Sri Lankan Government forces launched heavy air attacks against Tamil Tiger strongholds in the north of the country yesterday, a day after fierce fighting on the ground between army and rebel troops left hundreds dead or injured.

Military officials said that the air force was called in to bomb Tiger positions around Kilinochchi, the site of the rebels' headquarters, about 210 miles (340km) north of the capital, Colombo. For months the Government has claimed that the northern town is poised to fall, an event that could allow it to claim victory in the bloody 25-year civil war.

Fierce resistance and the monsoon rains have slowed the progress of the renewed offensive, however, and time is running out for President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who has pledged to oust the rebels from Kilinochchi before the end of the year.

The capture of the town would be a devastating blow for the Tigers, whose violent campaign for an ethnic Tamil homeland has left more than 70,000 people dead since it began in 1983.

Kilinochchi is effectively the administrative centre of a parallel state that the rebels, who are classified as a terrorist organisation by the US and the EU, have fought to establish to protect Sri Lanka's Tamil minority from a Government dominated by the ethnic Sinhalese majority.

On Tuesday government forces carried out a multi-pronged offensive against Tamil positions around Kilinochchi and on the Jaffna peninsula, a Defence Ministry spokesman said.

In a rare statement announcing casualty numbers, the ministry claimed that 25 of its troops had been killed, while another 10 were missing and 160 wounded. It said that an estimated 120 Tigers had been killed and 250 more wounded.

By contrast, the rebels claimed that they had killed 170 soldiers and wounded 420, according to a statement given to the pro-Tiger website Tamilnet.

Accurate figures on the level of casualties suffered by both sides are all but unobtainable because of a ban on media entering the conflict zone in northeastern Sri Lanka. Both sides are known to exaggerate enemy losses and to under-report their own.

S. Puleedevan, a Tiger officer, said that the rebels had recovered the bodies of 32 government troops and would return them through the International Red Cross. The rebels did not give details of their casualties.

The Defence Ministry said yesterday that fighting continued in the north while its troops consolidated captured Tiger positions.

For several months President Rajapaksa's Government has been predicting the imminent fall of Kilinochchi. The military said recently that it was within “kissing distance” of the town.

The army pushed the Tigers out of eastern Sri Lanka in July 2007 and began an attack on the north this year after the Government formally scrapped a 2002 Norwegian-brokered truce in January.

Times Recommends

• Experts baffled by vanishing sea lions
• CIA caught in a dirty and secretive war
• Double life of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab