text: Chapter 4
  External Support for the Tamil Tigers
  Eleven years of discrimination by the Sinhala majority against the Tamil
  minority reached a breaking point in Sri Lanka during the Black July riots of 1983.
  Soon after, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam emerged as the most capable Tamil
  insurgent group, prepared to wage a campaign of violence and terror against the Sri
  Lankan state and non-Tamil civilians. The operational environment was complex,
  with insurgents fighting insurgents while also fighting the government, as occurred
  with Sunni and Shia groups in Iraq. At various stages of the conflict, the Liberation
  Tigers of Tamil Eelam fought against the Sri Lankan state but also against other
  antigovernment insurgent groups. The most prominent of these groups was the
  Janatha Vimukthi Permuna, a Marxist-Leninist group that blended violence and
  left-wing politics before laying down its arms in the mid to late 1990s.
  This case illustrates the importance of non-state actors in an operational
  environment. While the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam was indeed a non-state
  actor in its own right, the group relied on its global diaspora for a range of support
  activities. Following the ethnic riots of 1983, thousands of Tamil refugees fled
  overseas to India, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. This sowed the seeds
  for the Tamil diaspora and the transnational nature of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
  Eelam’s insurgency. The global diaspora was a major part of the organization’s
  fundraising and propaganda network. Furthermore, the transnational diaspora
  network provided funding and weaponry to sustain the Tigers for most of the group’s
  existence.
  In addition to enjoying the largesse of a well-organized and entrepreneurial
  diaspora, the insurgents relied on co-ethnics in India for sanctuary, which was
  essential in the group’s early years. Since the Tamils effectively controlled the Jaffna
  peninsula in the northeast of the country, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had a
  home base from which it could train, plan, and execute attacks against the military.
  Furthermore, across the Palk Straits in Tamil Nadu, India, the Liberation Tigers of
  Tamil Eelam was able to rely on the support—both active and passive—of thousands
  of ethnic Tamils who sympathized with the group.
  The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam took advantage of the benefits of
  globalization, developing a truly global network of contacts abroad, and soon
  engaged in weapons procurement activities throughout East and Southeast Asia, in
  Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ukraine, the Balkans, Lebanon, and other well-known arms
  markets. At various points throughout the insurgency, the Tigers collaborated with
  other terrorists groups as diverse as the Revolutionary Armed Forces Colombia, the
  African National Congress in South Africa, Moro Islamic Liberation Front, Hezb-i-
  Islami Gulbuddin in Afghanistan, the Japanese Red Army, and the Popular Front for
  the Liberation of Palestine. In 1996, the insurgents acquired U.S. Stinger-class
  missiles from the Kurdistan Worker’s Party and used these weapons two years later
  to shoot down a Sri Lankan civilian Lionair jet.
  Over time, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam distinguished itself as
  perhaps the most lethal insurgent force in modern history. By the mid-late 1990s, the
  group boasted a navy, an air force, and an elite suicide commando unit used to
  assassinate several heads of state and numerous counterinsurgency force
  commanders. As a pioneer of suicide techniques, the Tamil Tigers devoted
  significant resources to two operational wings that functioned as suicide strike teams,
  the Black Tigers and the Sea Tigers. A “no-holds barred” approach to the conflict led
  the counterinsurgency force and the insurgents to routinely and systematically
  slaughter each other, while also destroying Sri Lanka’s infrastructure and displacing
  much of its civilian population.