Current Dynamics of Urban Military Operations
According to Niklas Masuhr in this new CSS Analysis, intense and protracted combat in towns and cities seems to confirm predictions that urban areas will increasingly become the primary battlefields of wars and conflicts.
Both in military and in political terms, cities tend to function as focal points in violent conflicts and open warfare. Though urban combat has been an important element of warfare since the start of military history, its importance seems to be increasing in the 21st century. As such, the city of Aleppo not only marks a strategically important point on the map of the Syrian civil war, but the four-year struggle for the metropolis also exemplifies the humanitarian disaster and brutality of the conflict. In fact, it is possible to trace the political history of intense conflicts between 2014 and 2019 in terms of the combatants’ ability to control the cities.