to return to war as a new wave of violence has swept over it. Around 200 people have been killed in the last month alone. After the latest attack, the Sri Lankan government launched air strikes on Tiger territory for the second time this year...
...invent modern suicide bombing - the first such attack was against the American embassy in Beirut in 1983. They did however turn it into a vicious art form. Tigers adapted explosives so that they could be used on land, sea and air - thanks to the purchase of what Sri Lankan intelligence services say is a small squadron of microlight aircraft. Bombs were disguised to fit around, and even inside, the body. Among Tiger victims: a president, the head of the Sri Lankan air force, a minister of national security, an opposition leader and a former prime minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi...
...fund their war in the dirt-poor salt marshes of northern Sri Lanka, the Tigers built a multimillion-dollar fund-raising arm, cajoling and strong-arming the expatriate ethnic Tamil community which settled abroad, particularly in Britain, Australia and Canada. They assembled a fleet of boats, which Sri Lankan intelligence estimates at 22 ships, to smuggle weapons across the Indian Ocean and beyond. And they exported their know-how to the world...