The Sri Lankan government has devoted as much as a quarter of the national budget to military spending. Sri Lanka's 3.2 million Tamils have close links to a larger population of Tamils in southern India who have lent financial support to the cause.

Repeated ceasefires have failed to hold and heavy fighting resumed in 2006. The government formally abandoned a six-year-old ceasefire at the beginning of 2008. Last year, the Sri Lankan army broke through rebel lines and drove the Tigers from many areas in the north that they had controlled for decades.

Independent journalists, foreign aid groups and diplomats have been almost entirely barred from the war zone, and reports from the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE have been impossible to verify.