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The guerrilla phase of the Irish Civil War began in August 1922, when the forces of the Irish Free State took all the fixed positions previously held by the Anti-Treaty IRA. The IRA then waged a guerrilla war to try to bring down the new Irish Government and overturn the Anglo-Irish Treaty. This guerrilla campaign was ultimately defeated. The IRA called a ceasefire in April 1923 and "dumped arms" the following month. This phase of the war was characterised by small-scale military actions but also by assassinations and executions on both sides. The Free State also imprisoned up to 13,000 IRA fighters. In addition, the campaign saw the destruction of a great deal of infrastructure such as roads and railways by the IRA. ==Start of the guerrilla war== Government victories in the major towns inaugurated a period of guerrilla warfare. After the fall of Cork, Liam Lynch ordered Anti-Treaty IRA units to disperse and form flying columns as they had when fighting the British. They held out in areas such as the western part of counties Cork and Kerry in the south, County Wexford in the east and counties Sligo and Mayo in the west. Sporadic fighting also took place around Dundalk, where Frank Aiken and the Fourth Northern Division of the Irish Republican Army were based and Dublin, where small scale but regular attacks were mounted on Free State troops. Among the casualties of the guerrilla attacks was Commander-in-Chief Michael Collins, who was killed in an ambush at Béal na mBláth, while touring recently occupied territory in County Cork, on August 22, 1922. Arthur Griffith, the Free State president had also died of a brain hemorrhage ten days before, leaving the Free State government in the hands of W. T. Cosgrave and the Free State army under the command of General Richard Mulcahy. For a brief period, the onset of guerrilla warfare and the deaths of the two foremost leaders of the Provisional Government threw the Free State into crisis. August and September 1922 saw widespread attacks on Free State forces in the territories they had occupied in the July–August offensive, inflicting heavy casualties on them. In this period, the republicans also managed several relatively large-scale attacks on rural towns, involving several hundred fighters. Dundalk, for example was taken by Frank Aiken's Anti-Treaty unit in a raid on 14 August, Kenmare in Kerry in a similar operation on 9 September and Clifden in Galway on 29 October. There were also unsuccessful assaults on for example Bantry, Cork on 30 August and Killorglin in Kerry on 30 September in which the Republicans took significant casualties.〔Hopkinson, ''Green Against Green'', p223, 225〕 However as winter set in the republicans found it increasingly difficult to sustain their campaign and casualty rates among National Army troops dropped rapidly. For instance, in County Sligo, 54 people died in the conflict of whom all but 8 had been killed by the end of September.〔Michael Farry, ''The Aftermath of Revolution'', Sligo 1921-23〕 In October 1922, Éamon de Valera and the anti-treaty Teachta Dála (TDs, Members of Parliament) set up their own "Republican government" in opposition to the Free State. However, by then the anti-treaty side held no significant territory and de Valera's "government" had no authority over the population. In any case, the IRA leaders paid no attention to it, seeing the Republican authority as vested in their own military leaders. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Guerrilla phase of the Irish Civil War」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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