Popular Support for Counterinsurgencies: Experimental Evidence from a National Survey in Iraq

This study presents unique evidence on popular support for ISIS and the counterinsurgency from an original national survey fielded in Iraq at the height of the insurgency in 2015. As direct question techniques would likely yield biased responses to sensitive questions about views on warring factions in conflict theaters, we administered the first survey experiments in Iraq in order to attain reliable measures of civilian attitudes toward ISIS, the Iraqi government, and the international coalition airstrikes. This research design and data enables us to test an original argument on the effect of civilian victimization in multi-party counterinsurgencies. Our findings run counter to existing public opinion research in rebellious environments. A near-consensus exists that the outcome of counterinsurgencies critically depends on the success of each side to win the support of civilians. Recent studies contend that violence against civilians shifts victims’ allegiance away from the perpetrator and toward its opponent. In this paper, we argue that an external military intervention that favors the government changes this dynamic as long as there is widespread opposition to the insurgency. Specifically, we expect that harm against civilians that is inflicted by the government does not shift support away from the counterinsurgency and toward a loathed insurgency if an external intervener also fights this rebellion. Instead, we expect that government-inflicted harm increases support for the external intervention, as long as that intervention is viewed as independent from the government that harms its citizens. Experimental evidence from an original national survey in Iraq, which was conducted at the height of the civil war in 2015, is consistent with this argument. List experiments reveal that popular support for ISIS was extremely low (at 1.4%) while support for U.S.-led international coalition airstrikes was substantially higher at 31.7%. Victimization by domestic counterinsurgents did not affect sympathy for the ISIS insurgency, but it did increase support for the international coalition airstrikes - except for those respondents who were experimentally induced to consider the close ties between Iraqi and foreign counterinsurgents. Thus, the perception of a counterinsurgency as fragmented (rather than unified) can help maintain popular support for the broad counterinsurgency effort even if one counterinsurgent is responsible for victimizing civilians.