This instigated the 1977 Anti-Tamil Riots. These were led by the armed forces, were extremely brutal, and simply led to the marginalization and radicalization of more Tamils. Then, in 1983, the LTTE successfully carried out an attack which killed 13 soldiers.[56] This sparked retaliation by soldiers, who took to terrorizing Tamils in Jaffna. The result was the worst violence yet in the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. The cycle of terrorist activity, responded to by Security Force crack down, which leads to more terrorist activity, shows how once violence became normalized, it became mutually reinforcing and only heightened the divide between Sinhalese and Tamil. This can be seen as the last factor which guaranteed that the ethnic conflict would turn out to be a bloody and violent secessionist movement, with little compromise and no mercy involved