COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - Tamil rebels and Sri Lankan troops fought one of their fiercest battles in years Wednesday, battering each other with small arms and mortars in a confrontation that the military said killed 52 guerrillas and 38 soldiers.
The rebels claimed they killed more than 100 soldiers and lost only 16 of their fighters in a 10-hour firefight they characterized as a rout of the heavily armed government forces.
Either way, the battle was a serious blow to the government's promise to capture the Tamil Tigers' de facto state in the north, crush the rebel group and end the 25-year-old civil war in this Indian Ocean island nation by the end of the year.
Both sides routinely inflate casualty figures for the other side and underreport their own losses. Independent accounts of the fighting are unavailable because journalists are barred from the war zone.
Fighting between the two sides has escalated since the government pulled out of a long-ignored cease-fire with the rebels and forced out the Nordic truce monitors who were some of the only observers with access to the war zone.
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