The liberation tigers of Tamil Eelam

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are a guerilla/terrorist group representing the minority Tamil community, fighting for an Eelam, or homeland in the northern and eastern provinces of Sri Lanka. Led by V. Pirabhakaran, the group started as a small forty to fifty man outfit in the early 1980s, but has since grown to an organization of several thousand. A unique, if macabre feature of its tactics has been the use of suicide commandos, both men and women, some in their early teens, for individual assassination as well as mass attacks. A former Indian prime minister, a Sri Lankan president, and several top aides have been targeted and killed in this way. The LTTE has not hesitated to kill prominent Sinhala civilians. Between 1987 and 1990 LTTE fought the Indian Army, which was sent to disarm it as part of an Indian-Sri Lankan agreement. After the Indian pullout in 1990, the organization used a suicide bomber to carry out the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Thereafter Indian authorities unravelled a well-organized network of safe houses, supporters, and logistics depots in Tamil Nadu. India maintains a strict naval cordon sanitate around the area of conflict, which shows no signs of abating.