COLOMBO, June 30: Sri Lanka’s army chief said on Monday his forces had wiped out the military capability of the Tamil Tigers, and that they needed just one more year to totally defeat the rebels.

Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka said the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) guerillas had been forced to resort to hit-and-run attacks.

“From about the beginning of the year, the LTTE has lost its conventional capability,” Fonseka told Colombo-based foreign correspondents. “They are no longer fighting as a conventional army.” He said the Tigers were not using heavy artillery and mortars, but that there were clashes in the island’s embattled northern areas on a daily basis.

“We have already defeated them (as a conventional army). They have lost that capability. Although they are fighting with us, it is not in the same manner.” ”Earlier, we couldn’t move one kilometre for two, three months. That type of resistance is not there any more.” He estimated that the Tigers would lose even their current reduced capability in about a year but he cautioned that a Tigers’ insurgency could rumble on indefinitely

The Tamil Tigers still have a few fixed-wing planes and a formidable sea going capability, a rarity for any guerrilla outfit in the world.

Led by 53-year-old Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE also has a band of suicide bombers known for their spectacular strikes, including a damaging attack on the island’s only international airport in July 2001.

General Fonseka himself narrowly escaped assassination in April 2006 when a woman suicide bomber targeted him inside the high-security army headquarters complex.

Fonseka said security forces had just wrested control over the entire coastal district of Mannar, along the north-western sea board of the island, after nine months of fighting which claimed the lives of 170 government troops.

During the same period, the Tigers lost at least 2,000 fighters, Fonseka said, while revising upwards the current Tigers’ strength to 5,000 combatants.

He admitted that previous military estimates of the Tiger strength had been too low.—AFP