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Red v Red for real in Syria


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.... curious that none of the dozen or so faithful who still check in here have commented on this at all, at least not lately.

Or isn't it interesting if it ain't whitey stomping towelheads?[/tongue in cheek]

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From the Beeb:

The opposition has also found it difficult to work with the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a group of army defectors which is seeking to topple Mr Assad by force. Based in Turkey, its fighters have launched increasingly deadly and audacious attacks on security forces in the north-western province of Idlib, around the central cities of Homs and Hama, and even on the outskirts of Damascus.

In January, residents of Zabadani, a mountain town 40km (25 miles) north-west of the capital, said it had been "liberated" by FSA fighters. Days later, defectors seized control of Douma, a suburb 10km (six miles) from Damascus, for a few hours. The FSA's leader, Riyad al-Asaad, claims to have 15,000 men under his command, though analysts believe there may be no more than 7,000. They are also still poorly armed, and many have only basic military training.

The FSA was formed in August 2011 by army deserters and is led by Riyad al-Asad, a former colonel in the air force....The strength of the FSA is unknown. The group put its membership at more than 15,000 by mid-October. It has admitted that it would be unable to directly confront the Syrian army, which is estimated to comprise over 200,000 soldiers.

According to the FSA, soldiers and officers are defecting every day and are continuously being organised and assigned tasks by the group. On 14 November Col Asad was quoted as saying that nearly 400 soldiers, including 15 officers, had defected in the previous week in a sign of growing momentum. The (FSA) gained international attention in November by claiming to have attacked an air force intelligence facility.

HOMS

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(January)...Significant numbers of soldiers defecting from the Syrian army have made Homs a base.

Defectors drawn to what was then a liberated city effectively enabled protests to take place. Armed and able to shoot back, they provided security and a perimeter for demonstrations.

The geography of Syria's third-largest city, a sprawling centre of agriculture and industry that is home to about 1.5 million people, is also said to have been problematic for the Syrian security forces.

"It is such an extended city, with extensive suburbs, villages and surrounding areas taking part [in protests] that it has been hard for the Syrian army to subdue all of that territory, as well as everywhere else," says Rime Allaf.

The unique character of the city's inhabitants and the area's strong local identity has also been cited as a explanation for Homs's resilience.

The BBC team met fighters from the Free Syria Army who hoped to lessen the authorities' stranglehold on the city.... But activists and residents quoted in the New York Times say a portion of those army defectors in Homs have begun carrying out regular attacks on the security services.

Peter Harling says the situation in parts of Homs now resembles "an urban battlefield" - and in the countryside surrounding Homs, there has been a worrying upsurge in sectarian violence that could lay the groundwork for "civil war".

Where the "deployment of security services, often behaving in a deeply sectarian fashion themselves, has had the effect of cutting the social ties between the towns and villages in the area around Homs", there is greater potential for sectarian conflict, he says.

(November) "They're asking for RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) in al Bayadah," said the young fighter, naming another district in Homs. "Assad's armoured vehicles are coming and they have nothing to stop them."

"Give them five or six of ours. God willing we will find some more," replied the man in charge, sitting cross-legged on the floor. This conversation took place in the Bab Amr quarter of Homs. The man giving the order for the RPGs to be sent had an M-16 automatic rifle, complete with sniper sight. The weapon did not have a scratch on it. It was brand new, just smuggled from Lebanon, they said. We had entered Syria the same way the M-16 had, from Lebanon, with men running guns to what is a growing insurgency... Casualties come out the same way that guns go in.

The Syrian government had ringed Homs with checkpoints and observation posts, they told us. The troops would open fire if we were spotted. Everyone ran as we crossed a ditch, and then a main road, into Homs. There was an atmosphere of siege, tension and constant fear in Bab Amr. The area is hemmed in by army and police posts, armoured vehicles sitting on the major road junctions. There was often gunfire. We couldn't see who was shooting but people said checkpoints often fired at people going by.

[Defectors] had fought their way out of their base, running under fire to reach Bab Amr. Now, people were coming out into the street to embrace them. Fresh from their flight, rapidly expelling plumes of breath into the night air, they explained why they had changed sides. Their officers had told them they would be coming to Homs to fight "terrorists" but earlier that day they were ordered to fire on unarmed protesters in the streets of Homs.... Time and again we met fighters who told the same story about being ordered to fire on protesters - and choosing instead to desert.

Sitting crossed-legged on the floor, weapons leant on the wall, they debated whether to attack a Syrian Army post. No said one; after all, we were all once conscripts. We should attack only the secret police, said another. In the end, they did attack, in the early hours of the morning assaulting the post with heavy machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. They killed two soldiers and wounded two more, they said.

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DAMASCUS

When the BBC team approached a checkpoint set up by the rebel Free Syria Army in the suburbs of Damascus, masked men with Kalashnikov assault rifles and hand grenades moved towards us - a few of them offering dates and biscuits. It is customary to give mourners something sweet, and a funeral was about to start that they said they were protecting.

The first time, in a small town called Zabadani, about half an hour from Damascus, it took a while for my brain to catch up with what I was seeing. We went in there with an official from the ministry of information, who got us through the army cordon that surrounded the town. A truce had been negotiated with the Free Syria Army - the first time that the Assad regime had properly acknowledged that the loose groups of ill-equipped defectors from its own forces were at all significant.

Even so, when a man who said he was an anti-government activist walked up to us and offered to take us to see the rebel fighters, I couldn't believe my ears. I thought he was some sort of regime stooge and was playing an elaborate trick. I hadn't realised that the army had pulled out of the town. Our minder said later that he was horrified, and scared to see the rebel fighters close up, but he hid it so well that I thought he had organised some sort of hoax to discredit the BBC's reporting.

How wrong can you be? It was all real. The Free Syria Army were only 30 minutes from the presidential palace in Damascus. Since then, I have seen their men in significant numbers inside Damascus itself. They are treated as heroes in the places they have appeared. It is not exactly clear how long they have been out in the open, setting up roadblocks and building firing positions here in Damascus - but as far as I can tell, it is only the last week or two.

LOYALISTS

President Assad has significant support. It is probably being eroded by the tide of blood, but he can still can count on most of the Alawite community he comes from - also on many Christians - and significant numbers of Druze and Kurds. That could be as much as 40% of the population. The Alawites support him because of who he is. The others believe he will safeguard minorities in a way that the mainly Sunni Muslims in the opposition and the free army would not.

What is also clear is that President Assad is losing ground in and around the capital. The poor Sunni suburbs - grim, poor tangles of concrete - are harbouring the free army. They are not a match for the president's forces yet. But they are getting stronger.

According to some estimates, 10% of Russia's global arms sales go to Syria, with current contracts estimated to be worth $1.5bn (£950m).... The current Syrian government also provides something else Moscow craves - the prestige of a navy base at the port of Tartus which is Russia's last base beyond the borders of the former Soviet Union.

200 people were killed by Syrian security forces in the hills and villages of the north-western province of Idlib on 19 and 20 December 2011. Most of those killed in the Jabal al-Zawiya area, 40km (25 miles) south-west of the provincial capital Idlib, were reportedly army defectors. In what activists say was one of the deadliest massacres of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, up to 70 soldiers were mown down by machine-guns on 19 December after hundreds fled their positions between the villages of Kafrouaid and Kansafra. Survivors said they had been attempting to reach Turkey.... On 20 December, government forces backed by tanks reportedly launched an operation to hunt down the defectors who managed to escape. Activists said there was fierce fighting around Kafrouaid for much of the day, as troops picked off the defectors one by one.... [Reportedly] 269 died in Idlib on 20 December alone - 163 of them defectors, but also 97 government troops and nine civilians.

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Preety strange to hear about all this in the news.

Ive managed to catch a couple of videos on YT with the rebels ambushing a BMP1 with an IED and a man pretending to sweep the streets, only to later pop out an RPG and fire it at a vehicle. Ill see if I find the vids.

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We are simulating this at The Few Good Men website in the Operation Desert Lance Campaign... about to embark on the third phase... been very interesting so far. In the campaign there was a rebel uprising in Homs but the Syrian Airborne Infantry destroyed them.

Campaign at FGM

Thanks for sharing this -- great project! But with rebels being forced to fight in an open district filled with office buildings like that, where the army vehicles can wander around at will and engage at standoff ranges, no wonder they got crushed.

cmshockforce20111213165.jpg

Now, if the rebels had remained in the narrow and familiar streets of the sympathetic Sunni residential areas (as they are in fact doing), rallying around the mosques, and had a few trained RPG gunners (army defectors), I suspect you'd have obtained a somewhat different outcome, or at least a standoff.

RPGAlley-Red.jpg

Ramadi_N_Souk1.jpg

Ramadi_E_HealthMinistry.jpg

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Yes that much is very true.... in this case though the Syrians made a pre-emptive strike against the Free Syrian Army whilst they were forming up and before they had entered their own preferred area of operations. Be interesting to see how the Syrians fare in densely populated areas against an unconventional enemy.

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I was the commander of the Rebels :P

well not so much a commander, as a viewer and watched how my men ignored orders and panicked on sight of the Airborne!

The problem was I only had 1 RPG gunner with 2 rounds...and when I was planning on retreating my men ignored me. yes I should have just stayed at the back of the map since the begining but...lesson for another day.

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Yes, in that case IEDs plus snap shots from rooftops is the best you can hope for. If rockets are short and users are poor, a few burning cars blocking an intersection will slow down and blind AFVS and their escorts long enough to allow a good shot. But generally there's no worthwhile reason I can see to enter or contest these parts of town in daylight, if ever. Choosing when and where to fight is one of the few advantages of a guerrilla.

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So just for fun, let's take a closer look at the two centres of FSA support in Homs. BTW, I am not nitpicking your campaign or anything, just interested in the "tactical" aspects of the rebellion here based on all my CMSF-driven learnings from Ramadi (Fallujah, Baghdad, Basra, etc.)

Bayada. Yeah, good luck "pacifying" this mess of narrow congested streets using any number of Republican Guards or paras. The place is sniper, RPG and IED heaven. 150 motivated rebels could hold this place indefinitely. Seems to me the army would likely cordon this district with bases at or near the City Council / city centre (2), the textile factory (3) and the old citadel (4), plus set up checkpoints and a main base on the highway / ancient trade and smuggling route leading north up the Orontes valley toward Hama. There's an Alawite/Christian area to the east and south, and their sectarian militias should seal off those sectors pretty well.

Homs_Bayada.jpg

And if I look closely at the map, ooh, what's that? A sturdy Ottoman mosque (1) housing the mausoleum of Khaled ibn al Walid, known as the "Sword of Allah". Basically, this guy was the Prophet's Rommel, a brilliant field commander who among countless other victories ran the Byzantine armies out of Syria. Hmm, that's not going to be a rallying point for any Sunni zealots or anything....

800px-Khaled_Ebn_El-Walid_Mosque3.jpg

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And southwest of the city centre, we find a smaller but still formidable Sunni pocket in Baba Amr. And oh look, there's another one of those mosques (4), this one named for Zubayr ibn al-Awam, another Companion of the Prophet (pbuh) and leading general.

BabaAmr.jpg

The Orontes river plain (with the oil refinery on the far side) provides a basis for interdicting the western approaches, while the highway running between the police HQ (1) and those Soviet-style industrial housing estates (2) screens the eastern boundary. If the Army is feeling up to it, they might also establish a base at the stadium (3). Notice also that the main campus of the technical university is just east of this district -- lots of students to keep the army distracted with demonstrations, provide volunteers, spies, etc.

Boche, I imagine that where your fighters died in your CMSF campaign is in a vain attempt to contest zone 2, or something resembling it. Those apartment complexes are sitting out in parking lots. Better to stay in the ghetto, building up your forces while doing hit and run and planting IEDs by night.

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Very good analysis... noted for future reference in the campaign. Thanks.

As an aside how would in laymans terms the Syrians handle an uprising in this area. Basically sector it of and flood each sector one by one with troops. Im sure the Americans did this in Fallujah IIRC.

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Well, with the UN actively intervening on the ground, per your campaign, I sincerely doubt even the most loyal army units will be up for a Fallujah or Hama 1982 pattern house-to-house fight (in the latter case backed by total disregard for ROE). They'd run a risk of units switching sides instead, with their heavy weapons, as happened in Libya early on. Keep in mind though that the UN forces will be the very next target of these guys the moment they become perceived as occupiers on the Iraq pattern.

So under the situation posited in your campaign, I doubt even elite forces would dare to do much beyond organizing a nominal "cordon" (hell, it's easier duty than facing the Crusader armies!), keeping their vehicles safe from Allied air power by hiding them next to schools and hospitals. And just as likely they'd negotiate local cease fires with the rebels while awaiting the indvitable regime change.

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....Now if instead the world remains indifferently on the sidelines and things begin to "stabilize" you have two possible strategies.

One, the Assad regime does a deal with the Sunni militias (and their Alawite and Christian counterparts although probably not the Kurds whose dominant and foreign-influenced factions will be de facto separatists) granting them formal status and the right to police their turf, with the army and police withdrawing to Damascus and the other loyalist towns that furnish most of the officer corps. At that point you commence the slow slide into sectarian conflict and warlordism.

The other option is that Assad emulates Qadafi and vows to exterminate the rebel "insects" to the last man. Expecting no mercy, the rebels will harden, become more seasoned, fanatical, Sunni-sectarian with AQ "volunteers" creeping in, and well-armed (smuggling is second nature). It may already be too late for the regime to crush a selected rebel area on a brutal Hama 1982 model, terrifying the rest into submission. The genie is well and truly out of the sectarian warlord militia bottle, and the only hope is regime change followed by reassertion of central ( army-backed) control on an Egypt model to head off the warlords. But given that the Syrian army leadership is a minority-dominated palace guard a la Iraq, I see little hope for that.

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.... But as for a what-if scenario for an intense, nasty and odds-are-even CMSF fight pulled from tomorrow's headlines, perhaps a dawn "lightning strike" by a Guards reinforced mechanized company deep into the rebellious residential district of Baba Amr (see posts 1 and 12). Objective is to clear out the rebel nest of vipers at the Zubair ibn al Awam mosque. The renegades (raf'ida) are known to be cynically using the holy mosque as a gathering point, and possibly as a headquarters and arms dump.

BabrAmrMosqueTacMap.jpg

Suggested game map area outlined in white (400m x 700m).

Since you want to trap the Zionist stooges and also intimidate the populace with an overwhelming show of force, your armoured force has been instructed to approach in two columns as shown: the first (RED line) to advance visibly along the main commercial boulevards, setting up blocking positions (hexes - 1 AFV each + infantry squad) to the north and west. The Hassan Ibn Thabit School seems like a good spot to occupy for an operational CP.

As the ill-disciplined rebels rush north to ambush the main force, a smaller group of elite police commandos (YELLOW line) in jeeps and BMPs will dash along the main highway and rail line that forms the eastern boundary of Baba Amr, take a sharp right, push 250 meters (3 blocks) into the dense residential area and secure the mosque in a coup de main -- once this area is secure some heavy tanks will move east and block each end of the street.

It will now be the surprised and disorganized rebels who must attack (at a time and place of our choosing for a change), and mainly be slaughtered piecemeal, or else disperse meekly into the neighbourhood.

Foolproof!

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A mild repurposing of my JOKER THREE Ramadi (Iraq) map will do quite nicely for Baba Amr. North on the game compass will point east, but that's a small price to pay for not laying out 25 city blocks and over a thousand buildings.

BabaAmr_Ramadi.jpg

Homs is a larger, wealthier and greener city than arid Ramadi (although Baba Amr is not the wealthiest district), so the makeover requires the following:

(a) More 3 and 4 story apartment buildings in the residential streets (still have courtyards)

(B) More/better paved streets and commercial boulevards, a lot more cars

© Greener grass, more deciduous trees and foliage

And no, this is not another 3 year project. Better yet, it'll be playable Red vs Red using base game CMSF only.

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From me, although I just started work tonight (click the link in my sigline to get the Ramadi scenario and map). I'm taking a break from CMBN to build this scenario, then I'll upload it to the Repository and GreenAsJade's site. I put a lot of effort into building my Ramadi map and I'm glad to find a new use for it.

As the last echoes of the morning adhan fade, the armoured column and its police escort parades down the leafy main boulevard of Baba Amr, watched glumly by the citizenry.

BabaAmrBoulevard.jpg

By the way, you're looking at all new buildings and street (this used to be the edge of the Ramadi cemetery). I've gotten pretty quick at building these streetscapes.

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Good CNN report and footage here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exWmITZb2iY&feature=endscreen&NR=1

And it looks like I'm WAY behind the bubble on current events in Homs. At least one BMP has defected to the FSA. And Baba Amr is a full-on battleground -- the commercial district at least is looking a lot more like Ramadi these days, sad to say.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ighjc3VKVuk&feature=related

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Well, after viewing 150 or so YouTube videos, including some posted in the last few days, I withdraw all my earlier glib comments. This is pretty brutal stuff and it's very sad that the West is sitting on its arse. Homs seems like a city that would be very pleasant to visit in peacetime, especially in the spring.

I've posted a few links to videos that give some insights into the tactics being used by both sides right now. I haven't gone out of my way to gross people out, but a couple of these are quite nasty....

This cameraman has some stones, sitting in front of 3 actively shooting BMP using a very strange form of shoot and scoot (turn your ass to the enemy? -- maybe CMSF pathing isn't so wrong after all). They finally notice him at the very end of the clip....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLB93R3ZRl4

T72s fire across the highway and RR tracks into Baba Amr from positions 500m east at the university (the high rise apartments are also regime sniper platforms)

122mm SP guns in the same place. Uploaded yesterday. Assad is clearly determined to pound Baba Amr into submission. What a pity we can't take these murderous f***ers out -- it would be so easy with one JDAM.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhkW78idP4c&feature=related

Shilka spraying 23mm indiscriminately down a residential street ....uploaded today

T72 brews up

FSA forces (more a mob than a tactical force by the look of it) overrun a police checkpoint, including a BRDM (there are a bunch of clips of this action). The big bearded guy in the second video is the commander of the FSA "Khaled ibn al Walid battalion"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCkXCUEOzKc&feature=related

FSA "spray and pray" tactics against snipers inderdicting a street. Note the chorus of schoolkids chanting the takbir (Allah u Akbar! الله أكبر) in the background.

T72s ambushed on an overpass -- one seems to be knocked out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqkCpmHCf9o&feature=related

Government soldiers under fire behind a burnt out BMP, with the burnt corpses of the crew (extremely graphic and not for the squeamish).

Interesting. Looks like a video "Wanted For War Crimes" poster -- a freeze frame of a Syrian officer together with a video of him shooting a rebel on the ground.

Mechanized infantry deployed at an intersection

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Not much going on in this little clip (Feb 4), but it does give a good-on-the-ground view of the typical tactical landscapes of Baba Amr -- the cinderblock-walled residential compounds vs the 3-5 story shophouse/apartments in the commercial district.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_c-l4ohbL8&feature=endscreen&NR=1

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