Sri Lanka suffered from decades of violence before the Easter Sunday bombings
On Easter Sunday, a series of coordinated bomb attacks killed nearly 300 people in Sri Lanka. It was an unhappy reminder for many of the country’s recent history of violence — a history which Sri Lankans hoped had been put to rest.
The island nation of 22 million just off India’s southeastern tip has dealt with brutal fighting and bloodshed for decades, mainly due to a civil war that pitted the Sinhalese Buddhist government against militant fighters and separatists from the minority Tamil community who pioneered modern-day suicide attacks.