ABSTRACT
When Europeans think of war in cities they tend to think in terms of a Stalingrad or Berlin. The dramatic images of the Second World War may no longer be omnipresent but the popularity of films such as Saving Private Ryan and the success of books such as Anthony Beevor’s Stalingrad (more than half a million copies sold in four years) are evidence of the concept’s continuing power. It is reinforced by the imagery associated with the most recent battle of Grozny, which involved thousands of casualties, desperate refugees, swaggering Chechen fighters and the devastation of an industrialised city.1 The Mogadishu firefight of 1993 involved thousands of Somali fighters and civilians, and the bombing of Baghdad ten years later produced harrowing images, but Grozny represents war on a different scale and to different criteria. It is this extreme that is now considered.
