Continuity and Change in the Operational Dynamics of the Islamic State

Abstract

In this article we estimate the influence of leadership changes on the operational dynamics associated with terrorist attacks conducted by the Islamic State and its predecessors. Because the focus of our research is empirical, the study uses data for 2,131 successful attacks between October 2002 and December 2014 to examine differentials in operational tempo, attack severity, primary tactics employed, and principal targets. The data are aggregated on a monthly basis to estimate the probabilities associated with specific attack sequences in terms of the following primary tactics: (1) firearms, (2) explosives, (3) hostage-taking/kidnapping, and (4) attacks involving combinations of (1), (2), and/or (3). The analysis is placed in a broad historical and strategic context in order to explore two key issues: (1) The effect of leadership change on terrorist group activity and (2) The implications for counterterrorism and counterinsurgency efforts. Our analysis reveals a myriad of conceptual, theoretical, and policy implications.

Predicting Known Terrorist Event Outcomes and the Illusion of Self‐Assessed Expertise*

“…Each individual was provided with a one‐sided sheet of information containing a complete description of the scenario, blank spaces for inputting each participants’ estimate of IS operational dynamics (i.e., empty cells requiring a prediction), and a small section for providing a self‐appraisal of expertise and information about his/her demographic attributes. Participants were told that the information provided in the scenario was actual monthly data obtained from open sources about the operational dynamics of successful IS attacks conducted throughout 2014 (Regens and Mould, ). As a result, the study employs an empirical baseline for determining forecasting accuracy relative to known information about the operational dynamics of successful IS attacks conducted between January 2014 and December 2014.…”

“…In this case, the data were obtained from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), a publicly available open‐source data set based on media reporting of individual attacks, allowing for replication of this study (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism). We employed a series of filters to construct the analysis data set by querying the GTD for all successful events attributed to IS to screen out ambiguous incidents that do not involve terrorism (Regens and Mould, ). First, the violent act seeks to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal.…”

“…Because countering terrorism is one of the major issues facing the intelligence community, this study employs information about real‐world events, rather than hypothetical scenarios, to illustrate the challenges associated with predicting future events using information derived from a collection of historical observations (Regens and Mould, ; Regens et al., , ). Specifically, we focus on predicting the actual operational dynamics of the Islamic State of Iraq and al‐Sham, commonly called ISIS ( ad‐Dawlah al‐Islmiyah ) or IS.…”