This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The United Nations' own post-war estimate put the Sri Lankan Civil War's full toll at eighty to one hundred thousand deaths across its twenty-six years. A separate and narrower figure, the Secretary-General's Panel of Experts' 2011 finding that credible sources put civilian deaths as high as forty thousand in the war's final months alone, measures a different quantity, the acute final-phase civilian toll rather than the whole war's combatant and civilian dead combined, and this atlas names it rather than folding it into the war-wide bounds. Sri Lanka has never conducted its own comprehensive casualty count.
The war's final months, when government forces shelled areas crowded with civilians the Tigers would not allow to leave, produced allegations of war crimes by both sides that the Panel of Experts later found credible; no international body has made a formal genocide or crimes against humanity determination, and Sri Lanka has not conducted its own independent accountability process into the allegations. Tamil civilians in the island's north and east bore the heaviest toll, especially in the war's final months, alongside Sinhalese civilians killed in Tiger attacks including suicide bombings, and Sri Lanka's Muslim minority, caught between both sides and, in 1990, expelled en masse from Tiger-controlled areas of the Northern Province. Ethnic and religious tensions between the Sinhala Buddhist majority and the Tamil minority remain unresolved in Sri Lankan politics since the war's end.