Forces march towards Eastern domination

THOPPIGALA: Army commandoes seized a massive rocky plateau nicknamed “Tora Bora” and searched through grassy fields and brush Monday looking for Tigers - the last organised resistance to the government forces in eastern Sri Lanka, the military said.

The top army commander on the ground said the operation will conclude soon and bring all of Eastern Sri Lanka under Government control for the first time since 1994, dealing a major blow to the Tigers.

The commander spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media.

The military action in the East began last year, with the Government gaining advantage after a major split within the LTTE. The top Tiger commander in the region, known as Karuna, split from the Tigers in 2004 and took thousands of fighters with him.

Without his forces, the Tigers were quickly driven into the mostly uninhabited Thoppigala area - a region of rocks, bushes, lakes and grassy fields - where army commandos have been trying to crush them.

Late Sunday, the commandos began climbing a 4-kilometre-long rocky Narakamulla plateau, where the Tigers had kept a network of observation posts overlooking much of the area.

The plateau and several other nearby rocky outcroppings were dubbed “Tora Bora” by the LTTE because the caves and crannies made it an ideal hiding place to use for guerrilla warfare, much like the Tora Bora area in Afghanistan, army officials said.

At dawn Monday, the fighters had fled, but they left behind a maze of booby traps that could take days to clear, said Col. D. Gunawardane, head of the commando battalion that seized the area.

“At the moment, we are just inching up,” he said.

Army commanders said the capture of the area was a major success.

“Narakamulla Heights is a place where the terrorists can dominate the whole Thoppigala area,” Gunawardane said.

The senior ground commander leading the battle said he had cut off their supply routes and hoped to have the area free of Tiger fighters giving the government full control of the Eastern part of the island nation for the first time in 13 years.

“We are taking all the breeding grounds of the LTTE,” said Media Minister Anura Yapa.

The senior commander said that even after the fighters in Thoppigala are defeated, he expected sleeper cells hidden among villagers to continue attacks on soldiers in the area.

Even now, there are few direct confrontations between the thousands of soldiers patrolling Thoppigala and the 200 or so Tigers on the near-constant move throughout the area, Gunawardane said. Instead, the LTTE cadres prefer to lay mines and booby traps for patrolling soldiers.

Early Monday, one of his soldiers lost a leg when he stepped on a land mine, he said. A second mine, which the soldiers uncovered, lay unexploded in the nearby bush.

The commandos also uncovered a string of abandoned LTTE outposts Sunday, and gave a tour to journalists Monday. One hide was a small fort of logs and mud, with a roof of grass, dug into the ground beneath a tree. A UNICEF mat lay next to the entrance.

A short distance away, a metal cage, apparently used as a cell by the Tigers to hold their prisoners, was hidden beneath a tree.

Fearing traps, soldiers in the area were careful to walk only on paths that had already been certified as cleared by minesweepers combing the area with metal rakes.

Commandos also discovered a wire strung across the path leading to a booby trap of two mortar shells, a mine and a car battery planted two feet from the path.

Sappers carefully uncovered the trap, put explosives of their own in the hole and detonated the makeshift bomb.

In other captured areas, the government has sent in bulldozers to tear up the fields on both sides of the road to make sure there are no mines there.

AP