Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century

Anthony King

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509543670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Intelligence & Espionage
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Warfare has migrated into cities. From Mosul to Mumbai, Aleppo to Marawi, the major military battles of the twenty-first century have taken place in densely populated urban areas. Why has this happened? What are the defining characteristics of urban warfare today? What are its military and political implications?

Leading sociologist Anthony King answers these critical questions through close analysis of recent urban battles and their historical antecedents.Exploring the changing typography and evolving tactics of the urban battlescape, he shows that although not all methods used in urban warfare are new, operations in cities today have become highly distinctive. Urban warfare has coalesced into gruelling micro-sieges, which extend from street level – and below – to the airspace high above the city, as combatants fight for individual buildings, streets and districts.At the same time, digitalized social media and information networks communicate these battles to global audiences across an urban archipelago, with these spectators often becoming active participants in the fight.

A timely reminder of the costs and the horror of war and violence in cities, this book offers an invaluable interdisciplinary introduction to urban warfare in the new millennium for students of international security, urban studies and military science, as well as military professionals.

1
Gomorrah

Mosul

On 16 July 2018, the last bombs fell on Mosul. A battle, which some American generals described as ‘the most significant urban combat since World War Two’, was over.¹ After nine months of bitter fighting, ISIS was defeated, but the city was also destroyed. Homes, government and commercial buildings, factories, shops, mosques and hospitals had been ruined; the streets were choked with rubble and the detritus of war. The civil infrastructure – water, electricity, sewage – had collapsed. The fighting had been truly terrible. One of the American commanders of the operation, General Stephen Townsend, recalled: ‘The battle of Mosul was the most disorganized, chaotic, debrislittered place I’ve ever seen. Large swathes of the city were damaged. Some parts, especially the west side, were completely levelled – entire neighbourhoods destroyed.’² Other US officers, closer to the combat, were shocked: ‘You can’t replicate how stressful it was: how bad the slaughter was in Mosul.’³

It was a scene worthy of the Old Testament. Indeed, the battle of Mosul had a strange historical parallel. More than 2,500 years before, in 612 BCE, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, Nineveh, located on the east bank of the Tigris in modern Mosul, had been sacked by Babylonian forces. Excavations at the Halzi Gate discovered the remains of men, children and even a baby, killed by arrows as they tried to escape the burning city. Then, the last king of Assyria, Sin-shar-ishkun, had perished in the flames with his possessions, his eunuchs and his concubines.⁴ Like their Assyrian predecessors, ISIS too had chosen to die in the ruins of Mosul.

In June 2014, ISIS advanced on Mosul. The city of over 1.5 million, the second biggest in Iraq, was a major strategic prize. Although Mosul was defended by an American-equipped Iraqi division of some 20,000 soldiers, the entire force fled in the face of a bold advance by only 1,500 ISIS fighters. The ISIS force, mounted in Toyota trucks, entered the city all but unopposed. With the capture of Mosul, the ISIS leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, declared the creation of the caliphate. For more than two years, ISIS imposed a reign of terror on their territory in eastern Syria and northern Iraq. Remarkably, they were able to unite the entire international community against them. The war against ISIS converged inexorably on Mosul.

On 16 October 2016, the Iraqi Security Forces, under the supervision of a US Combined Joint Task Force based in Baghdad, began its campaign to retake Mosul with a force of 94,000 Iraqi soldiers.⁵ Initially, the Iraqi 1st Infantry and 9th Infantry Divisions attacked the eastern part of the city from the east and south-east, though the Iraqi Counter-Terrorist Service, an elite special forces formation of about 10,000 soldiers, led most of the attacks. The Iraqi Security Forces were accompanied by about 1,000 American advisers with a further 2,000 supporting them.⁶ They were opposed by an ISIS force of some 5,000–8,000 active fighters, supported by locally recruited young militants; ISIS probably fielded a force of about 12,000 in the city.

From October 2016, Iraqi Security Forces began to advance on and into eastern Mosul (see Map 1.1). Iraqi forces faced intense resistance. Mosul consisted of some 200,000 buildings and 3,000 kilometres of road; millions of rooms and thousands of square metres of terrain had to be cleared. Organized into small squads of perhaps five fighters, ISIS defended the city fanatically from their prepared strongpoints, engaging in frequent counterattack, often using subterranean passages to infiltrate Iraqi lines.

Of course, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) – mines and booby-traps – played a central role in the ISIS defence plan. ISIS laid belts of IEDs across roads and avenues of advance, hiding them in the rubble and ruined buildings. However, their most feared and effective weapon was the suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (SVBIED). ISIS had prepared hundreds of armoured vehicles before the Iraqi attack; many were camouflaged to look like civilian vehicles.⁷ Whenever the Iraqi Army mounted an assault, ISIS launched suicide fleets against Iraqi lines. Having observed the Iraqi dispositions from remotely controlled drones, ISIS commanders directed the vehicles along routes to inflict maximum damage and casualties. In all, ISIS mounted 482 suicide vehicle attacks in Mosul.⁸ Eventually, the Iraqi Army developed effective countermeasures, blocking side roads with tanks, barricades or craters created by bombs dropped by US aircraft. Thwarted by these obstacles, ISIS loaded their armoured vehicles with squads of suicide bombers. Once the vehicles reached Iraqi lines, the individual bombers burst out of the trucks and charged towards the Iraqis detonating themselves in hellish scenes.

Map 1.1: The battle of Mosul, 2016–17

Source: Map courtesy of the Institute for the Study of War: http://www.understandingwar.org/map/map-mosul. Modifications based on Thomas D. Arnold and Nicolas Fiore, ‘Five operational lessons from the battle for Mosul’, Military Review, Army University Press, January–February 2019, 63: https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/military-review/Archives/English/JF-19/Arnold-Fiore-Lessons-Mosul.pdf.

The fight for Mosul was desperate, especially once Iraqi forces crossed the Tigris into western Mosul and the Old Town. In a strange echo of Assyrian siege techniques from the seventh century BCE, bulldozers led the way clearing the rubble so that Iraqi troops, tanks and armoured vehicles could advance. From the rear, artillery, mortars and rocket launchers fired heavy bombardments onto identified targets, while attack helicopters, drones, gunships and jet and propellered aircraft monitored the city and struck targets with cannon fire, Hellfire missiles and precision bombs.

The final acts of the battle were worthy of Stalingrad itself. The last ISIS fighters were trapped in fighting positions in a shrinking pocket near the west bank of the Tigris. As they refused to surrender, the Iraqi forces eventually bulldozed over their positions, eliminating any final resistance with grenades. ‘It reminded me of something you would watch on a World War II video of Iwo Jima; marines burying Japanese die-hard defenders on Iwo Jima. I never thought I’d see that.’⁹ Although some escaped, most of the ISIS fighters were killed. Officially, 1,400 Iraqi soldiers were killed and 7,000 wounded, but casualties were probably much higher.¹⁰ Although thousands left Mosul before the battle, estimates of civilian deaths vary wildly. The lowest suggest that 3,000 died, the highest 25,000. Any figure within this range seems possible.

The Urban Revolution

Mosul may, indeed, have been one of the greatest urban battles of the twenty-first century, but it was far from unique. On the contrary, urban warfare has become normal, even the norm, today: ‘Warfare, like everything else, is being urbanized.’¹¹ Of course, since the early 2000s, there has been extensive fighting in rural and mountainous areas in conflicts in Sudan, Afghanistan, Mali, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Eritrea, and in Kashmir and Ladakh. By contrast, in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Georgia, Yemen, Israel, Libya and the Ukraine, populations have been overwhelmingly caught up in the fighting; in these theatres, wars have taken place inside urban areas.

The rise of urban warfare in the early twenty-first century now has a well-recognized chronology. In October 1993, US Special Operations Forces and Rangers were trapped inside Mogadishu for twelve hours after an attempt to seize a Somali warlord had failed. In stark contrast to the Gulf War, when US Abrams tanks were able to engage Iraqi T-72s in the open desert from several kilometres before the Iraqis had even detected them, the canyons of Mogadishu became a killing zone; two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and in running gun battles with local militia that lasted for more than twelve hours, eighteen US soldiers were killed and seventy-three wounded.

The battle of Grozny a year later was an even more sobering portent of the urban future. In December 1994, in response to the declaration of Chechen independence by President Dudayev, Russian Army forces advanced into the capital Grozny in order to reassert Moscow’s authority. The Chechen rebels allowed Russian armoured columns to penetrate deep into the city. The 131st Mechanized Rifle Brigade, under Major-General Politovsky, reached the central station, where some conscripts, thinking the conflict was over, even bought rail tickets home.¹² Yet, the war had only just begun. A brigade commander, Colonel Stavin, later claimed that he heard the words, ‘Welcome to hell’, over his radio. At that moment, with complete surprise, Chechen hunter-killer teams ambushed the Russian columns from high-rise buildings, destroying numerous armoured vehicles and tanks, and killing many soldiers, before moving through cellars and sewers to new positions. In the end, the Russians had to mount a systematic clearance of the city, destroying much of it, before the uprising was suppressed in February 1995. Even so, a second bitter battle occurred over the city in 1999–2000, as Russian forces seized Grozny from the rebels once again.

In 1984, Sarajevo was the site of a very successful Winter Olympic Games. However, only a decade later, Sarajevo came to haunt public imagination as symbol of ethnic war. From May 1992 to December 1995, Serbian forces besieged and bombarded the city as part of its war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The blockade, watched across Europe on nightly news programmes, inflicted terrible suffering on the citizens of Sarajevo, who had to endure constant sniper and artillery fire. There were some notorious incidents, including the Serbian mortaring of Markale marketplace on 28 August 1995, which kille...