Throughout the Iraq War, international and local security forces maintained records of “significant activities” (SIGACTs).

In 2014, the U.S. Department of Defense’s CENTRAL COMMAND released Iraq War SIGACTs data for the period December 2003 through the end of December 2011, when American forces formally withdrew from the country. These included details of attacks and other significant wartime incidents (e.g. IEDs that were found and cleared) that were experienced or observed by these forces. The data identify, amongst other details, the precise location of incidents; their date and time of occurrence; and general categorization.

We have extracted the data, cleaned it, and matched incidents to Iraqi districts and provinces. The resulting dataset contains 251,845 observations. We release the data with the publication of “Disorganized Political Violence: A Demonstration Case of Temperature and Insurgency” in International Organization.