The word “liberation” carries with it a tremendous sense of finality and accomplishment. It suggests freedom from something that was previously oppressed. Despite all of these positive connotations, the liberation of cities in Iraq and Syria has proved to be much more of a mixed bag for those living in the aftermath. Part of this is the challenge of governing post-liberation areas where city infrastructure has been destroyed and where security threats still remain. Consider the example of Fallujah, which was liberated by Iraqi forces on June 27, 2016. Many months later, reports suggest that the citizens of the city...

This report relies on open-source data collected by researchers at the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) from various online sources. For the data on Islamic State military activity, CTC researchers based their data collection on the Islamic State’s own reporting regarding its military activities. This approach is not without its limitations. The most significant is that it is hard to independently verify whether or not what the Islamic State is reporting is an accurate representation of what is actually occurring on the ground. There would seem to be clear incentives for the Islamic State to inflate its attack reports in an...

Shortly after the Islamic State’s takeover of Mosul in June 2014 and continued advance through Iraq and Syria, the National Counterterrorism Center estimated that the group controlled approximately 81,000 square miles of territory, roughly the same land area of Great Britain.⁵ In early 2017, it was reported that the group had lost approximately two-thirds of the territory that it once controlled.⁶ Along with this reduction in territory, there has been the loss of the Islamic State’s formal control over a large number of cities, towns, and villages. In an effort to limit the scope of the data collection required for...

Across the 16 cities in the CTC dataset, researchers were able to code 1,468 self-reported Islamic State attacks. There was a significant amount of variation in the number of attacks that took place in each city following liberation. To demonstrate this, Table 1 presents three pieces of information: (1) the number of days between the city’s liberation and the end date for coding in the CTC dataset (April 30, 2017);^{9 10} (2) the number of attacks coded in each city following its liberation; (3) a statistic that shows the average monthly number of attacks.¹¹

A few important points emerge from...

One way to refine these initial findings is to add additional levels of nuance to the data. To do this, CTC researchers coded two additional categories: attack type and target type.

There are seven categories for type of attack: suicide bombing, suicide fighter operations, armed assault (without intention of the perpetrators to die in the attack), improvised explosive device, indirect projectiles (such as mortars), direct fire weapons (such as sniper fire or RPGs), and other types of attacks (air defense operations, arson, etc.).²⁰ The coding for type of attack was not mutually exclusive, so that an operation may have been...

The fact that territory is being pried away from the grip of the Islamic State as a governing organization is a positive development. This report is not intended to diminish the gains being won on the battlefield by mostly local forces, supported by a variety of external actors. However, what this report suggests is that pushing the Islamic State out as the formal governing party in a territory is not a sufficient development when it comes to ending the group’s ability to enact violence against individuals in Iraq and Syria. Indeed, the more than 1,400 data points of the Islamic...