The Sri Lankan government said Thursday that 39,324 civilians have left the battle zone in the north and arrived in government welfare centers.

Mahinda Samarasinghe, the minister of Human Rights told reporters that over 33,000 of the fled civilians are being accommodated in the northern town of Vavuniya.

Samarasinghe said the International Committee of the Red Cross has evacuated over 3,000 sick and wounded from Puttumattalan area in the Mullaithivu district in nine sea evacuations.

The government has charged that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are holding Tamil civilians as human shields in the current fighting.

Although humanitarian agencies estimated some 230,000 civilians were trapped in the northern Kilinochchi and Mullaithivu districts, the government said the figure was less than 120,000 people.

The government also said it maintains a regular supply of food and essentials to the civilians who are still trapped in the battle.

The government said the LTTE have been limited to a small patch in Mullaittivu after the military recorded unprecedented success in the current military campaign started in 2006.

The LTTE began to rebel against the government to set up a separate homeland for the minority in the north and east in the mid-1980s, based on claims that the minority Tamils was being discriminated by the majority Sinhalese dominated governments.

More than 70,000 people have died in the conflict since the mid-1980s in one of the world's longest civil wars.

Source:Xinhua