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Posted on 01/15/2003 4:47:47 PM PST by knighthawk
AUSTRALIA'S elite forces could be among the first to enter a nightmarish urban warfare campaign if a conflict with Iraq takes place on the streets of Baghdad.
Australian Special Forces and their American counterparts have been training in specially built mock-town compounds in the Middle East in preparation for close-combat battles.
The war grew closer yesterday with US President George Bush warning he was "sick and tired" of Saddam Hussein's "games and deception" and that the dictator's "time is running out".
Experts believe pitched house-to-house battles in congested city areas would be the favoured tactic of Hussein's regime in a bid to thwart US and allied forces.
But such a scenario is the worst nightmare of US military strategists.
Most experts say Iraqi military leaders would attempt to draw American and allied forces into the cities, rather than face defeat on remote desert plains where US weapons would be best utilised.
A ground battle in the streets of Baghdad would ensure high casualties, to allied forces and civilians, and would dilute the effectiveness of America's superior firepower in the air.
It is for that reason that US and Australian troops have been preparing for close-quarters fighting.
In Israel, entire mock cities, complete with mosques, clotheslines and even donkeys, have been built in the deserts bordering western Iraq.
There, Israeli soldiers are instructing their US counterparts in the ways of hand-to-hand and close combat.
Defence force bases across the US have been transformed into replica Middle East townships to enable the army and Marines to train troops in "building-to-building, door-to-door" fighting.
Urban warfare exercises also are taking place in Kuwait, where members of the US 3rd infantry division yesterday carried out training assaults on buildings erected to mimic the conditions they would face in Iraq.
Australia's elite SAS forces could be called upon to pinpoint buildings that pose a threat to ground troops in the event of an urban battle, paving the way for conventional troops to fight the enemy.
"If they were going to be used in that role, it would be for . . . pinpointing the locations of the top echelons of the potential enemy command structure," retired SAS officer Mike Jeffrey said.
"If that target is pinpointed to a particular place, or particular room, or particular barracks or house or whatever, they may well be used to deal with it, to neutralise it and deal with whoever or whatever is inside."
The claims are evidence that the Iraqi military learned a valuable lesson from the 1991 Gulf War which was fought away from the cities.
In the vast desert expanses, the superior weapons of US forces easily overwhelmed the under-equipped enemy.
But, in an urban environment, allied troops would face the uncertainty of breaching a building possibly containing only civilians, or soldiers disguised as such.
Anything from toddlers strapped with explosives to plate glass windows deflecting laser-sighting equipment would be potential obstacles in such conditions, experts say.
"I wouldn't want to get sucked into the cities," one former senior US military official said.
"There would be a lot of casualties on our side, we'd kill a lot of civilians and destroy a lot of infrastructure, and the images on Al Jazeera (the Arabic television network) wouldn't help us at all."
With this training in mockup buildings, I see this as sort of a ruse to keep the pressure on Saddam. Hussein says "we will fight them from house to house" and with this sort of training in the neighborhood, we are responding "Hey, that's fine with us- we're coming to get you!". I sort of picture our forces quickly capturing most of Iraq and then enveloping Baghdad in a siege with the ultimate goal of Hussein being dragged out of his palace and killed by his own people or spirited away into exile.
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