Sri Lanka’s Civil Battle Escalates
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Tamil rebels and Sri Lankan troops fought one of their fiercest battles in years yesterday, battering each other with small arms and mortars in a confrontation that the military said killed 52 guerrillas and 38 soldiers. The rebels claimed they killed more than 100 soldiers and lost only 16 of their fighters in a 10-hour firefight they characterized as a rout of the heavily armed government forces. Either way, the battle was a serious blow to the government’s promise to capture the Tamil Tigers’s de facto state in the north, crush the rebel group, and end the 25-year-old civil war.
