Some pretty worrying insurgent activity trends in north Diyala. The stand-out incident this week was house raid in Dara village, just outside Khanaqin city. Insurgents executed a Kurdish Kakai family and fought off village guards who went to investigate.

An ISF QRF was hit with an effective RSB attk and follow on ambush. 3x ISF KIA in the initial IED hit and another 3x in the following hours-long hr firefight plus several villagers. The Kakai vills north of Khanaqin have been the focus of an intensive ISIS intimidation effort

We’ve seen more than ten attks along this little 6km stretch of road during the past quarter, including the killings of the mukhtars of Maykhas and Mubarak vills. Now insurgents overmatched an ISF unit in a sustained contact less than 3km from Khanaqin district center

One of the emerging tactical trends @Mikeknightsiraq and I highlighted in our recent @CTCWP piece was increasing ISIS effectiveness in small-unit nocturnal engagements, particularly by luring responding ISF into effective “come-on” attks - usually IED-initiated ambushes

There have a been series of these incidents in recent months. In early May 10x Sunni tribal PMF were killed in a raid on a rural outpost north of Samarra. In mid-May insurgents ambushed the convoy of a district council member in Udhaim and killed 7x ISF in follow on IED ambush.

ISIS’ tactical set-up is heavy with night-vision optics, precision marksman rifles, low/mid-yield IEDs and light mortars that can be moved around by motorbike-mounted IED/mortar crews. This is a mix that’s optimized for the current operational environment ISIS is facing in Iraq

There’s still a hard cap on ISIS operational rebuilding from the Coalition airpower/ISR and residual special ops-heavy CJTF-OIR presence. But ISIS doesn't really need to get that fancy during engagements with local ISF, who're often poorly-equipped PMF/police/village guards

ISIS doesn’t need to do massive ambushes using strings of daisy-chained 155mms or deep-buried IEDs to inflict serious casualties when the friendlies are driving around in thin-skinned Hiluxes with zero IED protection instead of Bradleys or MRAPs.

Pre-attk assembly and exfil are also easier when the units getting attacked don’t have a direct line to a huge stack of F-16s and ISR drones orbiting overhead, aren’t that great at maneuvering tactically and really don't like going outside their bases after nightfall

The key takeaway here is that local ISIS cells don't need to do big, high-quality attacks to overmatch ISF. This scales up across the broader insurgency as well: in the mid-2000s insurgents needed to generate a huge volume of individual attks to seriously hurt Coalition forces.

Now ISIS can achieve the same battlefield effects with a much lower level of kinetic activity. Some sniping/IED hits to keep local police bottled-up in their compound where before it would have taken an SVBIED & infantry assault to physically destroy a hardened US patrol base.