There has been a significant rise in ISIS attacks in Iraq and Syria, with the group exploiting security gaps in Iraq caused by the coronavirus pandemic to relaunch and invigorate its rural insurgency in the country, according to a report submitted to the UN Security Council that was made public on Thursday.
The wide-ranging report, put together by the UN monitoring team that tracks the global jihadi terror threat, states that the group is consolidating in Iraq and Syria and “showing confidence in its ability to increasingly operate in a brazen manner in its former core area.”
It states that the number of ISIS attacks in Iraq and Syria “increased significantly in early 2020 as compared with the same period in 2019.”