By Ravi Nessman
Associated Press
Thursday, April 24, 2008

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, April 24 -- Tamil rebels and Sri Lankan troops fought one of their fiercest battles in years Wednesday, battering each other with mortar and small-arms fire in a confrontation that the military said killed 100 guerrillas and left 76 soldiers dead or missing.

The rebels asserted that they killed more than 100 soldiers and lost 16 of their fighters in a 10-hour firefight they characterized as a rout of heavily armed government forces.

Whatever the casualties, which were impossible to verify, the battle was a serious blow to the government's promise to capture the Tamil Tigers' de facto state in the north, crush the rebel group and end the 25-year-old civil war in the Indian Ocean island nation by year's end.

A military spokesman, Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara, said the battle broke out about 5:30 a.m. when rebel forces overran government front lines in the Muhamalai area of the Jaffna peninsula, north of the rebels' de facto state.

Government forces fought back with small arms, mortars and tank fire, eventually repelling the rebel assault and pushing 500 yards into Tamil Tiger territory, he said.

Soon after the ground fighting, air force jets and helicopters destroyed two rebel artillery positions and hit rebel bunkers in the area, the military said in a statement.

The military initially said 15 soldiers died, then increased that toll to 38. By early Thursday, it said 43 were dead, 33 were missing and 120 were wounded. The toll was the worst suffered by the military in months and would make it one of the deadliest battles since fighting started here more than two years ago.

Rasiah Ilanthirayan, a spokesman for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, accused the military of sparking the battle. The rebels counted more than 100 dead soldiers and about 500 wounded troops, he said. Sixteen rebels were killed, he said.

Both sides routinely inflate casualty figures for the other side and underreport their own losses. Independent accounts of the fighting are unavailable because journalists are barred from the war zone.