Sri Lanka Rebels Cripple International Airport

July 24 -- Sri Lankan rebels launched one of their boldest and most damaging actions today, decimating the country's international airport and putting its main source of revenue — tourism — at stake.

Nine rebels stormed Bandaranaike International Airport outside the capital, Colombo, and using suicide bombers, mortars, guns and explosives, destroyed eight military and five passenger aircraft.

They also killed five military personnel and injured 14 before being shot dead or blowing themselves up.

The attack is expected to further weaken the government's resources, already battered from 18 years of civil war between the country's majority Sinhalese population and Tamil separatists.

Tourism has continued in the country's south and west despite fighting in the north and east. But today's attack on the airport where all international tourists arrive is sure to make visits even rarer.

More than 63,000 people have been killed in the conflict, and the 130,000-strong Sri Lankan army has suffered from immense desertion rates — numbering up to 30,000.

The problem has become so intense that last month, the country's prime minister said the government would give bonuses to large families for their potential personnel contribution to the nation's military.

Money for the Cause

Meanwhile, the Tamil rebels have become increasingly resourceful in their quest for funding — finding much of it overseas in the million-odd overseas Sri Lankan Tamil population scattered over neighboring India, Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States.

At least some of the money comes from expatriate gatherings.

Earlier this year in a senior citizen's center in a New Jersey suburb, about 200 Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants gathered to hear a guest speaker, a Tamil Roman Catholic priest, talk about the atrocities of the civil war.

It could have been any one of numerous immigrant gatherings in the U.S., except that the funds being gathered that evening would eventually end up — through a complicated financial network and a web of international bank accounts — in the pockets of one of the world's most high-profile organizations employing terrorist tactics.