Sri Lankan separatists take fight to the air

The Sri Lankan Air Force has long suspected the insurgents of trying to develop an air force.

Intelligence officials suspected that, before his death at the hands of the Sri Lankan Army in 2001, Colonel Shankar (the nom de guerre for rebel leader Vaithilingam Sornalingam) was working to create a viable armed, aerial force. Shankar, who was once an aeronautical engineer with Air Canada, was responsible for developing the airplanes from scratch since 1995, according to an SLAF report.

A routine reconnaissance mission by one of the SLAF's Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in early 2005 detected an airfield in Tiger-held territory in the north of the island. Analysts estimated the field to be around 3,600 feet in length with a paved surface, sufficient to land a variety of different aircraft.

The Tiger air raid comes shortly after SLAF claims that they have destroyed the Tigers' air capabilities.

What's most surprising about the Tamil Air Force, says Mehta, is that the Tigers were able to improvise the assembly of a light, single-propeller aircraft equipped with automatic weapons circuitry and the ability to carry as many as four undercarriage bombs – a difficult feat of engineering for such small aircraft.

The air attack, Mehta says, could be a sign of the Tigers' growing desperation after a series of losses in ground battles in eastern Sri Lanka.

"After the recent losses, they [the Tigers] want to disabuse the common perception that they're down and out," Mehta says.

The LTTE are fighting for a separate ethnic-Tamil state in the island nation's northeastern region. The majority of Sri Lankans are ethnically Sinhalese. Several nations, including the United States and Canada, have classified the Tigers as a terrorist organization.

Despite a 2002 ceasefire, which is still officially in place, the last 15 months have seen Sri Lanka slide steadily back toward full-scale civil war. Now, as many as 127,000 people from the largely ethnic Tamil eastern region of the country are considered internally diplaced people, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The Tigers have, of late, lost territory in ground fights with the Sri Lankan Army for the first time in several years. In Sept. 2006 and Jan. 2007, the Tigers lost Sampur and Vaharai respectively, two strategically important towns along the island's east coast.

Their new air capabilities, says the IPCS's Dr. Manoharan, may now help the Tigers reverse these losses and may signal more brazen and bloody attacks to come.

"No matter how unsophisticated their aircraft are, the possibility of suicidal attacks similar to 9/11 on a Colombo high-rise building or targets of economic and political significance in the future cannot be underestimated."

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