Sri Lankan troops fought toward the shrinking strongholds of the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels on Sunday, the military said, seeking a crushing battlefield victory to end one of Asia’s longest insurgent ground wars.

The military said it had killed at least 24 rebels after a series of confrontations on Saturday in the small northeastern wedge of jungle which is all that is left of the Tigers’ self-proclaimed state.

In the course of fighting, troops captured two rebel camps and a 2.5 km (1 mile) long airstrip with two hangars the military said it suspected was used by the Tigers’ rudimentary air wing.

The air force said war planes destroyed a rebel boat on Sunday and wounded fighters from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fleeing the area, which is on the east coast north of the remaining Tiger bastion of Mullaittivu.

The Tigers could not be reached for comment. But the pro-rebel web site www.TamilNet.com quoted Tiger officials saying they had killed 18 soldiers and wounded 40 at Iranamadu, southwest of the former rebel headquarters of Kilinochchi.

Soldiers seized that town, which the rebels had dubbed their capital, on Jan. 2 and a week later ran the LTTE out of Elephant Pass, the strategic gateway to the northern Jaffna Peninsula which had been in rebel hands since 2000.

Both major victories have cleared the way for soldiers to converge on the port of Mullaittivu with the aim of ending the 25-year ground war.

TamilNet also reported an artillery barrage killed four civilians in Puthukudiyiruppu, near Mullaittivu.

The military denied both TamilNet stories and said it had a policy of not causing any civilian casualties.

It is difficult to get a clear picture since both sides block most independent access to the battlefield and have in the past distorted casualty figures to their advantage.

Rights groups have accused the LTTE of holding Tamil civilians hostage in the war zone.

The LTTE denies this but in the past has used the presence of civilians to stop or slow army offensives, and analysts expect the large civilian presence to delay the push on Mullaittivu.

In a sign of what analysts believe will come after the conventional war is over, one member of a government-allied breakaway Tiger group was killed and two rebels were shot in a confrontation in the eastern town of Trincomalee.

The LTTE say they are fighting to address mistreatment of minority Tamils since the Sinhalese ethnic majority took over at independence from Britain in 1948. But many Sinhalese say Tamils enjoyed unfair advantages in colonial times and want them back. The Tigers are on U.S., European Union and Indian terrorism lists after carrying out hundreds of assassinations and suicide bombings, including against Tamils who challenged them.

Indian authorities and international experts have expressed the suspicion that the good intentions of Pakistan’s civilian leaders are not necessarily shared by its military and intelligence establishments, which were forged in a decades-long rivalry with India and have sponsored armed Islamist groups in Indian Kashmir and in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet conflict there.

But Qureshi and Pakistan’s intelligence chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, said Wednesday that the country’s security forces are subservient to civilian authority and committed to supporting democratic rule. “It is completely clear to the army chief and I that this government must succeed,” Pasha said of Zardari’s administration. “I report regularly to the president and take orders from him.”

Pasha also ruled out the possibility of going to war with India, telling the online edition of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel that Pakistan is “distancing itself” from such conflict and that “we know full well that terror is our enemy, not India.” He acknowledged, however, that although he had been willing to travel to India after the Mumbai attacks, some senior officials were “simply not ready” to make such a gesture to Pakistan’s longtime adversary.

Qureshi, asked here whether his government was in control of the military and intelligence sectors, asserted vehemently that it was.

“Pakistan’s political and military leadership is one,” he said. “When the military leadership speaks, you can take it for granted they are speaking for the civilian leaders, and when the political leadership speaks, the military is behind it.”

Sri Lanka army fights to finish off Tamil Tigers | Reuters