Sri Lankan government troops pushed into two of the last sections of territory held by Tamil Tiger rebels on Saturday, a day after capturing a key stronghold in the north.
Soldiers moved into a narrow sliver of land the rebels have been holding on the east coast of the Jaffna Peninsula, military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said.
On Friday, troops seized control of Elephant Pass, the Tamil Tiger rebels’ last major stronghold on the northern peninsula.
Soldiers also moved on Saturday into the pocket of territory the rebels still control on the main section of an island south of the peninsula, he said.
The rebels retreated south to the region around their last stronghold of Mullaittivu — where they were expected to make a stand — after months of government offensives.
Soldiers advancing on Mullaittivu also captured a nearby 2.5km-long runway on Saturday. The rebels have used the strip to launch their rudimentary aircraft for several bombing raids on key military and economic targets since 2007, the military said in a statement.
Rebel officials could not be reached for comment.
The government has vowed to crush the separatist guerrillas and end the Indian Ocean island nation’s quarter-century-old civil war in the coming months.
The new military thrust followed a string of major victories.
Troops seized the Tamil Tiger administrative capital of Kilinochchi last week and quickly pushed deep into rebel territory.
On Friday, they took Elephant Pass, giving the government nearly full control of the northern peninsula — the Tamil’s cultural capital and the symbolic heart of the insurgency — for the first time in nine years.
The rebels still controlled a tiny section on the peninsula’s east coast that troops were fighting to clear on Saturday, Nanayakkara said.
The fall of Elephant Pass also put the A-9 road, Sri Lanka’s major north-south highway and a powerful symbol of national unity, completely under government control for the first time in 23 years.
The road will allow soldiers in the north to link up with those coming from the south and west and attack the rebels boxed in the northeast with renewed force.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS