ISIS uses strategy of stressful mobilization in Iraq

Mouaz Mohammad

The terrorist organization ISIS revealed during its past weeks its activities in separate areas in Iraq that included the provinces of Diyala, Tigris, Kirkuk, Salah al-Din, Anbar, Nineveh, Al-Jazeera and Fallujah as it carried out nearly a hundred operations, according to its newspaper Al-Naba in its numbers 232 and 233, resulting in the death and injury of 176 people.

It also confirmed that the organization is currently seeking to implement a strategy of “stressful mobilization”, similar to the “harvest of the soldiers” that its followers ordered to work through, through a version issued in April 2019.

What stressful mobilization?

The strategy of “stressful mobilization” is to force the opponents to mobilize all the time in all regions, and to keep them on permanent alert, which helps to weaken their morale, increase their stress and then cause their collapse.

In that strategy, ISIS is trying to preoccupy the opponents with operations, no matter how simple, and not allow them to rest, while changing their frequency in terms of time and intensity, to keep them in a state of permanent shock, and unable to anticipate the location and time of future attacks.

Under the title: “Strenuous mobilization is a target for the mujahideen as well”, the organization’s weekly newspaper, Al-Nabaa, in its issue No. 213, issued in November 2019, presented a detailed description of this tactic, explaining that it is represented in “preparing the Mujahideen for their strikes by monitoring the enemy’s positions, and determining how to strike them as well as withdraw to safe places, to rest and prepare themselves for a next blow. ”

This strategy works, according to the guerrilla style, which includes the implementation of assassinations and planting explosive devices and car bombs, in addition to targeting economic sites, agricultural crops and energy resources, which the organization has done since the features of its return in the past days, taking advantage of the governments’ preoccupation with the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

In spite of the Iraqi forces launching the “Black Desert” operation, during the past days, to track the elements of the organization in a number of governorates, the Iraqi researcher Hisham Al Hashemi considered it merely a legal or a show reaction, confirming in a statement to the Reference that it will not eliminate or eradicate terrorism from its roots, nor will it prevent terrorist operations again.

Trying to win the pledge of allegiance

ISIS, through its operations and its newspaper Al-Nabaa, and a number of publications, seeks to ensure that the organization will own the lands it lost in 2017 in Iraq again, to try to win allegiance by the branches of Al Qaeda and their elements, and what is known as the Headquarters for the Liberation of Al-Sham and the Taliban movement for the new leader of ISIS, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qurashi.