COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — More than 150,000 civilians are trapped in a rapidly shrinking jungle battlefield as Sri Lanka hopes to crush a 25-year-old separatist movement. The top U.N. official in the country said Monday their lives are in serious danger. “There’s so many people, so many guns and such a high intensity of fighting,” U.N. resident coordinator Neil Buhne told The Associated Press. “There have been many civilians killed over the last two days. … It’s really a crisis now.”The huge population of trapped, uprooted civilians is living in makeshift shelters under desperate conditions in the last scrap of rebel-controlled territory, Buhne said.
Trapped civilians in Sri Lankan war a ‘crisis’
January 26, 2009