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.
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.
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