Word: northerners
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After completing a highway from its desert border, the Islamic Republic next door bankrolled an extension linking Herat city to Afghanistan's remote northern provinces. Later this year, a host of Iranian-built schools, clinics and industrial parks around the city will be connected to the Iranian interior thanks to an $80 million railroad spur currently under construction. Homayoun Azizi, the head of Herat's provincial council, says he's grateful for the "huge impact" Iran has had in accelerating economic growth in the region, "But," he asks, raising an eyebrow, "what are they doing beneath it all?" (See pictures...
...Prabhakaran was the youngest of four children, born in a middle-class family in Valvettiturai, a fishing town on the northern coast of Sri Lanka's Jaffna peninsula. Very little is known about his early life. "My childhood was spent in the small circle of a lonely, quiet house," he said in a 1994 interview. He described a deep-seated anger against the military and remembered an eighth-grade teacher who exhorted students to take up arms against it. "It is he who impressed on me the need for armed struggle and persuaded me to put my trust...
...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...
...group's attacks continued to grow more audacious, culminating in a 2001 suicide mission at the international airport in Colombo. By the time of the 2002 cease-fire, the LTTE was essentially governing Sri Lanka's northern and eastern provinces and had the trappings of a state military complete with a rudimentary air force and navy. Prabhakaran appeared with fanfare to sign an agreement with the Sri Lankan government that year, but during four years of negotiations that followed, neither side could agree to a political compromise on autonomy for Tamil-majority areas. Confrontations between the Tigers and the government...
...civil war that has plagued the nation since 1983. At 1:40 p.m., Sri Lanka's government radio announced that Velupillai Prabhakaran, the elusive leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), was killed early this morning by special forces in the island's northern Karayamullavaikkal area. The 54-year-old Prabhakaran, who headed the Tamil separatist movement for 33 years, had been trying to flee the shrinking 100-m by 100-m pocket of land still under Tiger control in an ambulance when troops intercepted the vehicle, shooting those inside...