The Era of Urban Warfare is Already Here by Margarita Konaev and John Spencer – Foreign Policy Research Institute
Aleppo. Mosul. Sana’a. Mogadishu. Gaza. These war-ravaged cities are but a few examples of a growing trend in global conflict, where more and more of the world’s most violent conflicts are being fought in densely populated urban areas, at a tremendously high cost to the civilians living there. Despite their aversion to urban warfare, American and NATO military strategists increasingly acknowledge that the future of war is in cities. Concurrently, humanitarian agencies such as International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are adjusting their response to relief operations in urban centers in real time. This rise in urban violence and the resurgence of warfare in cities comes from three key factors: the global trend toward urbanization, increasingly volatile domestic political conditions in developing countries, and changes in the character of armed conflict…
he apparent ease within which IS took over cities like Mosul and Tikrit in Iraq and Deir el-Zour across the border in Syria was also puzzling considering that historically, urban-based insurgencies have been relatively rare and largely unsuccessful. For instance, with the exception of South Yemen in 1967, the urban-warfare strategy has been ineffective in places like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru. Throughout the 1970s and the 1980s, the urban terrorism campaigns of separatist groups such as Northern Ireland’s Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Spain’s Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), as well as the left-wing and right-wing extremist groups in Italy, France, and Germany also ultimately failed to accomplish their goals.
This poor track record might not come as a surprise. Cities, after all, are the bastions of state power. And as the epicenter of political, industrial, economic, and commercial activity, communications, and culture, cities lie at the center of transportation networks, where the state can bring its full power to bear. Scholars of classical insurgencies and civil wars have therefore often argued that cities offer easier targets for state control than the pacification of large rural areas in the periphery of the country.
Improvements in military technology have also widened the gap between state armies and irregular groups, making it more difficult to organize and mobilize an urban-based uprising against the vastly superior government forces…