BRUSSELS, October 19. /TASS/. Any potential Israeli ground operation in the Gaza Strip will be protracted, dragging on for years, and will feature fighting fiercer than what faced US troops in their 1993 assault on the Somali capital of Mogadishu, former US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director David Petraeus said.

The ex-intelligence official said that his personal experience of leading armies engaged in brutal counterinsurgency campaigns should serve as a cautionary tale for Israel should it decide to launch a ground invasion. "You don't win counterinsurgencies in a year or two. They typically take a decade or more, as we saw in Iraq, as we saw in Afghanistan," he told Politico Europe. Petraeus added that it was hard for him "to imagine a more difficult setting" for such a ground operation than that presented by the Gaza Strip.

According to the military and intelligence expert, if the bombing of Gaza is followed by a ground invasion, it "could be Mogadishu on steroids very quickly."

"If they're [Hamas] as creative in the defense as they were in that horrific, barbaric, unspeakable attack (on October 7 - TASS), then you'll see suicide bombers, you'll see improvised explosive devices, there will be ambushes, booby traps, and the urban setting, again, could not be more challenging," Petraeus emphasized.

The United States dispatched 28,000 troops to Somalia in December 1992 as part of a UN peacekeeping operation. On October 3, 1993, during an unsuccessful attempt to capture local paramilitary leader Mohamed Farrah Aidid in Mogadishu, the Pentagon lost 18 elite US Army Ranger commandos and other US soldiers as well as two Black Hawk helicopters, while 75 troops were wounded in fierce urban fighting that became known as the "Black Hawk Down" incident. Then-US President Bill Clinton ordered the troops home by March 1994 as American public opinion soured on the US military intervention in Somalia.