A wave of pitched battles, bombings and an air strike killed at least 34 people across northern Sri Lanka, the military said Monday, as a Japanese envoy met with officials to try to stop the raging civil war.

Sri Lankan policemen check identities of people during a search operation in Colombo on Tuesday.
(Lakruwan Wanniarachchi/AFP/Getty Images)

In the latest attack, soldiers thrust into rebel territory in northern Mannar district and captured nine bunkers, killing nine insurgents, said military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara.

Two soldiers also died in the fighting and 15 more were wounded, he said.

The rebel-affiliated website TamilNet reported that Tamil Tiger fighters in Mannar held off a major military offensive in a battle that killed at least 30 soldiers and three rebels.

The rebels recovered the body of one soldier, but said they saw other dead bodies across the field of battle, the website reported.

The two sides often give vastly different accounts of the fighting, exaggerating enemy casualties while underreporting their own. Independent confirmation is unavailable since the battle zone is a restricted area.

Earlier, a roadside bomb hit a van in the Vavuniya region, just south of the front lines separating government forces from the Tigers' de facto state in the north, Nanayakkara said.

The civilian driver and two soldiers were killed, while three other soldiers and a civilian were wounded, the military said. The explosives inside the van did not detonate, Nanayakkara said.

Violence has surged since Jan. 3

The Tigers have been fighting since 1983 for an independent state for Sri Lanka's ethnic Tamil minority after decades of being marginalized by successive governments dominated by the Sinhalese majority. The fighting has killed more than 70,000 people.

Violence has surged since Jan. 3, when the government announced its withdrawal from a 2002 ceasefire that had largely broken down amid two years of renewed fighting. At least 330 people have been killed — 310 rebels, 15 troops and five civilians — in that time, according to military figures.

The withdrawal brought to an end a Nordic monitoring mission that was one of the few independent sources of information on the fighting. The monitors were due to leave the country Wednesday.

In hopes of reviving the shattered peace process, Japanese mediator Yasushi Akashi met with Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama and President Mahinda Rajapaksa on Monday during the envoy's three-day visit to the Indian Ocean island nation.

Japan was a key backer of the Norway-brokered 2002 ceasefire, and Akashi played a pivotal role in organizing a 2003 donor conference in Tokyo to raise funds to rebuild areas in Sri Lanka destroyed by the war.