Each battered high-rise becomes a sniper's aerie, each deserted thoroughfare an ambush zone. In this kind of warfare, advances and retreats are measured in blocks or half-blocks, or even just houses. In the calculations of battle, the shield of technology gives way to human failings and human skills -- speed and deception, close knowledge of streets and alleys.
Since Stalingrad and Berlin in the World War II, to the US assault on Hue, Vietnam, in 1968 and on to the war zones of Beirut or Nablus, Belfast or Mogadishu, urban warfare has become a central part of the underdog's arsenal -- a fight without scruples for the high ground of propaganda that exploits civilian losses and denies the intruder's superior might.
PHOTO:REUTERS
It is precisely that messy, manipulative and murderous kind of fighting between conventional forces and elusive defenders that could confront the Americans and British as they try to enter Bagh-dad, despite their much-publicized reluctance to engage in a close urban brawl.
"Close and dirty"
"The Iraqis will want to fight close and dirty, with Iraqi tanks darting in an out of garages and buildings; they will conduct small-scale offensive actions with dis-mounted soldiers supported by mortars," wrote General Wesley Clark, the US former commander who led NATO forces during the Kosovo campaign.
"The fighting will be full of the tricks we have already seen and more: ambushes, fake surrenders, soldiers dressed as women, attacks on rear areas and command posts," he said in an article in The Times of London.
"The Iraqis will be prepared to conduct high-risk missions of a kind we would not consider," he said.
Although coalition commanders in Iraq have expressed outrage at what they see as such dishonorable tactics, urban warfare has always set its own rules of guile and deceit, from the use of a wooden horse to break the siege of Troy over 3,100 years ago to modern times, when war is broadcast live 24 hours a day.
And in this post-Cold War era of asymmetric warfare -- the fight between overwhelming conventional forces and zealous adversaries seeking the chinks in the high-tech Western armor -- the fight has come to mean a contest to disable the technology that enables US forces to contemplate killing without loss of their own.
Bad memories
That was evident enough in Moga-dishu, Somalia, in 1993 when sophisticated Black Hawk helicopter gunships were brought down by crude, shoulder-fired Soviet-era RPG-7 rocket propelled grenades a standard item in the kit of guerrilla armies around the globe, along with AK-47 assault rifles, land mines and hand grenades.
Indeed, similar tactics were popularized by the Afghan guerrillas who battled the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, courtesy largely of more sophisticated US-supplied Stinger missiles.
The downing of the helicopters not only seemed a victory for the lightly-equipped Somali street-fighters. It also led to humiliating American casualties that hastened the US withdrawal -- just as images of wounded and slain US marines at Hue and other battle zones of the Tet offensive in Vietnam turned American opinion against the war.
Those memories underscore the perils of street-fighting that face allied troops in Iraq. And history offers little solace. In recent decades, urban warfare has taken many forms, with many aims.
When battle-hardened Soviet troops pushed into Berlin in 1945 against the last feeble remnants of the Third Reich, lofting the Red Flag over the battered Reichstag, their intention was clearly conquest, not the liberation Washington says it seeks in Iraq.
In Beirut in the mid-1970s, by contrast, Palestinian and other Muslim forces fought Christian militias across a line of faiths whose incongruous initial markers were luxury seafront hotels -- the St. Georges and the Phoenicia, the Palm Beach and the Normandie, won and lost in room-to-room fighting.
The weapons were generally low-tech shoulder-fired antitank grenades, assault rifles and mor-tars, pickup-mounted machine guns that put a premium on stealth and mobility. But when American marines intervened in Lebanon, an equally crude weapon -- a suicide truck bomb -- killed more than 230 of them in 1983.
Home-side advantage
In Berlin and Beirut -- as in successive waves of Russian assaults on the Chechen capital, Grozny -- the fighting reduced urban areas to rubble. But it is precisely the familiarity of the urban terrain to those who live there that enables them to use it to the advantages of ambushes, surprise attacks and rapid redeployment.
"Urban warfare usually benefits the defender," said Clifford Beal, the editor of Jane's Defence Weekly, a leading publication on military matters.
Not only that, urban warfare "will negate the technological advantage of the coalition," Beal said.
He added: "The Iraqis will be jumping in and out of alleyways. It tends to become a low-tech, house-to-house situation and that kind of combat can become very costly for combatants and others."
A war depending on low technology and high numbers of combatants and casualties is precisely the opposite of what the modern US Army is trained to do.
And even the British army, with three decades of experience fighting the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, would not be familiar either with the Iraqi terrain in cities such as Basra or Baghdad or with the much greater firepower that Iraqi troops could use in urban areas.
Indeed, said Tom Clonan, a military analyst in Dublin, a more likely comparison for allied troops in Iraq would be the humbling experience of Russian troops fighting Chechen separatist forces in Grozny.
"There are striking similarities between Grozny and Baghdad," he said.
"For example, Saddam's Republican Guard, equipped with the same weaponry as Chechen sep-aratists in Grozny, might well mimic their modus operandi in the streets of Baghdad," he said.
The "low-tech weapons would form a formidable arsenal in the narrow alleys and back streets of Iraq's capital," Clonan said.
Others draw comparisons with house-to-house fighting in Hue, which not only sent home bloody images of American casualties but also forced US commanders to loosen the rules of engagement in a way the Pentagon says it is seeking to avoid in the Iraq war.
That reflects the differences in the role of public opinion for defenders and attackers in any urban warfare in Iraq, where irregulars and ultra-loyal forces would have few qualms about civilian casualties or, indeed, using civilians as human shields.
The US and Britain face opinion at home that may prove fickle, constraining their ability to use overwhelming force, military analysts said.
"The allies are fighting with kid gloves on, but it'll be very difficult to keep it this clinical if urban warfare ensues," Beal said. "Urban warfare takes longer. It can bog down large numbers of troops. This war is being fought on a clock. And the longer it goes on, the more carnage is seen, the more difficult it is for the Bush administration to continue."
The pressure, therefore, could be to unleash a huge strike, despite the ostensible war aims of keeping civilian casualties and damage to a minimum.
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