Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

This research explores the questions: Can we see patterns in the public opinion of Sunni Iraqi Arabs living in ISIS-conquered areas before and during their capture that would indicate popular support for ISIS displacing the Iraqi state? Did those Iraqi Sunni Arab attitudes toward ISIS turn more negative over time? Most importantly, what explains the variation in Sunni Iraqi Arab support and opposition in the earlier days of ISIS and during the time of ISIS’s military defeat? Using data from nationwide and Mosul-specific polls executed in Iraq between 2013 and 2017 by IIACSS, an Iraqi polling firm, and employing ordered logit regression analysis, this paper will show that grievances among Sunni Arab Iraqis about their governance in spring/summer 2014 set the stage for support for ISIS, rather than factors like religious values or relative individual wealth. ISIS governance in the Sunni Arab territory it controlled turned the populations in Mosul and other Sunni Arab-dominated parts of Iraq against ISIS. Thus, the public opinion data show a clear picture of an insurgency that rides a wave of popular grievances about governance and then crashes, at least partially, because it fails to provide the governance the population seeks.