Iraq Airstrikes and ISIS Control Data from From Occupation to Insurgency: How U.S. Intervention in Iraq Enabled the Rise of ISIS

This repository contains two original datasets used to analyse the relationship between U.S. military intervention and the rise of ISIS in Iraq. The first is a district-level panel dataset covering 101 Iraqi districts across 12 time periods (2014–2017), yielding 1,212 observations. The dependent variable measures the percentage of district territory under ISIS control, derived from georeferenced and digitised maps produced by the Institute for the Study of War. The primary independent variable is the cumulative number of U.S. airstrikes conducted in each district during the pre-2011 occupation period. Control variables include population density, education, poverty, pre-2003 terrorist activity, and a spatial measure of Sunni demographic dominance. The dataset is structured for panel analysis with two-way fixed effects. The second dataset contains 2,768 geolocated and dated U.S. airstrike events, compiled by merging Iraq Body Count data on civilian casualties with data from Imai et al. (2022) declassified U.S. Air Force strike records (2007–2008). Each observation includes geographic coordinates and timing, allowing aggregation to the district level and spatial analysis. The appendix from the original research these datasets were built for provides detail on each variable and how they were collected.