In this handout photo provided by the Sri Lanka Army, Sri Lankan army soldiers receive internally displaced ethnic Tamil civilians Saturday in Kariyalamullivaikal, Sri Lanka.

Colombo, Sri Lanka ? Sri Lanka’s president declared victory in his nation’s quarter-century civil war with the Tamil Tigers rebels. But the group’s top leaders remained at large, while troops killed at least 70 rebels trying to escape the shrinking northern war zone today.

A triumph on the battlefield appeared inevitable after government forces captured the last bit of coastline under rebel control Saturday, surrounding the remaining fighters in a 1.2-square mile patch of land.

Thousands of civilians who had been trapped by the fighting poured across the front lines, the military said.

“My government, with the total commitment of our armed forces, has in an unprecedented humanitarian operation finally defeated the LTTE militarily,” President Mahinda Rajapaksa said referring to the rebels by their formal name, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

“I will be going back to a country that has been totally freed from the barbaric acts of the LTTE,” he said in a speech in Jordan that was distributed to the media in Sri Lanka.

The rebels, who once controlled a de facto state across much of the north, have been fighting since 1983 for a separate state for minority Tamils after decades of marginalization by the Sinhalese majority. Responsible for hundreds of suicide attacks — including the 1991 assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi — the Tamil Tigers have been branded terrorists by the U.S., E.U. and India and shunned internationally.