Terrorism across boundaries

Last week I posted about the apparently last-gasp air strike of the Tamil Tiger terrorist movement against Sri Lanka's capital city, Colombo.

It seems that the Tigers' ties to other international terrorist groups - well-documented in the past - may have been linked to yesterday's attack on the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team in Pakistan. As Melanie Phillips reports:

The sophistication of the attack, with one group of gunmen firing a rocket-propelled grenade in order to create a diversion, while others then approached, firing guns on the convoy, has drawn comparisons with the horrific multiple attacks by Islamists on the Indian city of Mumbai last November.

There were claims that Pakistan itself was implicated in the Mumbai atrocities. Today's attack will increase suspicions that Pakistan, notionally the ally of the west in the defence against Islamist terror, is turning a blind eye to the Islamists on its own soil and their suspected connections with Pakistan's intelligence network.

Sri Lanka is currently fighting a war of its own against Tamil Tiger terrorists, in which it has been criticised for the apparent harshness of its actions.

But what few in Britain understand is that the Tamil Tigers, whose cause is Tamil separatism, have links to Islamic terrorism and specifically with al Qaeda - links which were first forged in 1991.

Since then, a number of intelligence agencies around the world have reported transactions between these apparently disparate terrorist groups. In the Philippines, for example, the Tamil Tigers provided an al Qaeda cell led by Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Centre in New York in 1993, with forged and adapted identity documents.

Throughout the 1990s, reports from Afghanistan confirmed the presence of Tamil Tigers members delivering military training to Asia and Arab nationals. In addition, Tamil Tigers were included in al Qaeda teams training up other terrorist groups in the Philippines. And Tiger ships have been used to transport al Qaeda weapons.

In Sri Lanka, the Tigers have been fighting a separatist war for an ethnic Tamil state in the north of the country - where they formed a de facto one party state - for the past 25 years.

Their ‘Black Tiger’ brigades pioneered the practice of suicide bombing, and were linked to the assassination in 1991 of the former Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi.

In 2004 Amnesty International said the Tigers were beating up parents who refused to hand over their children to serve as ‘child soldiers’.

The Sri Lankan government has had considerable success in isolating the Tamil Tigers by its military campaign against them.

Squeamish people in the west disapprove of such military tactics. But the campaign has been successful because the Sri Lankans have grasped something many in the west implacably deny – that terror can only be defeated through military means and that appeasement only brings an increase in violence.

When the Sri Lankan government previously invited the separatist Tamil Tigers to a conference and offered them concessions, there was a huge increase in terrorist violence. It was only once the Sri Lankans decided to attack the Tamil terrorists militarily and started flushing them out that it started getting the upper hand.

In recent weeks, it has stepped up its military offensive to defeat them altogether. The Pakistan attack therefore may well be payback time for the Sri Lankan campaign.

A sobering article. There's more at the link.

This should serve as a reminder to us. We're used to thinking of 'allied' or 'sympathetic' nations elsewhere in the world, as well as 'opponents' or even 'enemies'. Terrorists are just like us. They also have allies and sympathizers. I tend to agree with Ms. Phillips: it's not at all unlikely that Muslim fundamentalist terrorists in Pakistan could have been contacted by the Tamil Tigers to carry out this attack on their behalf.

Bears thinking about, if you travel a lot.

Peter