2023 The Death Of The Islamic State In Iraq?

2023 could go down as the year the Islamic State died in Iraq. The group is still around but it has become completely irrelevant to the country.

 

2014 was the high mark for the Islamic State as it seized Mosul and a large swath of northern Iraq. It declared its own state and set up a vast administration. It was able to have some successes in Anbar afterwards but then moved onto the defensive before being defeated in 2017 and officially moving back to an insurgency. 

 

IS declared that it would return and did launch a rebuilding effort. It drove people out of rural areas of central Iraq while carrying out an intimidation and assassination campaign against local officials to assert control. It brought in men and material from Syria where it still held territory. It seemed like the group could make a comeback as it promised, but then things fell apart.

 

The group failed on several levels. It wasn’t able to recruit new members as the war had devastated Sunni areas and made it far too costly to stand up to the government. It wasn’t able to rebuild its networks and lost the capability to hit Iraq’s cities. Finally its leadership was devastated by U.S. and Iraqi forces.

 

The number of security incidents reported in the media tracks this decline. In 2014 when it took Mosul there was an average of 28 incidents a day and over 10,000 total for the year.

 

It’s shift from seizing land to defending it can be seen in the following years as there was an average of 23 incidents per day in 2015, 20 per day in 2016 and 15 per day in 2017.

 

It’s defeat on the battlefield resulted in a more than 50% drop in attacks to 6.5 per day in 2018 or around 2000 incidents for the year.

 

It then declined into obscurity. It only averaged 3.1 incidents per day in 2019. 2.8 per day in 2010, than 2.2 per day in 2021, 1.3 per day in 2022 and only 0.3 per day in 2023.

 

In 2023 there were no car bombs and only 2 suicide bombers. IS was only able to carry out double digit attacks one week and there were six weeks when there were no incidents, the first time that happened since 2003. Almost every attack that did happen was defensive in nature aimed at threatening the security forces and civilians to keep out of the few places IS was still present. Those were all in isolated parts of the country.

 

Overall the Islamic State is at a point where it has no real impact on Iraq. It could continue on like this for a few more years, but the possibility of it returning seems remote at best.