The influence of leadership on the strategies and tactics of Islamic State and its predecessors

ABSTRACT

Using data from the Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism's Global Terrorism Database, this paper analyses terrorist incidents perpetrated by the Islamic State and its antecedent groups under three different modes of leadership. We investigated whether changes in leadership are followed by changes in the targeting strategies and attacking styles of the group. We compared the frequency and the lethality of attacks, fatalities per day and the rates of suicide attacks, and investigated the differences in target selection and attack modalities using cross tabulation with chi-square analysis. The results indicate that the group followed different trajectories under the three different leadership styles examined in terms of target selection and the tactics employed to carry out the attacks. The analysis also shows that in the case of the Islamic State and its predecessors, the decapitation of terrorist leaders did not reduce the frequency of attacks, and fatalities per day. Further research is necessary to test to what extent changes in the strategies and tactics of terrorist organisations are caused by changes in leadership.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamic State (IS)
• terrorist leadership
• decapitation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. There was about four-month gap between the death of the first leader, al-Zarqawi, and the appointment of the second leader, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. We removed that period from the charts.