Black Day for Black Tigers - Strategy Page
On September 9, the Sri Lankan military got a major morale boost when
their Special Forces troops and air force defeated a three pronged
attack on the Vavuniya air base in the northern part of the island, said
the respected military website Strategy page yesterday.
It said: “The LTTE was intent on destroying a newly installed Indian
radar in the air base, and killing soldiers in an adjacent army base.
But Army Special Forces troops in the base detected the 11 LTTE
“Black Tiger” commandos sneaking into the base, and ambushed them.
Meanwhile, the LTTE was sending its two single engine commercial
aircraft, modified as light bombers, to bomb the base once the Black
Tigers lit it up.
At the same time, the LTTE had moved a few of their remaining 130mm
artillery pieces to the front line, which was within range of the
Vavuniya base. But the Sri Lankan Special Forces had already quietly
alerted the entire base, and the new radar also spotted the income LTTE
aircraft.
The radar had been installed specifically to spot these low flying
aircraft. The Sri Lankan got several F-7 (a Chinese clone of the Russian
MiG-21) fighters into the air, and one of the LTTE aircraft was found
and shot down. The Black Tigers were all killed. The LTTE artillery
fired about 70 shells at the Vavuniya base, killing 14 and wounding 20
people.
But the big news was the defeat of the dreaded Black Tigers. Last
Fall, two dozen of these men raided the heavily guarded Anuradhapura air
base, 170 kilometres north of the capital, killing 14 air force
personnel, and destroying eight aircraft. Eight other aircraft were
damaged, but repairable. Nearly all (21) of the Black Tigers were
killed.
The Black Tigers have been an elite force of suicide bombers for over
twenty years. In that time, they have lost about 350 men and women while
carrying out suicide attacks. There have been about fifty such attacks
in the last year. There are only a few hundred people in the Black Tiger
organization.
The Black Tiger suicide bombers are carefully selected and well
trained, enabling them to get to heavily guarded targets.
The preparations for each attack are extensive. The LTTE will
sometimes even conduct research to see what types of bombs work best. In
one case, a live dog and goat were strapped into the front seat of a
car, and then exposed to a bomb blast in the car to see if the bomb had
enough force to kill.
The bombers themselves undergo months of training and dry runs before
they are turned loose with a live bomb.
The two dozen Black Tigers that attacked the heavily guarded
Anuradhapura air base (north of the capital, far from the LTTE base
areas) apparently planned their attack carefully, and carried it out
despite the knowledge that few, if any, of them would come back. People
around the air base remembered seeing some the Black Tigers before the
attack.
And the raid was coordinated with an aerial attack by two of the
single engine commercial aircraft the LTTE uses as improvised bombers.
The pre-dawn raid took the air force guards by surprise, and was over
quickly, mainly because the raiders went straight for their objectives
regardless of losses.
The air force security personnel had to kill all the raiders to halt
the destruction of aircraft. In response, the Sri Lankan military are
again revising their security measures, sure that they will have to deal
with the Black Tigers again.
This time, the Army was apparently expecting an attack. The Army
commando force has been growing in numbers and competence over the last
few years.
The fact that the commandos confronted a Black Tiger squad at 3 AM,
and wiped them out, makes all Sri Lankan soldiers believe that the last
few years of successful operations against the LTTE was not a fluke, but
the result of better training and combat experience.”
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