Iraq prepares for urban warfare

Forget Desert Storm. Drawing on lessons from the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi and US strategic planners are already preparing for a different kind of conflict. This time expect operation Urban Storm.

Iraqi officials are warning that Iraq will create a "new Vietnam" for American forces by forcing them to fight in cities. Senior Iraqi officials are telling Western visitors that "[we will] let our streets be our jungles; let our buildings be our swamps."

The aim is to draw US troops into urban warfare to "kill enough Americans to send them home," said one such visitor, who asked not to named. Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz vowed "a fierce war during which the United States will suffer losses they have never sustained for decades."

During the 1991 war in the open desert, American tanks and aircraft "plinked" Iraqi armor at will, and US bulldozers trundled along the front line, burying surprised Iraqi troops in their trenches. This time, Baghdad wants to level the playing field by pulling US forces into city combat.

"Withdrawing Iraqi forces into the cities would make it much more difficult for Americans to fight," says Sean Boyne, an Iraq expert based in Ireland, who writes for Jane's Intelligence Review. "If US troops are drawn into cities, the risk of collateral damage is great."

Baghdad has already begun preparing the ground for this defense. Experts familiar with high-level Iraqi thinking say every urban base from the southern city of Basra to Baghdad has been garrisoned. Command and control is now decentralized; trusted officers have been put in charge of each urban area.

Food, fuel, and weapons are being stockpiled by the military, and Iraq's plan calls for a declaration of martial law to put troops on the streets "as soon as the bombing starts," according to a Western source. Ten new radio transmitters are said to be in operation to "keep communications fluid," the source said. In recent years, air-defense systems have been linked by Chinese-laid fiber-optic cable to ensure continuous communication, even during bombing.

But American planners are aware of Iraq's moves, and are devising ways to overcome Iraqi urban warfare plans. They make no secret that street fighting is a nightmare scenario for US troops, who have proven, from Vietnam to Somalia, that street battles are not America's strongest suit.

During a recent war game in California described by The Wall Street Journal, an attack force of 980 specially trained Marines were stymied, bloodied, but ultimately successful in attempts to dislodge 160 "enemy fighters" – but at a cost of about 100 casualties. The 6-to-1 US numerical advantage in this exercise could well be reversed during fighting in Iraq.

In Somalia in 1993, a US raid in downtown Mogadishu turned into a 15-hour firefight – the fiercest since Vietnam – that left 18 Americans dead and prompted a US withdrawal.

"This is what worries senior US generals," says Andrew Krepinevich, a retired US Army planner who heads the Center for Strategic and Budget Assessments in Washington. "But they believe that if you can move fast enough, if you can generate this snowball effect – this momentum for collapse – then these plans to turn cities into killing zones won't be able to be executed, because the regime will start to collapse."

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