LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam)

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), commonly known as the Tamil Tigers, was founded in 1976 by Velupillai Prabhakaran. It sought to establish an independent state called Tamil Eelam in the north and east of Sri Lanka, citing systemic discrimination against the island's Tamil minority by successive Sinhalese-majority governments following independence in 1948. Tensions that fueled the movement included the 1956 Sinhala Only Act and the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983 ("Black July"), which is widely treated as the start of the Sri Lankan Civil War.

The LTTE operated a conventional army, a navy known as the Sea Tigers, and a nascent air wing, and it administered a de facto state in parts of the Northern and Eastern Provinces for much of the conflict. It was notable for pioneering the use of suicide bombing through its Black Tigers unit and for recruiting child soldiers, practices documented by UNICEF and Human Rights Watch.

Among its most prominent attacks were the 1991 assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi by a suicide bomber in Tamil Nadu and the 1993 assassination of Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa. The group was proscribed as a terrorist organization by India, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Canada, and other states.

A Norwegian-facilitated ceasefire agreement signed in February 2002 collapsed within a few years. The final phase of the war, from 2006 to May 2009, ended with the Sri Lankan Armed Forces overrunning LTTE-held territory in the Vanni and killing Prabhakaran. A 2011 UN Panel of Experts report found credible allegations of serious violations of international humanitarian law by both the LTTE and government forces, particularly in the war's closing months. Accountability for these events remains the subject of ongoing proceedings at the UN Human Rights Council, including Resolution 30/1 (2015) and its successors.