March 7,2008:
The LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), a separatist Tamil group
from the island of Sri Lanka, has been revealed as a key operator in a
worldwide weapons smuggling operation. This has served a wide variety of
terrorist organizations. In three decades of fighting, the LTTE has killed over
70,000 people and pioneered the use of suicide bombers. This included inventing
the explosive belt. The LTTE has also killed two national leaders (of Sri Lanka
and India) and many more senior government officials than Islamic terrorists.
Al Qaeda learned quite a lot about terrorism from the LTTE, which is basically
a secular organizations (although most members are Hindu).
But even
more importantly, the LTTE pioneered fund raising and procurement techniques
that have greatly aided Islamic terrorists. The LTTE developed methods which
enabled them to raise large amounts of money from expatriate Tamils (who are
native to southern India). The LTTE was also able to raise money from Tamils in
southern India, but it was the techniques of pretending to collect money for
charity work, then using it to fund terrorism, that really caught al Qaedas
attention.
All this
eventually caught the attention of
counter-terror organizations in many countries, leading to the LTTE being
declared a terrorist organization, and many of its fund raising operations shut
down. As that was done, more and more evidence (documents, and interrogations)
piled up showing that the LTTE had worked with Palestinian, Kurdish, Taliban,
Al Quaeda, Eritrea, Filipino, and other Middle Eastern groups to obtain illegal
weapons, and learn how to use them. The LTTE also became the primary weapons
purchaser, and transporter for many of these other terrorist groups. The LTTE maintained
hundreds of small, and a few large, boats for transporting these weapons to
LTTE controlled parts of the island country of Sri Lanka, and other parts of
the world as well. But recent reverses have destroyed most of that fleet,
especially the six large ships, that could move weapons around the world, and
sometimes did.
The LTTE
arms procurement operation has been badly damaged, but is still (barely)
functioning. The terrorist groups it has worked with in the past are also
experiencing hard times. But the information about these past LTTE exploits
demonstrates how terrorist groups, with quite different agendas, can cooperate
for their mutual benefit.