Syrian Rebels Shift to Tunnel Warfare

War is Boring ^ | March 15, 2015 | Elliott Carter

[C19fan]

On March 4 at 5:31 p.m., computer screens at the European Mediterranean Seismological Center lit up. A a 2.3-magnitude tremor had just rattled Aleppo in eastern Syria.

But it wasn’t an earthquake.

Rebel tunnelers had planted a huge stash of explosives under the Syrian Air Force Intelligence Directorate headquarters. The underground attack represented a powerful blow against the Syrian regime.

The explosion was a current adaptation of a medieval siege tactic. Pre-modern soldiers would dig a tunnel deep under an enemy castle’s walls, collapse the tunnel and bring down the castle along with it. Syria’s rebels do the same, but adding explosives to better collapse the tunnel.

[C19fan]

Out of the Crater at the Siege of Petersburg or when the British sappers and miners blew up a big section of the German trenches in Flanders.

[McGruff]

What helps is that Syria’s modern urban areas sit on layers of ancient structures. Aleppo has been continuously inhabited since the Copper Age — around 6000 B.C. — and Damascus is two millennia older than Julius Caesar.

Dig beneath the street, and there is always a possibility you’ll run into older buildings.

“There has never in the world been such a thick network of tunnels as there is in Syria,” Syrian academic Salim Harba told AFP in 2014. “It started in Homs in 2012, and the army has since discovered 500 of them. But I think there are twice as many.”

I was wondering how they could do that so easily. And they were able to catch in on video.