Learning From Terrorist Tactics: Preparing For Subterranean Warfare

I posted an article last year on Subterranean Warfare in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank and it now looks like this nasty type of fighting is definitely going to be part of the landscape in the battle zones in Syria and Iraq as well. -SF

 

Last year, members of Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, dug a tunnel leading to the Syrian Air Force Intelligence building in Aleppo and detonated a massive bomb in an attempt to destroy the facility. Reported globally, this event was by no means a rarity in the ongoing Syrian civil war. As Benjamin Runkle warned last year, the United States and its allies must prepare for the subterranean future of warfare. His article was a broad and useful overview of the various threat actors using tunneling to negate the advantages that airpower and other technologies provide to Western militaries. As America increases its military involvement in Iraq and Syria, a more detailed look at the military significance of such structures is warranted. As of February of this year, there were nearly 4,500 U.S. troops in Iraq. Regardless of the merits of further intervening in the conflict, it is a fact that the United States and its allies are sending increasing amounts of troops to the region. Whatever the intentions of American leaders, this expanded presence is almost certain to result in greater contact with a variety of hostile forces. Al-Nusra, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Syrian government, and other factions in the war have all used tunnels to great effect throughout the conflict. U.S. and allied militaries must thus understand and prepare for subterranean warfare.

The Subterranean Landscape in Iraq and Syria

Both Syrian regime and rebel forces have burrowed a vast series of tunnels into the area around Damascus. Given the ever-shifting tide of battle, these structures have become neutral parts of the battlespace, rather than dedicated mobility corridors for one side or the other. Teams of up to 300 insurgents have labored with shovels and pick axes to dig these tunnels. The Free Syrian Army has reportedly even employed architects to design a tunnel, which it used to infiltrate a government military base near the town of Erbin. Outside of the Syrian capital, regime forces claimed they had destroyed a subterranean network near Harasta in June 2015. This massive underground structure includedtunnels up to 200 meters in length equipped with lighting and ventilation ducts. Later that year, ISIL built an elaborate series of passageways in the border town of Sinjar during its battle with Kurdish forces. Likely constructed with jackhammers and hand tools, the network featured multiple exit points fortified with sandbags to protect against American-dropped ordnance. The Islamist group also smashed holes in walls between buildings to allow covered, aboveground transit in the face of withering American airstrikes. As part of ISIL’s tenacious defense of the area south of Mosul, the group has constructed an underground “city within a city” to protect its fighters against advancing Iraqi government troops.

Tunneling in the Offense

The various warring factions in Syria and Iraq have not only used burrowing below ground as a defensive or force protection measure, but they have also used tunnels to deliver troops and explosives against their enemies. When they threatened the Iraqi capital in the late summer of 2014, ISIL made use of Saddam-era subterranean routes to evade Iraqi Security Forces, hide from their aircraft, and deny them rear-area security. In the battle for Homs in November 2015, al-Nusra built passageways 15 meters underground, some of which stretched for 3 kilometers. According to Syrian government soldiers, the primary purpose of these structures was to allow insurgents to encroach on regime fortifications by maneuvering in a covered fashion.

In an almost herculean effort, another rebel group reportedly spent seven months building a tunnel under the Syrian Army’s Wadi Deif base. Instead of using the subterranean passageway to deploy troops, the rebels used it to detonatealmost 60 metric tons of explosives in May 2014 and kill at least 20 soldiers. Possibly following the lead of other groups, ISIL detonated six metric tons of explosives under an Iraqi army headquarters in Ramadi in March of 2015. The insurgents had spent two months digging a 240 meter tunnel under the structure. Syrian regime forces have likewise maneuvered toward rebel checkpoints under the surface to detonate explosives below their unsuspecting targets.

Read the Remainder at War on the Rocks

Examining Terrorist Tactics: The Changing Logic Behind Suicide Bombings

(Note from Hammerhead: It was just announced that yet another ISIS suicide bomber killed 29 people in a Football Stadium in Baghdad).

What was once purely a strategic action has become a tactical move meant to help hold territory.

In October 2015, two suicide bombers killed more than 100 people outside a railway station in the Turkish capital of Ankara. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in the country’s modern history, but it was also something more, something not fully appreciated at the time, according to Robert Pape, a terrorism expert at the University of Chicago: The U.S.-led military campaign against the Islamic State—a mixture of air strikes and support for local ground forces—had turned ISISinto a “cornered animal.” And the animal was lashing out.

The group’s suicide attacks in its sanctuaries of Syria and Iraq declined, displaced by complex acts of terrorism abroad: the Ankara attacks, followed by the October 2015 downing of a Russian plane over Egypt, the November 2015 Paris attacks,more explosions in Turkey, and most recently triple bombings, at least two of them suicide blasts, in Brussels. All have appeared meticulously designed to kill as many people as possible in countries that are all, to differing degrees, fighting the Islamic State. The question is: Why is the animal suddenly flailing about? Why are bombs going off in Brussels now?

On display in Belgium this week, Pape argues, is what he calls the “strategic logic of suicide terrorism.” Deciphering the logic of terrorists is maddeningly difficult, which is why the study of terrorism is anexercise in competing theories, all circling The Truth at varying distances.

Pape’s theory is that suicide terrorism is fundamentally a response to military intervention—in the form of a rival occupying territory that the terrorists prize. For “nationalist” reasons, the terrorists want to control that territory, as any state would, through a monopoly on force and exclusive political authority. The argument here isn’t that all territorial occupations produce suicide terrorism, or that every individual terrorist is chiefly concerned with contested land, but rather that terrorist groups that today practice suicide terrorism tend to be grappling with dynamic losses of territory. Drawing on a database of suicide attacks around the world since 1982, Pape claims that his geopolitical paradigm has more predictive power than, say, explanations for terrorism that focus on religious fanaticism.

The idea that ISIS is primarily driven by extreme Islamist ideology suggests that “the targeting logic of a group comes right from its [religious] doctrine,” Pape told me. “Given thatISIS’s doctrine has not changed—that is, it’s still a religious group—then there should never have been a shift of its targeting tactics.” And yet a shift in who it targets seems to have occurred. Why?

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ISIS Territorial Gains and Losses: January 1, 2015–March 14, 2016

IHS Conflict Monitor

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In other words: In response to Ted Cruz’s statement on Tuesday, following the bloodshed in Brussels, that “radical Islam is at war with us,” Pape might agree that ISIS is a radical Islamist group. But he likely wouldn’t agree that the precepts of radical Islam are determining the course of the war that ISISis waging.

“The ebbs and flows of territory are predictive of the group’s targeting logic,” Pape told me, and the evolution of that logic over the last six months might be the key lesson from the Brussels attacks, even if the violence may have more proximate causes as well, such as the arrest last week in Brussels of one of the plotters of the Paris attacks. “ISIS is now losing in Iraq and Syria—they’re losing actually quite badly—and so they’re now in a position where they’re trying to change a losing game,” he said. The less in control the organization is at home, the more it strikes at targets abroad.

Pape argues that interpreting incidents like the Brussels attacks as a sign of weakness rather than strength is critical. He worries that if people conclude from the Belgium bombings that ISIS is stronger than ever, they’ll be more likely to support a major American or European ground offensive against the group. Such an offensive, he believes, will greatly increase the risk of suicide terrorism against Western targets beyond what’s likely to result from the current air campaign, without offering a higher probability of success in the fight against ISIS.

In defending the link between fierce struggles for territory and the use of suicide bombing as a strategy, Pape cites historical examples ranging from Chechen terrorists in Russia to the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. In 2010, he applied the theory to America’s occupations of Afghanistan starting in 2001 and Iraq starting in 2003. “From 1980 to 2003, there were 343 suicide attacks around the world, and at most 10 percent were anti-American inspired,” he wrote in Foreign Policy. “Since 2004, there have been more than 2,000, over 91 percent against U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries.” The invasion of Iraq, hehas argued in the past, “produced the largest suicide campaign in history.”

But if the occupation of territory spurs terrorism, why does it take the form of suicide terrorism specifically? Suicide attacks, Pape explained, are particularly well-suited to accomplishing two goals. One is “to coerce the target government to pull back its military forces, and suicide attacks kill more people—it’s the lung cancer of terrorism—than non-suicide attacks by a factor of ten.” The public will be terrorized by the scale of the carnage and the sinister nature of the suicidal act itself, the logic goes. Under pressure, their government will be forced to retreat from the territory that the terrorists desire.

Second, in the regions where terrorist groups operate, “suicide attacks are excellent against security targets to hold territory.” Those security forces—be they American or Iraqi or Sinhalese—are usually better armed and equipped than the terrorists. “Suicide attacks are a way to level that tactical advantage,” Pape explained.

“If you’re just going to go up against a tank with a handgun, it’s a lot less effective than some coordinated suicide attacks,” he continued. “That’s why, when there was a pitched battle for [the Iraqi city of] Ramadi last May, there were complex suicide attacks [by ISIS] used in coordination with other non-suicide attacks to basically seize and hold territory against an opposing force. That’s not something that we see in El Salvador with the [guerrilla group] FMLN [during the Salvadoran Civil War]. We don’t see that with the [Viet Cong] in South Vietnam [during the Vietnam War]. They’re not holding territory in a pitched way. … Suicide attack allows for more aggressive, coercive punishment and it allows for more aggressive territorial strategies.” While these strategic considerations have remained fairly constant across time and place, he says, what’s changed in the last 10 or 15 years is that in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, suicide bombing has increasingly been used as a tactic to take and hold territory.

On Tuesday, ISIS justified its suicide attacks as retaliation against “the Crusader states” for “their aggression against the Islamic State,” adding that it had targeted “Crusader Belgium” in particular because it would “not stop targeting Islam and its people.” The statement had all the trappings of a religious message, but its essential argument echoed Pape’s secular thesis: Brussels was being targeted for the participation of Belgium, and European countries more broadly, in the anti-ISIScoalition. What if we take the jihadists at their word?

Read the Original Article at Defense One