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The Islamic State inside Iraq: Preserving Strength?

(Combating Terrorism Center at West Point) Michael Knights - It has been a year since Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory over the Islamic State, yet ISIS did not disappear. In the first 10 months of 2018, the movement mounted 1,271 attacks. 762 were explosive events, including 135 attempted mass-casualty attacks and 270 effective roadside bombings. ISIS attempted to overrun 120 Iraqi security force checkpoints or outposts and executed 148 precise killings of specifically targeted individuals such as village mukhtars, tribal heads, district council members, or security force leaders. As Hassan Hassan has documented, the Islamic State had readied "a calculated strategy by the group after the fall of Mosul to conserve manpower and pivot away from holding territory to pursuing an all-out insurgency" - to return to the attritional struggle against the Iraqi state and Sunni communities that it executed so successfully in 2011-2014. The writer is a senior fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
2019-01-02 00:00:00
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