Friday, February 20, 2009

Tamil Tiger's, Who Are These People?

Hello, hope you are doing well. As you may know, Gaza is in ruins, hopefully going to be successfully rebuilt, but with so much destruction, its hard to say when it'll be back to normal. Now there is a "new" conflict, The Tamil Tigers rebels in Sri Lanka, called, "Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)". This conflict have been going on for a while, yet people outside of South Asia may not know too much about it.

The Tamil Tigers are trying to establish a separate state from Sri Lanka, and create a Tamil State, they are recognized as a terrorist organization, and rightly so. The Tamil tigers are responsible for explosions, suicide attacks, killings, recruitment of child soldiers, ethnic cleansing (against Muslims and Sinhalese from areas in their control), piracy, credit card fraud, and smuggling arms, and god knows what else. This conflict brings memories of the "mujahideen", not in the tactic they use (though not dissimilar), but in the fact that many people don't know these people, similarly to how we didn't know what a Taleban or Al-Qaeda was a few years back (the good old days), we found out what those were once the United States was attacked, now we will know the Tamil Tigers only if they are stupid enough to attack (not likely, except maybe a US embassy).

The Tamil Tigers are particularly dangerous, because they are the only rebel organization who has possession of aircraft! Aircraft, for a terrorist organization, surely that's a scary thought, although now they have appeared in the spotlight, for their recent fights against the Sri Lankan army, but also for their attack on Columbo, Sri Lanka, the largest city in Sri Lanka. They have attacked with two propreller airplanes, both shot down with anti-aircraft guns, one landed on a building, killing the occupants inside. The other plane fell on the Sri Lankan airport. The Tamil fighters have been mostly defeated by the Sri Lankan army in the past few weeks, they are now in a small part of the jungle, in the north of Sri Lanka. These attacks are obviously a last ditch effort, possibly to damage any targets, for instance the nearby air force headquarters. They have lost though, all that needs to happen now is the capture of their leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, which will end this stupid land grab attempt, that only destroys lives.

Yeah, I'm talking to you FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia)