Sri Lankan security forces captured another key village from Tamil Tiger rebels on Monday after heavy fighting as the air force kept up bombing more guerrilla targets, the defence ministry said.Troops took control of the village of Ampakamam after hours of heavy fighting, the ministry said, adding that the area had been used by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as an administrative hub.
Troops moved into the area as soldiers in the neighbouring Kilinochchi district were trying to take control of the town of Kilinochchi, where the Tigers maintain their political headquarters.
The air force carried out several bombing sorties over Kilinochchi on Monday after an intense bombing drive over the weekend, the ministry said.
Last week, the military said it was within "kissing distance" of the town, but heavy rebel resistance and monsoon rains had slowed the army offensive.
Both sides have claimed inflicting heavy losses in the recent battles. However, it is not possible to verify casualty claims by either side as independent reporters and aid workers are banned from the north.
War zone: Human Rights Watch (HRW), meanwhile, said on Monday Tamil Tigers, under unrelenting military pressure, have increasingly subjugated Tamils with forced military service or labour and kept them trapped in the war zone.
In a new report based on eyewitness accounts from Tamils in the northern war zone and from aid workers, the rights watchdog said the LTTE's "treatment of the very people they say they are fighting for is getting worse".
"The LTTE claims to be fighting for the Tamil people, but it is responsible for much of the suffering of civilians," Brad Adams, Human Rights Watch's Asia director, said in a statement.
The military has made more progress against the rebels in the past year than at any other time in the 25-year war.
Only about 1,000 people have been able to flee the war zone, which the LTTE claims as a Tamil homeland, since March. The LTTE used to force those who wanted to go to leave a family member as guarantor of their return, the report says.
"But now they stop everyone, saying, 'We are fighting for the people, but the people have to stay with us,'" the report quotes a humanitarian worker as saying.
The report says all men aged 18-45 must go through two weeks of compulsory military training, and that LTTE fighters increasingly are recruiting at schools and may be reversing a trend of falling recruitment of fighters under the age of 18.
Instead of now requiring each family to submit one person to service, the LTTE sometimes requires two or more, it says.
The trapped civilians -- which aid groups say number 230,000 -- provide a ready force "for future forced labour and recruitment of fighters", the report says. That includes building the mazes of trenches and bunkers near the battlefront.
"In doing so, the LTTE is unlawfully seeking to use the presence of the large civilian population in areas under its control for military advantage," the report says.
Defence analyst Iqbal Athas said the Tigers had several reasons to keep civilians nearby, first of which was the fact that the LTTE takes its food from aid supplies sent to the north.
"It is their source of food supply. It is their shield against isolation that will make them an easier target for the military," he said.
The government -- itself long on the receiving end of criticism from rights watchdogs it accuses of imbalance -- has repeatedly accused the LTTE of using civilians as human shields, to prevent the military from using superior air and firepower. "We have been saying it for a very long time. So Human Rights Watch saying it doesn't make it any more or less credible but the fact is, it reflects the reality," said Rajiva Wijesinghe, secretary of disaster management and human rights.