ISIS Captures Mosul, Iraq

Standard analysis

The troubles in Iraq are far from over. Over the first few months of 2014, an increasing amount of violence has destroyed hopes for a normalization. A new organized Islamic insurgency, apparently the offspring of Al Qaeda and the war in Syria, has come to the fore, as ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Their activities have become well organized and effective, and they have progressively captured more territory against weak opposition from the government troops. This is one of those long simmering disasters which seem to capture our attention around the world, but without a sharply focused time period. I decided that the capture of Mosul, one of Iraq's large cities, and the "capital of northern Iraq", would serve as a reasonable sample. Even that event was spread out, but June 9 2014 seemed to be representative.

The GCP event was set for the full 24 hour UTC day of June 9th. The result is Chisquare 86216 on 86400 df, for p = 0.671 and Z = -0.441.

(click for larger image)

Standard Caveat: It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny statistical effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from noise. This means that every “success” might be largely driven by chance, and every “null” might include a real signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect can be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of similar analyses.