Word: rebel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...release of the politicians was less moral reawakening than practical compromise. Keeping prisoners for years on end requires territorial control, supply lines and a large number of rebel guards. The FARC maintains those things in some areas. Alan Jara, a kidnapped former governor who was released on Feb. 3, recalls pulling into a rebel camp that lacked kitchen gear. Though they were deep in the Amazon forest, the rebels overnight procured a gasoline stove and a 13-quart pressure cooker to prepare their beans and lentils. But even so, holding hostages has become increasingly difficult. The FARC is losing ground...
Colombia's Marxist guerrillas probably rue the day they kidnapped state legislator Sigifredo Lopez and his colleagues. Disguised as police agents, the rebels stormed a government building in the southern city of Cali in 2002, announced a bomb threat and then herded a dozen lawmakers, including Lopez, aboard a bus and drove them into the mountains. But the operation ended up in one of the ghastliest blunders of Colombia's four-decade-long civil war. In June 2007, guerrilla guards mistakenly thought they were under attack by the army and, in a panic, executed 11 of the hostages. Lopez alone...
...considered one of the world's most sophisticated and tightly organized insurgent groups, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) may be nearing defeat in its 25-year war against the Sri Lankan government over a separate homeland for the region's minority Tamils. Sri Lankan troops captured the rebel group's last remaining airstrip on Feb. 3, following the military's Jan. 25 takeover of the city of Mullaittivu, an LTTE stronghold. An estimated 250,000 ethnic Tamils remain trapped in the war zone, with human-rights groups accusing both sides of putting civilians' lives at risk. Violence between...
...short on supplies and fighters, and has gone to ground in an ever ever-shrinking pocket of jungle in the northeast of the country as government forces advance. Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa on Sunday called for the LTTE's surrender, but there is little chance that a rebel movement whose fighters over the years have chosen suicide over capture will go down quietly. (See pictures from inside Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger territory...
...figure is closer 120,000). As many as 300 civilians have been killed in the last week of fighting, and human rights groups have accused both sides of abuses. The International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) claimed on Sunday that artillery shells landed in a makeshift hospital in rebel territory, killing at least 9 people and wounding 20 injured. And ICRC representative Sarasi Wijeratne in Colombo urged both sides "to allow the immediate evacuation of civilians and allow in the flow of essential medical supplies...