WASHINGTON, 6 April 2003 — US tactics in Baghdad in coming days may be similar to urban warfare used by the Israeli Army in Palestinian villages, some experts say. Images broadcast in the past few days on US television already reveal a similarity between the two: house-to-house searches, roadblocks, arrests, soldiers in flak jackets creeping along walls, fingers on triggers.
And USA Today recently alluded to Israel’s secret role in training Marines for urban warfare in the latter half of last year. “Israel is secretly playing a key role in US preparations for possible war with Iraq, helping to train soldiers and Marines for urban warfare,” it said. The paper said that the Israelis built two fake cities at a secret venue — complete with mosques, clothes hung out windows, and donkeys wandering down alleys — for use in the exercises.
Since the start of the Al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000, and Palestinian use of automatic arms, Israeli commandos generally take Palestinian towns by advancing in a rapid zigzag toward the center, backed by F-15 or F-16 airplanes, or Apache or Cobra helicopters.
Control of the town is established in the interior of a city, then spread to its outer limits. To minimize their casualties, troops move under cover, often knocking holes in walls and entering houses, while elite snipers are posted on roofs.
“The technique the Americans are going to use will be a lot like ours. And like us, they will use tanks and rely on air support,” Meir Payil, a military historian and reserve colonel with the Israeli army, told AFP. “You won’t see street-to-street fighting. They will go after pockets, and only hit certain areas,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. David Grange.
“The Americans will use this tactic for one good reason: to avoid a maximum of losses on their side and to cut Saddam and his circle from the rest of the world,” Payil said. The goal, according to Patrick Garrett of the US military think tank GlobalSecurity.com, is to isolate regular troops and paramilitary forces from civilians “slowly but surely.”
“The Israelis have no compunction whatsoever about knocking buildings down to get to whatever it is they need to get to,” whereas the Americans will try to conduct “much more of a clean operation,” Garrett said. US military experts say that, like the Israelis, coalition forces will erect barricades at entry points into Baghdad in an effort to control movement and to locate soldiers trying to hide among civilians.
Meanwhile, British analysts say that with many years’ experience battling the IRA in Northern Ireland the British Army seems better prepared than its US counterpart for winning hearts and minds in Iraq. “Belfast may be considered relevant, in as far as the British have experience of military dealings with hostile inhabitants,” said Adrian Guelke, a professor of international relations at Queen’s University in Belfast.
Alistair Miller, a native of Northern Ireland who saw action with the 7th Armored Brigade (the Desert Rats) in the last Gulf war in 1991, agreed. “Without a doubt this experience (in Northern Ireland) will help them,” said Miller, 36, formerly a corporal with the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars and now a Londonderry warehouse manager.
“They’ve maintained the peace in Kosovo and Bosnia and are very experienced in dealing with the civil population,” he said. In three decades of confronting the Irish Republican Army in urban and rural parts of the province, the British Army learned that having a numerical and technological advantage was not enough.
“The story of the British Army’s alienation of civilians during the first years of ‘the Troubles’ is incredible,” said Guelke, using the official British euphemism for the conflict in Northern Ireland. “When the troops arrived in Northern Ireland in 1969 they were hailed by the Catholics as liberators, they got cups of tea for people on the Falls Road” in Catholic west Belfast, he said.
The Provisional IRA, founded in January 1970, waited 13 months before killing its first soldier. But, Guelke said, the situation deteriorated rapidly when the army got involved in assisting Protestant parades through Catholic areas. “There were very heavy-handed random searches for weapons during the curfew of June 1970 where they messed up the local population,” he said.
US troops “don’t know how to control these types of situation, while our men have more training and experience to stop them getting into a situation where you have civilian casualties,” Miller said.
“If you drive through a checkpoint in this country you will be fired at too,” he said, alluding to the deaths of eight Iraqi civilians, killed on Monday in their van at a checkpoint at Najaf, south of Baghdad. “In that environment, a van can carry a lot of explosives, so they will take the van out,” he said. “Iraq is a completely different kettle of fish. It’s war out there.”
