Tigers attack in Sri Lanka north, U S envoy visits

COLOMBO, Aug 17 (Reuters) Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels launched a new attack overnight on the besieged northern Jaffna peninsula, the army said today, as a U S envoy visited the island for talks on the worst fighting since a 2002 truce.

The military said the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had launched a night-time offensive along the front line with assault boats and infantry, but said it had largely been repulsed with some 70 rebel bodies left in no-man's-land.

''Sea Tiger boats fired at the security forces,'' said an army spokesman. ''The security forces retaliated with air strikes ... It was repulsed. Overall, we believe over 100 LTTE were killed including with artillery and air strikes.'' The military said 106 soldiers had died in the Jaffna battle in the past week. Even before current fighting, the area had already been devastated by two decades of war, the flat landscape dominated by the burnt trunks of shelled palm trees, destroyed buildings and small red minefield marker signs.

There is now no access to the area and phone lines are down. Diplomats are sceptical about claims by both sides, suspecting they talk down their own casualties and exaggerate enemy deaths.

More than 800 people had already died this year even before ground fighting began after a dispute over rebel-held water supplies. The man leading a Nordic ceasefire monitoring mission said several hundred civilians had probably died in August.

''If there is no success ... getting the two parties back to the ceasefire, we will see a long military struggle where, as is usual in this island, no one will win,'' retired Swedish Major General Ulf Henricsson told Reuters in his Colombo headquarters.

Jaffna, birthplace of many of the senior rebel leadership and central to their fight for an ethnic Tamil homeland, is cut off from the rest of the island by Tiger territory and troops must be brought in by sea and air.

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