The Islamic State at Low Ebb in Iraq: The Insurgent Tide Recedes Again.

AuthorKnights, Michael

Incidents like the January 20, 2022, Islamic State prison break (1) at Ghweran, Syria, or the January 21, 2022, massacre of 11 Iraqi Army soldiers in Diyala, Iraq, (2) give the sense of another Islamic State resurgence, (a) but a longer and more methodical survey of attack metrics shows that the Islamic State's insurgency in Iraq is looking increasingly anemic, in contrast to the sustained resurgence it enjoyed over the course of 2019 and early 2020. Attack activities plummeted across the board in mid-2020, falling from a high of 808 Islamic State-initiated (b) attacks in Q2 2020 to 510 during the third quarter of that year. Attack trends persisted in an erratic pattern of ups and downs for the remainder of the period surveyed in this study, averaging 330 per quarter over the remaining 17 months from July 2020 to November 2021. These national-level figures, supported in this article by an exhaustive qualitative and province-by-province breakdown, paint a picture of an insurgency that feels increasingly isolated and disconnected from the broader Sunni Arab population. Under pressure from rolling security offensives, the expansion of the government security footprint further into rural areas, and an energetic campaign of leadership decapitation strikes, the Islamic State is struggling to maintain even historically low levels of attack activity. While all these factors have certainly contributed to driving down attack activity in Iraq, in the authors' view, they lack the explanatory power to fully account for the ebbing of the insurgent tide over the last 20 months. The key analytical quandary for insurgency watchers that emerges from this study is how much of the Islamic State's present weakness can be attributed to these variables, or if some other, unseen factor, such as the deliberate preservation of forces by the Islamic State, is driving the trajectory of the insurgency.

This article extends the metrics-based analysis used in three prior CTC Sentinel pieces (3) in 2017, 2018, and 2020, adding a further 20 months of Islamic State attack metrics in Iraq, picking up from the start of April 2020 (where the last analysis ended) to the end of November 2021. As in the prior study, this article looks at Islamic State attacks in Anbar, Salah al-Din, Baghdad's rural "belts," (c) Nineveh, Kirkuk, and Diyala. The authors also look at the Islamic State's provinces in Syria, making some rudimentary comparisons between activity levels in Iraq and the areas of Syria directly adjacent to the Iraqi theater of operations." (d)

As with previous studies, to maximize comparability, this analysis used exactly the same data collection and collation methodology as the December 2018 and May 2020 CTC Sentinel studies. Attacks were again broken down into explosive or non-explosive events, (e) and also by the four categories of high-quality attacks (effective roadside bombings, (f) attempts to overrun Iraqi security force checkpoints or outposts, (g) person-specific targeted attacks, (h) and attempted mass-casualty attacks (i) ). As with any set of attack metrics, this analysis represents a partial sample that undoubtedly favors more visible attack types (explosions, major attacks) over more subtle enemy-initiated actions (such as kidnap or intimidation). Nevertheless, as with the previous studies, the immersive, manual coding of thousands of geospatially mapped attacks remains one of the best ways to gain and maintain a fingertip-feel for an insurgency.

The piece will unfold in a recognizable format borrowing from previous studies. First, the authors will review national attacks trends and high-quality attack trends. Then, the piece will proceed with quantitative and qualitative attack trends at the provincial level. Next, the article addresses the question of centralized direction and resourcing. In the period examined in this article, there have been two attack campaigns by the Islamic State that suggest surviving centralized direction and resourcing: first, efforts to carry out "external attacks" into the well-secured Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), and second, an integrated assault on Iraq's electricity sector in the summer of 2021. Both will be examined in turn. The article will conclude with an analytical section on the potential causal factors of the Islamic State decline (including conditions in Syria) and then discusses the predictive outlook for the future of the Islamic State insurgency in Iraq.

National Trajectory of Islamic State Attacks

The December 2018 CTC Sentinel study of Islamic State attack patterns in Iraq chronicled a stark decline in Islamic State attack metrics in late 2017 and the first half of 2018, (4) while the May 2020 CTC Sentinel metrics study described a strong partial recovery of Islamic State attacks in Iraq in the second half of 2 019 and the first quarter of 2020. (5) In this new study, as shown in Figure 1, the authors discovered that the partial recovery of Islamic State capabilities in Iraq appears to have peaked in Q2 2020 and has since experienced a slow reversal in quantitative terms.

As the May 2020 analysis predicted (based on metrics up to March 31, 2020), Islamic State attacks continued to increase for some months in Q2 2020, reaching a level similar to 2012 intensity (j) (including 315 Islamic State attacks in April 2020 and 319 in May 2020, (6) a period roughly correlating with Ramadan in 2020 (k) ). Yet this upward trajectory was not sustained. Instead, the number of Islamic State attacks dropped off sharply in June 2020 and throughout the third quarter of 2020, settling back at a level more commonly seen in 2019. (7) Though undulating above and below the trendline in specific months, the quarterly attack metrics trended downward in 2021. This gradual decline trend is clearer when viewed via the monthly Islamic State attack metrics shown below (Figure 2).

Another very clear trend is a steady and unmistakable decline in the quality of Islamic State attacks in Iraq in late 2020 and 2021. Figure 3 shows the raw numbers of high-quality attacks (effective roadside bombings, attempts to overrun Iraqi security force checkpoints or outposts, person-specific targeted attacks, and attempted mass-casualty attacks). Again, the second quarter of 2020 marked a high point for high-quality attacks within the new study period, but this level of performance was not sustained. As Figure 4 shows, the proportion of high-quality attacks declined, from an average of 61.6% of attacks in Q2 2020 to an average of 41.6% in Q3 2021. (8) All categories of high-quality attacks also declined, as shown in Figure 5, but two weathered 2020-2021 better than the others. Effective roadside bombing held up relatively well as a tactic, and the targeted killing of specific security and local officials overtook attempted overruns of positions as the second most common high-quality tactic from Q3 2020 onward. (9) In the authors' experience of analyzing Iraqi security dynamics, (1) this speaks to the Islamic State's declining capability to win stand-up fights against Iraq security force (ISF) units, with fewer overrun efforts being undertaken and a lower proportion being effective enough to be coded as recognizable overruns. As this study will discuss at various points, the gradual hardening of ISF outposts may have helped in this process, with thermal camera masts (m) giving outposts better situational awareness of Islamic State raids mustering to attempt overrun attacks. (n) Table 1 in the appendix provides the quarterly national metrics for Islamic State-initiated attacks in Iraq since the beginning of 2018, including across the different categories of high-quality attacks.

Quantitative and Qualitative Attack Trends at the Provincial Level

In terms of provincial-level comparisons (see Figure 6), Diyala produced the highest number of Islamic State attacks in all but four months of the new 20-month dataset, (o) confirming its longstanding position as the most consistently active operating environment in Iraq for the Islamic State. (10) One stand-out observation from the new attack data is the growing role of Salah al-Din as a cockpit of Islamic State attack activities in Iraq, with the province moving from being a relative backwater to the second or third most active attack location in any given quarter of 2020 and 2021. (p) By contrast, early 2020 Islamic State attack hotspots such as Anbar and the rural Baghdad belts fizzled out in the latter half of 2020 and Kirkuk struggled to maintain a consistently high level of attack activities. (11) To dig more deeply into provincial dynamics and trends, the following sections will proceed governorate-by-governorate across the six provinces.

Anbar

In the authors' May 2020 CTC Sentinel metrics analysis, Anbar was showing signs of recovering as a major Islamic State attack location after years in the doldrums. In the first quarter of 2020, there were three times the number of attacks each month (27.6) than the 2019 average (8.7). (12) This continued in the second quarter of 2020, with a monthly average of 32.3 attacks in Anbar. (13) But the Islamic State then suffered a precipitous drop-off of all forms of attack in Anbar from June 2020 through to late 2021. While the monthly attack average was 22.5 in 2020 (14) due to the high levels of Islamic State activity early in the year, the monthly attack average for the first 11 months of 2021was just 9.0, (15) essentially a return to the very low attack levels of 2019. (16)

High-quality attacks in Anbar also dropped sharply after the summer of 2020. In Q2 2020, the Islamic State in Anbar was still striking out regularly from rural redoubts in the Wadi Husseinat, on the high plateau east of Rutbah. (17) Effective overruns were targeting border guard stations on the Syrian, Jordanian, and Saudi borders, as well as outposts on the highways ringing the central desert plateau. (18) Islamic State cells were moving back down onto the...

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