Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century. Anthony King

the late 1990s, Sarajevo, Mogadishu and Grozny were being interpreted not just as significant incidents in themselves, but as the start of a trend. They denoted an epochal turn to urban warfare. The past couple of decades have only affirmed this trajectory. Since 2000, urban warfare has been almost continuous. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for instance, a few engagements took place outside urban areas, but the battles inside Iraqi cities were far more significant. The battle of Nasiriyah on 23–24 March 2003 was notorious. There were other major battles: in Baghdad, Samawah and Najaf.

      The Iraqi invasion was rapid, but it established the tone for the rest of the campaign. From 2003 to 2008, US-led forces were engaged in an urban counterinsurgency campaign against Al Qaeda terrorists, and Sunni and Shia militias. The most intense urban battles occurred in November 2004 with the second battle of Fallujah and, in March to May 2008, when Shia militias were finally suppressed in Sadr City and in Basra. Yet, the US also conducted major operations in Tal Afar in 2005 and Ramadi in 2006. Most of the campaign took place in the towns and cities of Iraq, with US coalition forces fighting to control the streets. Sometimes the situation was relatively benign. In Basra, British troops wore berets on patrol until 2004, but, for the most part, coalition forces wore helmets and body armour and moved in protected vehicles because of the threat from IEDs, rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire. It was a high-intensity urban guerrilla war, with Ramadi, Fallujah, Mosul and Baghdad the sites of extreme violence and, sometimes, grotesque atrocity.

      Other recent conflicts in the Middle East only reaffirm the point. The Syrian civil war is the most important case here. It began as a series of urban protests in the towns and cities of eastern Syria, beginning in Dar’a in February 2011. However, in the face of extreme repression, antiregime elements formed increasingly effective local militias and began to fight Assad’s troops. Between 2011 and 2016, fighting took place in most Syrian cities and towns. Major battles took place in Homs, Damascus, Aleppo, Ghouta, Idlib, Latakia, Hama and many other towns and cities. In addition to indiscriminate artillery and air bombardment, the regime periodically employed gas to kill civilian opponents. Local and international reportage has captured the horror of these sieges.

ISIS’s rise and fall is a case study in urban warfare. In early 2014, ISIS began to ally itself with tribal groups in eastern and southern Syria, in Deir Ezzor, Hasaka, Raqqa and Dar’a. As a result, ISIS took control of Deir Ezzor in July 2014 and from there began to expand its caliphate. ISIS inserted Sunni sleeper cells into towns and cities across the region. These cells mobilized the local Sunni population in support of ISIS’s imminent assaults, and provided intelligence and mounted attacks on the opposition forces holding the towns. As a result, ISIS took Raqqa, al-Bab, Fallujah and Mosul in a ‘lightning push’ in 2014, the towns falling in quick succession, often without significant fighting. Once established in an urban hub, ISIS was then able to dominate the surrounding area.

      Almost all ISIS’s offensive operations were urban, then. The eventual defeat of the group took precisely the same form; most of the fighting took place in cities. The caliphate was destroyed as the US-led coalition reversed ISIS’s own urban gains, retaking Iraqi and Syrian cities in turn. As a British officer noted:

      The campaign for the liberation from IS was a series of urban battles. There was no front line. It was just the cities and then the manoeuvre to them. If you looked at the campaign map, it consisted of spots: the fights were in cities and towns. In the Soviet era, there were large fronts, you don’t have those forces now. You are going to go from point to point.¹³

      Both the Libyan and the Yemen civil wars have also been heavily urbanized. Following Gaddafi’s fall in 2011, Libya quickly descended into a struggle between General Haftar’s Libyan National Army and the Government of National Accord based in Tripoli. They fought major battles for control of Benghazi in 2012 and Sirte in 2016 – and continue to do so. Similarly, the Yemen civil war has been highly urbanized with a major battle over control of Sana’a between Houthi rebels and government forces.

      The West has been involved in the wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen. Elsewhere, war has also migrated into cities. The experiences of Israel reflect this process. During the Six Day War in 1967, Israeli paratroopers retook Jerusalem, but in that conflict and the subsequent Yom Kippur War of 1973, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) was primarily engaged in open manoeuvre war in the Sinai desert or on the Golan Heights. The first phase of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was also predominantly characterized by manoeuvre warfare. However, since then, IDF operations have become increasingly urban. Ironically, even during the Second Lebanon War of 2006, many of the most intense engagements occurred in the towns of south Lebanon. Despite the fact that this region consists of rural, rocky hills and scrubland, ‘most of the fighting took place in built-up areas’.¹⁴ Circumstances have forced the IDF to urbanize.¹⁵

Russia had also experienced an urban revolution by the mid-1990s; the battles of Grozny in 1994–5 and 1999–2000 suggested that something profound had changed. Russian conflicts since the Chechen wars have only affirmed the point. Since 2000, Russia has fought wars in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine from 2014. After years of tension, in August 2008, Georgia deployed a force to suppress Russian-supporting Ossetian separatists who had been shelling Georgia. On this pretext, President Putin initiated a large operation to regain control of South Ossetia and drive out the Georgian troops. The fighting in the 2008 Russo-Georgian War concentrated on Gori and Tskhinvali. Similarly, in the Donbas, most of the fighting took place in urban areas. Donetsk Airport, for in instance, was the site of a major six-month battle in 2014 and 2015. The airport was eventually taken by the Donetsk People’s Republic Army in January 2015, when Russian special forces blew up the terminal building and its Ukrainian defenders. In early 2016, there was a renewed bout of fighting, which again focused on three urbanized areas: Avdiivka, a Ukrainian controlled industrial town with large coke and chemical plants, the major railway junction of Yasinovata, and Horlivka.¹⁶ In each case, the Ukrainian and Donetsk Peoples’ Republic forces have tried to seize – or hold – key industrial or transport nodes in cities and towns.

      Across Eurasia and the Middle East, then, warfare has urbanized. However, the urbanization of warfare is a truly global phenomenon. In India, on 26 November 2008, twenty-four terrorists from the Lashkar-e-Taiba group arrived secretly by boat into Mumbai. Armed with automatic rifles, grenades and suicide vests, they rampaged through some of the most prominent landmarks of the city, including the Taj Hotel, for four days, killing 174 civilians and security personnel. The 2008 Mumbai attack has highlighted the vulnerability of Indian cities to attacks. The Indian Army is currently concerned about improving its capacity to mount urban operations. In the Philippines in recent years, the armed forces have been engaged in two major urban battles against Islamicist jihadists: in Zamboanga in 2013 and in Marawi in 2017. The battle of Marawi was a brutal and intense engagement, when local militants from the Maute group reinforced ISIS jihadists led by Isnilon Hapilon to seize control of the main buildings in the centre of the town. The jihadists were eliminated only after bitter fighting against the Filipino Army, led by the special forces.

Mosul may, then, stand alone as the Stalingrad of the early twentyfirst century. For Western forces, it was certainly the largest and most intense urban campaign of the past two decades. Yet, despite its scale, Mosul was not an aberration. Urban combat has become a central, maybe even the defining, form of warfare in the twenty-first century. In the twentieth century, armies prepared to fight in the field. Today, it seems all but inevitable that they will fight in cities.

Urban Origins

      The rise of urban warfare is deeply troubling. The scale of human suffering and the destruction it has inflicted have often been terrible. Nevertheless, it would be quite wrong to suggest that urban warfare itself is new. Urban warfare was a regular occurrence in antiquity. Indeed, the siege and the sacking of cities were central themes in classical literature, as the Iliad and the Odyssey demonstrate. Roman literature is also replete with depictions of urban warfare. Unlike the Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid was not a primarily a poem about battle. Yet, some of its most powerful passages describe the sacking of Troy, the most famous siege of all:

      There we found the fighting so heavy that it seemed