Egyptian army bulldozer before the IED was activated.
Suicide bombing attack in the Bir al-Abd region (Telegram, January 8, 2021).
ISIS operatives on their way to carry out an attack against the Egyptian army.
Main events of 2020
Last week, ISIS published several infographics, summing up the activity of its provinces in Iraq and Syria in 2020. According to these infographics, and according to the ITIC’s data and several publications,
five provinces stood out in 2020:
The Iraqi Province remains the epicenter of ISIS’s activity and reorganization. In Iraq,
there was a sharp increase in the scope of ISIS’s activity, with the largest number of attacks (a total of 1,422, averaging close to 120 attacks per month). Most of the attacks (499) were carried out in the
Operatives of ISIS’s Somalia Province attacking Al-Shabaab operatives.
The rockets fired by ISIS (Telegram, December 12, 2020)
Main events of the past week
Routine attacks continued in ISIS’s various provinces in Syria, Iraq and throughout Africa and Asia. Noteworthy examples:
Syria: Clashes continue between ISIS and the Syrian army and forces supporting it in the desert region in eastern Syria. Russian and Syrian fighter jets reportedly provided air support to Syrian forces. ISIS’s intensive activity in the Euphrates Valley continued, in the form of activating IEDs, shooting at vehicles, targeted killings, and attacking military positions).
Iraq: ISIS’s intensive activity in northern and western Iraq continued, in the form of sniper fire, mortar shell fire, and attacking positions and compounds of the Iraqi security forces. Worth noting are
not as many in syria, and in fact, those forces in iraq are contributing to the fight in anbar province right now and taking back part of ramadi. let me interrupt. why did those iraqi troops run away from the second largest city in iraq, mosul, a city of nearly 2 million people, when a few thousand isis terrorists came in, the iraqi military abandoned huge quantities of u.s. military equipment yes, they have. and simply ran away. after all those years of u.s. training and equipping. i give you that, wolf. we ve talked about this hundreds of times. what i will tell you is there was political backing for them doing that. it was because they weren t getting paid. they weren t being led. and they didn t have a government that they trusted. they ran away. they walked away as opposed to being killed. there is a regeneration of a diplomatic and a governmental approach in iraq to help them fight. and mr. al abadi has been doing that since he s been elected.
the attackers in paris, the way they struck wasn t a mere gun assault. eight different suicide bombings coordinated with gun attacks. some execution-style massacre. that s out of baghdad. more than european cities. i have not heard, and i really wish the president would say this, look, i screwed up, i underestimated the threat, i called them the jv team well after i was briefed and knew what al qaeda in iraq had been up to including strapping mentally disabled young girls with suicide bombs and marching them into police headquarters including, by the way, holding terrain in al anbar province as the zarqawis did in the mid 2000s. i m not talking about fear mongering. i applaud him for drawing this distinction between islam and isis. in the last two months, two months and change, isis has perpetrated five major attacks. three of them have been in nato countries, wolf. okay? this is not a contained threat. this is not something that we can sit, you know, go to bed