America and Its Allies Nearly Destroyed Raqqa to Rescue It

[Peter1469]

America and Its Allies Nearly Destroyed Raqqa to Rescue It

This is an interesting article about Raqqa. The campaign to liberate it, left Raqqa in ruins. As more people move to urban areas, expect more urban warfare. The US is even creating military units to specialize in urban warfare.

Hell descended on this city twice: first when it was captured by Islamic State fighters in 2014 and made their capital, and then when it was liberated last year by U.S.-backed forces in a campaign that flattened much of the center of the city.

Photos and videos show the damage here, but they don't prepare you for the intensity of the destruction. Buildings are pulverized into rubble, block after block. Reconstruction in some areas is a distant prospect. It will take years just to clear away the shattered concrete and jungle of twisted rebar.




Raqqa experienced a ferocity of urban combat rarely seen since World War II. Think of newsreels of Stalingrad in 1943 or Berlin in 1945. Those cities are symbols of the fury of war and the cost of liberation, and Raqqa should be, too.


Raqqa's liberators were members of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led militia that captured the city one building at a time. They surrounded Raqqa in late June and then squeezed it, ever tighter, until October, when resistance finally collapsed. Brave as they were, the SDF fighters couldn't have won without devastating fire support from U.S. warplanes, armed drones and artillery. It was a brutally effective combination. One of the last redoubts was the local hospital.


The Islamic State left a farewell message: The city is laced with IEDs, which have injured nearly 500 people since October, including more than 150 children.



Some unforgettable images emerged during a day-long tour of the city last week with U.S. Special Operations forces who directed the campaign: mass graves dug in a public amphitheater to intimidate adversaries, the midtown traffic circle where the Islamic State videoed its grisly executions for the Internet; the stadium where the jihadists tortured prisoners in underground dungeons. The Islamic State made the city a theater of death.

[MMC]

America and Its Allies Nearly Destroyed Raqqa to Rescue It

This is an interesting article about Raqqa. The campaign to liberate it, left Raqqa in ruins. As more people move to urban areas, expect more urban warfare. The US is even creating military units to specialize in urban warfare.

Such is the effects of war.....until we design Phasers, such is how it will be. Let the leftness throughout the world know that. So they quit whining about what they knew would happen once a War jumps off.

[MisterVeritis]

America and Its Allies Nearly Destroyed Raqqa to Rescue It

This is an interesting article about Raqqa. The campaign to liberate it, left Raqqa in ruins. As more people move to urban areas, expect more urban warfare. The US is even creating military units to specialize in urban warfare.

The statistics for the battle of Stalingrad are staggering. I really don't want to go find the info but it was tens of millions of bullets, hundreds of thousands of artillery shells, hundreds of thousands of mortar rounds, tens of thousands of bombs. Nearly a million dead.

I remember seeing a photo of a sign reminding people to "walk on this side of the street" to improve their chances of surviving an artillery strike.

Urban warfare is brutish.

[Peter1469]

I drove to Mostar, Kosavo and went to the end of town where the battle lines were. The houses all had bullet holes in them on the north side.

The statistics for the battle of Stalingrad are staggering. I really don't want to go find the info but it was tens of millions of bullets, hundreds of thousands of artillery shells, hundreds of thousands of mortar rounds, tens of thousands of bombs. Nearly a million dead.

I remember seeing a photo of a sign reminding people to "walk on this side of the street" to improve their chances of surviving an artillery strike.

Urban warfare is brutish.

[Cletus]

That reminds me of a story about two grunts after the battle for Anzio in WWII. As they are walking through the ruins of the town, moving through the rubble, one of them looks at the other and says "We sure liberated the Hell out of this place".

Such is urban warfare.

[MisterVeritis]

That reminds me of a story about two grunts after the battle for Anzio in WWII. As they are walking through the ruins of the town, moving through the rubble, one of them looks and the other and says "We sure liberated the Hell out of this place".

Such is urban warfare.

Some things are amusing in the retelling.

During WWII while not much was going on two Italian troops made it their habit to ride their bicycles out to a large rock out in the middle of a large plain to eat their lunch. Day after day an Allied observer watched them. One day, mostly just to screw with them he decided to call in a fire mission. So he did.

Time passed. The Allied observer wondered. Maybe he wasn't going to get his fire mission.

All of a sudden hundreds of rounds came pouring down. The sound was deafening and rolled on for minutes. The observer was shocked. He expected one or two rounds from the closest artillery battery.

Then his radio went off. Higher headquarters wanted an effectiveness report against the two battalions in the open.