“Of course people are nervous. People finally thought there was stability and that they can travel wherever they want, and then there are these attacks and this video and people are afraid again,” said Imad Mahmoud, a member of the Diyala Provincial Council. “The terrorists are attacking from the empty desert and the mountains where there are still small cells. They are not large in number but they are launching surprise, fast attacks and they have people inside the towns who are helping them.”

It was inevitable that the Islamic State would attempt a comeback after its crushing defeat, said Hisham al-Hashemi, an Iraqi counterterrorism expert based in Baghdad who advises the government. But, he said, “they are returning faster than I anticipated. That they have returned this fast is very dangerous.”

He blames the government’s failure to deliver aid and reconstruction to an area that was among the first to be freed from Islamic State control but has seen little in the way of assistance. “The Iraqi government did well on the military side but it didn’t do well in bringing stability to those areas. It is to the advantage of IS that the government has not implemented any of its plans.”

This latest iteration of the insurgency is a long way from being in a position to capture whole cities or control territory, analysts and military officials say. The Iraqi security forces have launched operations over the past two weeks aimed at rooting out the militants, and they have claimed some successes.

The government has declared that the Baghdad-Kirkuk road is now safe, and drivers and passengers who take the route say there are new checkpoints every kilometre. An operation this week by Iraqi and Kurdish security forces, backed by US air strikes, succeeded in eradicating an Islamic State safe haven that had emerged in mountains near the town of Makhmour, the US military said Tuesday in a statement.

But attacks have persisted in areas away from security sweeps, and it is unclear whether the government is reversing the militants’ momentum. Government attention is now being further diverted by a political crisis in Baghdad, where negotiations for the formation of a new government after fraud-tainted elections in May are being delayed by a recount of the ballots and by the eruption of widespread anti-government protests in the mostly Shiite provinces of the south.

The Iraqi security forces are in better shape today to contain the violence than they were in 2014, when whole divisions fled the Islamic State advance, said Colonel Sean Ryan, the US military spokesman in Baghdad. “They’re just doing small scale attacks because they don’t have large scale abilities any more,” he said. “But what they do have is the ability to scare the population. The fight is not over, and if people are putting their guard down, it’s a little too early.”