The Battle for Baghdad?: The Urban Warfare Question

Increasingly, the discussion of the possible course of a war between the US and Iraq is focusing on the question of possible urban warfare in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. While the war may still be averted and the American war plan, despite many (conflicting) leaked versions is not publicly known, the assumption is widespread that the only way to bring Saddam Hussein down is to remove him from his lair in his capital city. As The Estimate noted in an earlier Dossier, that of October 4 (“How, and How Well, Will Iraqi Forces Fight?”), it is likely that the Iraqi Armed Forces will seek to concentrate their defenses in the Sunni heartland of Iraq, where their support is strongest, and will refrain from seeking to defend mountains, deserts and marshes where the population is less supportive to begin with. Defending this Sunni redoubt will likely mean a concentration in the Baghdad-to-Tikrit region in particular.

Baghdad is not Iraq’s only city, but Basra is easily cut off by amphibious operations in the marshes, and is likely to be less loyal given its significant Shi’ite hinterland; Mosul in the north may be cut off by Kurdish or Turkish operations and Kirkuk, in the oilfields of the north, will certainly be a target for Kurdish forces, who have long desired it. Baghdad and Tikrit will be the core defense area, and Baghdad, as the capital and center of most command and control, will be the prize.

But Baghdad is a city of some five million people, sprawling along both banks of the Tigris and with suburbs sprawling westward towards the Euphrates and eastward into the deserts. It is a spread-out, low-rise city by Arab standards.

Urban warfare by definition undermines the force multiplier effect of high technology. The advantages of high-tech weaponry are lost in a warren of narrow, winding streets where a few snipers can create havoc.

In recent decades, the US has grown wary of urban warfare. The battle in Mogadishu on October 3, 1993, portrayed in the book and film Black Hawk Down, was widely seen as a humiliation. A small (99-man) US special operations force seeking to seize to senior officers of Somali warlord Muhammad Aideed were caught in an urban nightmare with two helicopters down and an angry urban mob surrounding them. Before an international force extracted them the next day, 18 Americans died (a 19th died in another attack two days later) and one had been taken prisoner, while dozens were wounded. Though, as the Army Rangers have often pointed out, they carried out their mission successfully and came away with the men they sought to abduct, the television pictures of American dead being dragged through the streets by Somali mobs led to quick US disengagement from Somalia.

Prior to Mogadishu, the last time the US fought house-to-house in a city was the recapture of the Imperial City of Hue during the Tet offensive in 1968. Though Hue was successfully retaken, Tet was perceived as a US defeat and marked a turning point in the Vietnam war. And though the US did not engage in urban combat per se in Beirut in 1982-1983, the psychological scars of the bombing of the US Marine Barracks and Embassy there are a reminder that even an occupation force can be a target in an urban environment.

No one is certain what the prospects are for urban warfare in Baghdad, but this Dossier looks at some of the issues and questions involved.

When the ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur founded a new capital for himself in AD 762 (or 758 by some accounts), he named it the City of Peace. But most people called it after a small village already on the site along the Tigris, Baghdad, Persian for “garden of God”. Baghdad became the great capital of the Caliphate, and often was neither a city of peace nor a garden of God; when the Mongols took it in 1258 AD, they left little standing, and of the great Round City of al-Mansur, nothing survives today.

Today, Baghdad is a city of some 5 million people, with suburbs and neighboring cities adjoining it in the Mesopotamian plain. Those who know other Arab cities from Casablanca to the Gulf are often surprised by the low-rise sprawl of Baghdad: it lacks the clusters of high-rise apartment blocks which are so characteristic of many Middle Eastern cities. The fact that the city has not been limited in growth by physical barriers (the sea, the Nile, the desert) as many Arab cities are means that it has often grown outward rather then upward. Though there are plenty of older quarters with cramped streets from the Ottoman era, it lacks (largely thanks to the Mongols) survivals of the typically nearly impenetrable medieval city such as still can be found in Cairo or Fez, Damascus or Aleppo, Tunis or Marrakech. Still, there are parts of Baghdad which would pose a real problem to a military comander.

As noted in the introduction, American military planners are haunted by the specter of Mogadishu in 1993, and before that of Hue in 1968. Even once a war is over, the attack on the Marine Barracks in Beirut in 1983 is a reminder that an occupation force can also be a target. Urban warfare negates the advantages of high-tech weaponry, unless one is willing to accept massive civilian casualties. A few snipers in a populated area challenge an invading force: root them out house by house, or destroy the entire neighborhood and the civilians who live there. Large-scale civilian casualties would alienate much of the world, and US policy since the end of the Korean War has been to avoid large-scale strategic bombing of urban areas.

US planners, of course, are hoping that the Iraqi Armed Forces will either defect en masse, except for the regime-protecting praetorian guard, the Republican Guard. That is possible; certainly there is little reason to believe that Saddam Hussein is beloved by his people. On the other hand, as the events in Mogadishu in 1993 demonstrated, local populations can be rallied to oppose a foreign force in their midst, even one ostensibly there on a peacekeeping mission; many of those who attacked the US forces in Somalia appear to have been Somali civilians, though others were militiamen and in the context of Mogadishu in 1993, it could be hard to distinguish the two.

It is possible that Iraqis will line the streets waving American flags, as Kuwaitis did in 1991. But given the impact of a decade of sanctions and the monolithic propaganda mechanisms Saddam has used to demonize the US, it is hard to be very confident of that scenario.

Since Mogadishu, US planning for urban type warfare is understood to concentrate on seizing key command-and-control and communications centers, and then advancing outward from those centers in force. The fact that the US Rangers in Somalia had been denied support by AC-130 Spectre gunships and by armor — the decision to turn down those requests helped bring down then-Defense Secretary Les Aspin — certainly added to the problems faced by the Rangers and other forces. No one is likely to make that mistake this time around, but tanks and airborne gunships, by their very firepower, can lead to unintended civilian casualties, as the Israelis have learned time and again in the Palestinian territories. A Spectre, in particular, is a potent firing platform, but not one designed for great pinpoint accuracy, hence some of the unfortunate civilian casualties inflicted during the US campaign in Afghanistan.

The overwhelming military advantage possessed by the United States makes the ultimate result of any campaign virtually certain, but a few weeks of house-to-house fighting followed by a tense occupation in which US forces are targeted could undermine public support for the war. Certainly rising casualties had much to do with the erosion of domestic support for the war in Vietnam. Some US adversaries have interpreted this as meaning that the US is so casualty-averse that it will pull out rather than risk a significant body count of its own troops. And Beirut in 1983 and Mogadishu in 1993 seemed, at least on the surface, to support that intuition, as did the US insistence on avoiding a ground war in Kosovo.

Of course, the US has taken heavy casualties in earlier wars, particularly the Civil War and World War II, but those were wars before television. The images of US soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, repeated time and again on all-news television, certainly contributed to the decision to leave Somalia.

There are other alternatives to house-to-house fighting, but each has its own problems. One can simply surround the city, cut off its outside supplies, and begin a classic siege. This, unfortunately, tends to create major hardships for the civilian population, which the US insists it is trying to liberate. And modern sieges — Berlin 1948, Leningrad in World War II — tend to be somewhat permeable by air if major efforts are made to supply the besieged population. A long siege would also inflame international opinion and could easily be manipulated by a besieged Iraqi government to try to force a negotiated end to the fighting.

The US is therefore likely to try to neutralize the Iraqi government machinery at the outset of the war, to leave little command capability to marshal resistance in the capital if it comes to that. The map above shows the sorts of targets the US hit in the first day of bombing in 1991, during Desert Storm. There are likely to be some differences this time: by most reports the US does not want to disrupt the country’s economic infrastructure, since that will be essential to reconstruction under a new regime, but rather merely to neutralize the regime’s ability to exercise command and control.

But that may not be as easy to achieve as it seems on paper. A defeated enemy can sometimes seek to leave nothing behind for the conqueror, as Napoleon learned with the burning of Moscow, and as Saddam himself sought to achieve in Kuwait by firing the oilfields in 1991. Major sabotage of at least key elements in Baghdad is likely; if the US does not take out the bridges, the Iraqis themselves are likely to do so, for example. If Saddam decides to bring the temple down on his own head and leave nothing much for the conquerors, the US might find itself trying to race into the city to prevent further destruction (rather as the rapid occupation of Paris in 1944 helped prevent the planned Nazi destruction of the French capital).

And of course, in any attempt to conquer a city, one faces the same problems as in any other combat situation: fog of war, the confusion of the battlefield, the unpredictable response of the enemy. The use of chemical or biological weapons in an urban environment is a nightmarish scenario, one that would likely kill more Iraqis than Americans, but one that cannot be completely ruled out.

The biggest problem, as noted earlier, could come after formal cessation of hostilities: the Beirut problem, in which US occupation forces are simply targeted on a regular basis by hostile guerrilla forces, and a war of attrition begins. The US has found these sorts of situations particularly hard to cope with. However much the American forces may see themselves as liberators, if the Iraqis see them as occupiers, they could face the same sorts of problems that Israel has had to cope with in the intifada, a grass-roots rebellion with asymmetrical tactics used to isolate and embarrass the occupying forces. The US did not have to face that particular nightmare in Germany or Japan after World War II; in fact, it has not really had the role of an unwelcome occupying power defending against a local insurrection since the Philippines a century ago, and various Marine excursions to Central America and the Caribbean (and some might say Tet, though the parallels are less exact). But those insurrections were fought without television and therefore international opinion weighing in.

The US is likely to be well-prepared for urban warfare of a fairly conventional nature; it may be more challenged by a persistent insurrection after occupation. That may, however, be avoided if a relatively credible Iraqi successor regime, one not perceived purely as a US puppet, can be put in place. But that brings one to the difficult question of “the day after”, which has preoccupied a lot of planners in their discussions of the war. It will be the subject of a future Dossier.

Urban warfare is, in some ways, as old as cities themselves, but it is still a particuarly nasty form of war, (not as if there were any pleasant ones). When Hitler fought to the last bunker in World War II, the Soviet Army destroyed Berlin and civilians suffered terribly from the depredations of the conquering Army. The US Army of 2003 is a very different Army from the Red Army of 1945, and with a far different set of recent memories. But if Baghdad has to be taken house by house, Baghdad will not be a particularly attractive place at the end of the campaign.

Of course, such a battle for Baghdad may not be necessary. Modern Arab-Israeli wars have seen very little urban fighting: only Jerusalem in 1948 and, briefly, in 1967 saw real house-to-house combat. Nor did the Iran-Iraq war ever really see a fight for a major city, despite attempts by both sides.

That may mean that the war will be over without a real battle for Baghdad. But it is equally clear that if US and Western analysts are aware of the problems that urban warfare could pose the US forces, so are the Iraqis. Those who have forecast a “cakewalk” by US forces may prove right in many parts of Iraq; but it seems less likely that Baghdad will be quite as easy as that.

But one of the lessons of war is that one often learns the wrong lessons, or fights the last war. Baghdad, if there is a battle for the city, will not be Mogadishu, or Beirut, or Hue. There will be new lessons to be learned, new challenges to be overcome. Iraqis may well do everything in their power to avoid a last-ditch fight for their capital: or they may decide to deny it to any invader, come what may. No one actually knows which will be the case, and that is what makes war a sobering exercise, one not lightly undertaken.

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