Word: tigers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Years before the world 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...
...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...
...Technically, the Tigers did not 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...
...above all, Tiger leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran's real genius was to build a culture of sacrifice and martyrdom around his guerrilla force, with himself as demi-god leader - an almost exact forerunner of jihadi terrorism. In July 2002 TIME spent a few days with a female Tamil Tiger suicide squad at their base in northern Sri Lanka, and got a firsthand understanding of how he has been so successful...
...there's still no reply." "Why hasn't there been a reply?" whined Samandi, looking up with the one eye, her left, that survived a shot to the head and fiddling with the capsule of cyanide powder around her neck. "I want this. I want to be a Black Tiger. I want to blast myself for freedom...