In a career spent fighting the Tamil Tigers, Gen. Gerry de Silva (ret.), a former commander of the Sri Lankan army, learned a thing or two about information warfare. In campaigns in the north of the island, time and again he found himself confronting disinformation among the Tamil population.`It`s a disinformation program even to their own people, to their own cadre,` he told World Politics Review in an interview at his family`s home in the Cinnamon Gardens neighborhood of Colombo. The message was simple, urgent: `My god, the army is coming, don`t wait, for God`s sake go.``And you find the people, refugees, just carrying the clothes and the few little pots and pans that they had, evacuating their homes,` de Silva said. `I mean this is their propaganda. To say, `My God, these people are hell bent on genocide, wiping the Tamil race out, so for God`s sake escape,` and our problem of winning the hearts and minds of the people in those areas, in the rural areas, was a tough job.`The Sri Lankan army tried to `take a page out of their book,` he said. `We had a program on television, on radio, you know, and also the psy-ops part of it, where we dropped leaflets to the people, informing them about the operation. Also trying to tell them, `Look, we`re hear to liberate you.``That was a long time ago. De Silva commanded a campaign on the Jaffna peninsula in 1987 and retired as the commander of the army in 1996. These days, the information war has included hijacked satellite links, the broadcast of pro-Tamil Tiger television programs and, increasingly, the Internet.Support for both sides of the conflict has even found its way onto Facebook, where hundreds of groups pit the lion iconography of the Sri Lankan flag against the tiger emblem of the LTTE.Facebook groups `are serving as a major propaganda tool to further terrorist propaganda, and for glorification of terrorism, as can be seen by some FB/MySpace groups,` Navod Ediriweera, a Facebook user who administers a group dedicated to the memory of victims of a Tamil Tiger bombing, said in an e-mail. `Particlary in FB where people use `FB Events` to coordinate their protests, etc.`Users tend to be between 13 and 24 years old, he said, `but will continue to expand as social networking sites get more popularity with the older generation.`For pro-Tamil Facebook user Pragas Nanthakumar, networking sites `have provided us with the opportunity to show the cyber community the large number of people that are in favour of a separate homeland for the Tamil people in Sri Lanka.``It has also contributed to brand recognition, in that more people are now seeing the freedom struggle as being a just cause and are ignoring the anti-Tamil propaganda being dashed out by the Sri Lankan government,` he wrote in an e-mail. `It has helped us preserve our Tamil identity, and has helped the world recognize our voice as a separate entity from Sri Lanka.`Nanthakumar admitted that `both sides aren`t being honest` when they disseminate information from the island. But he pointed to the government`s ban on independent media reports from LTTE-held territory as an exacerbating factor. The ban has caused wire services to add disclaimers to their dispatches, even as the government closes in on LTTE sanctuaries in the north,. In recent weeks, communication lines have been cut to the Tamil Tiger areas, making it hard for the insurgents to get out their own message.The unverifiable information that inevitability comes out of the conflict area is subsequently spun by supporters one way or the other, spawning dueling narratives that play out in high-tech fora like Facebook but differ little from those prevalent during de Silva`s days of radio shows and leaflet ops. In the ensuing competition between the government`s war-on-terror story and the Tamil Tiger`s freedom-fighter line, the Tamil Tigers often get more attention, de Silva said.`Some of the Western psyche, the Western countries, they`re always for the underdog,` he said. `So with all the propaganda going around, they have sympathy with the LTTE and not with the Sri Lankan government.`Not surprisingly, the information war that has emerged from Sri Lanka`s 20-year insurgency teaches us as much about the importance of narrative in counterinsurgency as it does about the conflict itself.`We need a little data, but can`t get enough of stories,` said BJ Fogg, a Stanford researcher and author of `Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do.``Stories are a technology, not a high technology, but a biological technology, for remembering cause-and-effect relationships. Our brains are sponges for stories, and it`s very hard to undo a well-told story.`Brian Calvert is a freelance writer currently based in Southeast Asia, covering military and security affairs. His work has appeared in the New York Times magazine, Foreign Policy`s Passport, the Christian Science Monitor, Climbing Magazine and others.