July 10,
2008: The LTTE, an ethnic Tamil
separatist movement in Sri Lanka, announced that, in the last year, 34 of their
suicide warriors died. Since LTTE began using suicide bombers 21 years, 356 of
the "Black Tigers" (as they call their suicidal heroes) have died. Not all the
suicide attacks are with bomb vests. Last year, 21 Black Tigers launched a
commando attack on a Sri Lankan Air Force base, in order to destroy some well
equipped reconnaissance aircraft that were causing the LTTE a lot of problems.
All the Black Tigers died, and the government quickly found replacements for
the lost aircraft.
There are
only a few hundred people in the Black Tiger organization. The Black Tiger
suicide bombers are carefully selected, highly motivated and well trained,
enabling them to get to heavily guarded targets. The preparations for each
attack are extensive. The LTTE will sometimes even conduct research to see what
types of bombs work best. In one case, a live dog and goat were strapped into
the front seat of a car, and then exposed to a bomb blast in the car to see if
the bomb had enough force to kill. The bombers themselves undergo months of
training and dry runs before they are turned loose with a live bomb.
Most (65
percent) of the Black Tiger activity took place before the 2002 ceasefire, and
most of those took place at sea, as suicide boat attacks sought to discourage
the Sri Lankan navy from stopping gunrunners who were keeping the LTTE fighters
supplied.
The LTTE
practically wrote the book for suicide attacks, making their mark before
Hizbollah and al Qaeda went big time with it. The Black Tigers were very
successful going after senior officials, taking out an Indian prime minister
and a president of Sri Lanka. But their success was their undoing, as the
suicide attacks eventually played a
large role in getting the LTTE tagged as an international terrorist
organization, which made fundraising and obtaining weapons and munitions much
more difficult.