Analysis and Assessment of Islamic State’s military strategy in Iraq (2011-2015)

Abstract

Because many militant groups from the Islamist political landscape and beyond have suffered extinction, survival of insurgent groups in a context of insecurity and rivalry is not a fact. In 2010, the Islamic State in Iraq was near extinction and considered as defeated by a myriad of enemies regrouping 400 000 fighters (the US and Iraqi forces and militias). Four years later, it was able to control a significant part of the Iraqi and Syrian soil, outperform all Islamist groups in history, proclaim a caliphate and export its model, which will have long-lasting consequences at regional and international levels. This thesis seeks to explain the group’s resurgence from 2011 to 2015 by adopting a provincial perspective and with the theoretical framework of the indirect approach. By introducing a categorisation of operations based on their confrontational nature, this investigation tries to understand IS’ military effort in Iraq from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. In addition, a study of its relations with challenging social structures (tribes and insurgent groups) and an analysis of the group’s propaganda frames give us the possibility to determine how the group introduced more flexibility in its overall strategy and articulated a particular discourse in order to attract deprived Sunni Iraqis during the 2012 Iraqi protests. The main contribution of using this model is to explain IS’ past resurgence and enrich the existing literature with a complementary explanation of the group tactics and rapid morphing from a guerrilla to conventional warfare. This research project possesses the following creative elements: it provides a detailed and in-depth account of Islamic State’s strategy, applies theoretical frameworks from security studies to it and offers a better understanding of the group´s political behaviour by analysing its interactions with a range of actors ranging from its social incubator to competitive social structures and ideological rivals. It aims to expand on the idea of the Islamic State as an insurgent group that has adopted a repertoire of different strategies to establish an expansive caliphate by closely examining its adoption of the indirect approach and its execution at the operational levels of war.