By successfully carrying out air raids on military and economic targets in and around the capital, separatist rebels have demonstrated a new capacity to wage ‘all-out’ war in their fight to carve out a separate state for the Tamil ethnic minority in Sri Lanka. But questions are being asked as to how the fledgling Tamileelam Air Force (TAF), the air wing of the militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), has been able to acquire planes and train pilots despite the relatively small size of the land mass available in the Tamil-dominated north and east of the strife-torn island.

By all estimates, the TAF is puny and may consist of no more than five propeller-driven Zlin Z-142, Czech-made planes that seem to have been smuggled in as completely knocked down (CKD) kits and assembled locally.

But given the anti-terrorist atmosphere of the post 9/11 world, putting the TAF together and actually carrying out bombing raids is a feat that has startled intelligence specialists. This development is particularly worrying for security experts in Sri Lanka and neighbouring India and is the closest that a banned group has come to using aircraft to strike against the establishment after 9/11.

After the latest TAF raid on April 28, the third since the first strike on Mar 26, Sri Lankan authorities were forced to suspend night operations at Colombo international airport.

TAF raids have also caused damage and deaths at an air force base that shares a runway with the international airport and destroyed an engineering complex and ammunition dump at the Palaly military base in Jaffna. For its part, the LTTE warned of more TAF air raids.

Retired Sri Lankan air force wing commander CAO Direckze said that to maintain a handful of light aircraft, the LTTE must possess an efficient engineering facility, a limited training facility and an improvised explosive devices producing facility. “Utilising light aircraft brings is a new and very dangerous dimension to the current hostilities” he argues. “(But, it) does not constitute an air force, rather an air threat,” he said.

Meanwhile, Singapore-based international terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna has slammed the Australian government for allowing LTTE sympathisers resident there to raise funds which, he claims, is used to procure aircraft, arms, explosives and other equipment from Australia itself. Gunaratna, who heads the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore, argues that Australia may have been blind to LTTE fundraising in Australia “because they have been more focused on stopping Muslim extremists”.

“Within the intelligence community now it’s very well established that because governments turned a blind eye to this, today there are light aircrafts the Tigers are using to mount attacks in Sri Lanka,” Gunaratna was quoted as saying in the Daily News.

“If LTTE audacity is not nipped in the bud the ‘mosquito bite’ that at present only causes an irritation can develop into the mosquito that injects the deadly dengue fever,” was how Direckze put it.

But more than LTTE audacity and the willingness of foreign governments to look the other way, analysts are hard put to explain how the TAF could fly several bombing sorties over Colombo and return to their unknown bases safely. — IPS