National Post    

On Friday, Sri Lanka's army captured Kilinochchi, the de facto capital of the Tamil Tigers. This marks a crippling blow for the Tigers, a rebel militia and terrorist group that first took up arms more than a quarter-century ago. It also poses an indirect security risk for Canada: As the Tigers are routed from the battlefield, Ottawa must guard against fleeing Tiger leaders seeking sanctuary among this country's large Ontario-based community of expatriate Tamils.

B. Muralidhar Reddy 

Kilinochchi: To describe Kilinochchi, the administrative and political headquarters of the LTTE which fell into the hands of the Sri Lankan military on Friday, as a “ghost town” is an understatement. 

It is a town without a soul, roofs, windows and any conceivable civil and administrative infrastructure. For a bustling town that is home to an estimated 1,00,000 people, the destruction left behind presumably by the fleeing Tiger cadre as the military advanced is to be seen to be believe.

By A Selvaraj, TNN  

CHENNAI: The ‘Q’ branch police on Tuesday arrested a 23-year-old Sri Lankan Tamil for helping the LTTE smuggle goods from the state. Dileepan, a native of Jaffna, was arrested from Red Hills and three satellite phones which he had brought from Switzerland were recovered from him. He landed in the police net after sleuths traced the calls he made to an LTTE organiser, Antony, who was under police detention.

On November 27, 2008, Velupillai Prabhakaran, supremo of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, proclaimed in his annual Heroes’ Day message that the Sinhala state was “living in a dreamland of military victory.” He promised that it was “a dream from which it will awake.” A month earlier he had declared the capture of Kilinochchi — the LTTE’s administrative hub and de facto ‘capital’ following the loss of Jaffna in 1995 — to be “a day dream of Rajapaksa.” The realisation of this dream in the New Year is a body blow from which there can be no recovery as far as anyone knows. This is true in a political as much as military sense. Militarily, the LTTE has taken a continuous battering over the past two years. President Mahinda Rajapaksa did give it a window of opportunity to return to the peace talks. But after the success of the Mavil Aru operation — provoked by the Tigers’ foolish act of blocking the sluice gates — there was no stopping the Sri Lankan armed forces. In 2007 they rapidly evicted the LTTE, which had been fractured and weakened by the Karuna revolt, from the province. More surprisingly, over the past year the Sri Lankan army, backed effectively by the air force and navy, has made dramatic inroads into LTTE-held territory in the Northern Province. The capture of Kilinochchi was delayed owing to the presence of a large number of civilians, torrential rains, and the government’s determination to avert collateral damage. President Rajapaksa has done well to emphasise that the military achievement was not a victory of “one community over another” or a “defeat of the North by the South” but “a decisive victory over savage terrorism.”