07/05/14 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, July 6, 2014.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Today's show will be part of an interview I recorded yesterday, about an hour long interview I recorded with Patrick Coburn from The Independent, who's been reporting from Iraq for the past few weeks.
The entire interview can be found in the archives at scotthorton.org.
Welcome to the show, Patrick.
How are you?
I'm not so bad, thanks.
Okay, well, great.
I sure do appreciate you joining us on the show again and all your hard work, especially over the last few weeks here.
I really mean that.
A dangerous situation there in Iraq.
Before we start with Baghdadi's big sermon in Mosul, we've got to start with the other big news, which is that you've got a new book coming out, The Jihadi's Return, ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising, that'll be out already by the end of this month.
Now, how could it be that you've already got a book together, ready to come out about ISIS and the rise of this new caliphate by the end of this month, Patrick?
The reason is that over the last year or six months, I've noticed that the jihadi organizations, al-Qaeda type organizations, and notably the Islamic State for Iraq and Levant, ISIS, had taken over an enormous amount of territory in northern Iraq and northern and western Syria.
Even before they took Mosul, they held about the size of Great Britain or, in US terms, the state of Michigan.
And without the rest of the world paying much attention.
So I was writing this book already.
It was also, I know, I'd been in Iraq quite a lot, and it was obvious that the Iraqi government was getting weaker and weaker.
Right.
Well, and now you did a five-part series on the new generation of jihadi warriors for the independent just, what, two months ago, something like that.
And yeah, we talked about, I think right around a year ago, about Iraqi troops falling back from their positions up near Mosul, I think it was.
And this was without an ISIS invasion.
It was just the Iraqi troops were just, you know, basically deserting their positions and coming back toward, you know, closer to Shiite-held territory there.
And so it has been kind of a long time coming for those, especially those reading your journalism closely and listening to you on my show.
Anyway, I know that I wrote an article a year ago predicting the coming caliphate between Syria and Iraq, and that's mostly because I talk to you.
I read you.
So if I was that right, then that's ought to be a pretty good clue to people of whose journalism they need to be keeping track of here.
And of course, I can't wait to read the book, ISIS, The Jihadi's Return, ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising.
Okay.
And now to that new Sunni uprising, the big news this morning is that there is a picture circulating that supposedly is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the new self-proclaimed leader of the caliphate.
A picture of him on Twitter, Patrick, I don't know if you've seen it yet, where he's standing on a balcony like Mussolini, giving his big speech.
I guess it was, they're saying Friday prayers.
You want to tell us what you know about that?
Well, I've been just flying out of Baghdad this morning, so I don't know a great deal about the latest picture.
I mean, ISIS is a strange organization in that it's completely bigoted.
It's really a quasi-fascist organization in its use of violence and its bigotry against Shia Christians, anybody else who disagrees with it.
And so it's not maybe too surprising to find the leader looking like Mussolini, but it's also a very effective organization.
It's militarily very well organized.
Its leadership, its military leadership is made up of former officers in Saddam's army or people who'd been fighting the Americans when they were occupying Iraq.
So it's fanatical, it's kind of crazy in some ways, but it's very effective.
And now to that point about how ruthless these guys are, and yet effective, it seems like the ruthlessness has been counterproductive in al-Qaeda in Iraq's past, back under Zarqawi.
It really helped marginalize them, even among the Sunnis, and helped lead to the so-called awakening.
And you've compared these guys on the show recently to the Khmer Rouge, I think Mitchell Prothero from McClatchy calls them school shooters.
Like these guys are just madmen, these ISIS guys.
And so I wonder if the degree of their madness is, at this point, it's still just helping?
Do you think that before long it will be counterproductive to their aims of consolidating this new state?
It's a good question, and I don't think we really know the answer yet.
What happened in 2005 to 2006 was that, yeah, the brutality of these people, the way in which they, you know, would shoot, you know, some Iraqi who had a problem, you know, collecting the garbage or fixing telegraph poles as working for the government, alienated a lot of people.
They sort of married the daughters of local people, also enraged people, and also that puritanical code.
They were rumored, I'm not quite sure how true this was, but it was believed, you know, that they're against smoking, so they cut the fingers of people who were caught smoking against music, you know, a very rigorous puritanical code.
And at that time, that alienated the tribes, that alienated local people, so they went over to the Americans.
They also paid a lot of money to do that.
This time around, they seem to have two policies.
One is to not bother local people, which they do some of the time, and the rest of the time they do.
They try to use these codes, and that alienates people.
But they're also very conscious that they might be stabbed in the back again.
So during the last couple of days, ISIS called a meeting in a big mosque in Mosul and told militant leaders who'd been allied to them that they either have to pledge allegiance to the new caliphate or give up their weapons.
So they're very conscious that they might be stabbed in the back, and they're asserting their control to prevent this.
They're also recruiting hard among local young men, paying maybe $500, $700 a month with money in Iraq.
And so they're raising a much larger army.
So, yeah, the brutality may alienate people, but they're still pretty strong.
And the alienated people are being pretty quiet about the moment because they're very dangerous people to oppose.
And now about that, the stab in the back that they fear, there's an article that ran in The Telegraph that was an interview with a Sunni tribal leader.
I'm sorry, I don't remember his name, but they were saying that he was a very influential tribal leader.
And he was saying kind of outright that ISIS is useful to us now, but we will never let them be in charge.
And when the time comes, we'll get rid of them, but not until Maliki goes first.
And I wondered what you thought of that.
It seemed like a pretty brave position for him to take on the front page of a global newspaper like that.
Sure, and kind of stupid, too, you know.
I mean, I think that, you know, the cemeteries of the world are full of people who thought they could use extremists.
But the extremists hit them first, so maybe it won't happen that way.
Or maybe it will, you know, one can't quite be certain.
But I think that the idea that a group as violent, as successful, as well-run as ISIS isn't just going to be rolled over by tribal leaders who decided they've got what they want out of these people.
All right, now, I wonder what the Sunni religious leadership, and obviously it's not uniform, but, you know, kind of by and large, what has been the reaction to the declaration of the caliphate?
And also I wonder, I have seen, you know, at least some of this reaction has been that it's not legitimate and that kind of thing.
But I wonder whether, if that's what they're saying, whether they're just undermining their own authority, sort of like Zawahiri ordering Baghdadi around when he has no ability to enforce it.
And I wonder, you know, if some of the preachers are saying this is illegitimate in the face of its success, whether that's just going to delegitimize them and legitimize the caliphate even more.
I think it will with a lot of people.
I mean, obviously the caliphate will frighten a lot of people, so they'll go the other direction, but it will also attract some.
And it will particularly attract, I think, Sunni youth.
And they'll be attracted because this is, you know, a very successful organization.
You know, the evidence they have that they're divinely inspired will win spectacular military victories.
So I think for the moment they're riding pretty high.
And, well, I guess, I mean, obviously Zarqawi never was able to really claim cities and claim a real territorial state like this.
But if you could put some kind of number on it, could you give us a percentage or a multiplication of how much more powerful this current Islamic state is than the al-Qaeda organization that Zarqawi ran back, say, eight, nine years ago?
Well, Zarqawi's organization was really, you know, a collection of cells and groups, whatever you call them.
And they didn't really hold that much territory, none of the bigger towns.
ISIS, you know, holds Mosul, which is a city of two million people.
It holds other towns.
It holds pretty well all the territory in the center and west of Iraq.
So it's a very different type of outfit.
It also, you know, is conducted on military lines.
You know, they have these trucks packed with fighters that maneuver everywhere.
The ISIS themselves have a name for their strategy, which is they say they move like a serpent through rocky ground.
In other words, they avoid the really hard targets and look for the soft ones.
Yeah, well, and for now they had not tried to do any kind of real full scale assault on Baghdad.
And they'd be crazy too, right?
Well, maybe a full scale assault would be crazy, but they've got a number of other options.
One, they could create mayhem by suicide bomb attacks.
They could take over some of the Sunni enclaves.
Baghdad is seven million people.
It's mostly Shia of Sunni there.
So they could rise up in some areas.
And some of those areas are right in the heart of the city.
And then there are other options.
They could mortar the airport or fire rockets into it.
But probably their best tactic would be to take over the Sunni towns south of Baghdad.
This is an area that the U.S. Army, when it was occupying Iraq, had the roads running south.
So they could sort of pretty well encircle Baghdad, assault it.
ISIS doesn't really like offering heavy casualties among its front line troops.
But it could exert a lot of pressure.
And, you know, given the Iraqi government is pretty dysfunctional, I wonder if it would be able to maintain control of the city if it was a staged cut off and there was no electricity.
All right, so telephone change here.
But now we're going to try Patrick's cell phone, see if we can get a little bit better audio here.
On the line with Patrick Coburn, reporting on the war in Iraq.
Middle East correspondent for The Independent in England, independent.co.uk.
And author of the new book coming out at the end of the month, The Jihadi's Return, ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising.
All right, and so now you were saying, Patrick, that the ISIS guys, they can't really take on Baghdad.
But maybe they could lay siege to it.
They have enough of a Sunni presence to the south.
And I guess even to the southeast of Baghdad, that they really could separate it from Basra and from their Shiite militia allies.
Well, that's what we don't know.
You know, they're very much outnumbered.
There are 7 million people in Baghdad.
You know, there are probably hundreds of thousands in the, probably tens of thousands in the militias, the Shia militias, the remains of the Iraqi army.
But Iraq is a pretty dysfunctional state.
So would the government be able to organize them?
Its record is pretty bad so far.
You know, it had more than 30,000 troops in Mosul, was attacked by a much larger force.
But the key generals ran away.
They put on civilian clothes.
They ran to the Kurdish areas.
These guys are back in Baghdad.
And amazingly, they haven't lost their jobs.
You know, so this is a state which at the top is really in meltdown.
So people in Baghdad feel, yeah, you know, we should, everything should be okay.
But with this government in charge, maybe we'll have another disaster like we had in Mosul and Tikrit.
And so now what about that?
Is there anyone at this point who could really, you know, control the Iraqi army?
And, you know, I mean, George Bush tried for years and years.
We'll stand him up and then we'll stand down and all of that.
All the billions and billions, tens of billions put into creating this army.
And it seems like nobody's in charge of the dang thing, even to this point.
Who could take control of it?
Well, the thing to realize about the Iraqi army is that it's more of a sort of racket or an investment opportunity than an army.
In theory, there are 350,000 men in it.
But the way it works is, and this is partly American doing.
I mean, I was talking to a four-star general, an Iraqi general, the other day.
And he was saying, look, the Americans decided that everything should be outsourced, like supplying food to the troops.
But what happened was that you'd have a battalion, which was meant to have 600 men in it.
Money would be supplied to buy food for 600 men, but it would really only have 200 men in it.
So the officers would pocket the difference, which was an awful lot of money, the food feeding 400 men.
The same would apply for, you know, weaponry and fuel and ammunition.
So it would really make a big fortune by being a commanding officer, a colonel or a general.
And then what happened was that people only got these jobs if they paid up.
So, you know, you probably need to be a promoted colonel these days.
You probably have to put up $200,000 if you're a divisional commander or general.
People tell me $2 million.
And then you get your money back through embezzlement of funds, you know, that should be for food, or from kickbacks from troops who get their salaries, but they pay half to you and they never bother to turn up, or from checkpoints on the roads that look like customs posts and in a truck that goes past, you know, they charge, you know, $100 or something.
So it was a great big financial racket, not really a fighting machine.
So that's why it fell apart.
Right.
And so, but is it too late now for anyone to come and take charge of the thing?
Or is it, I guess, the defense of Baghdad is now just up to the militias?
Yeah, the Iranians are partly right.
I don't know how many people in Baghdad, but they're sort of running this.
I mean, their idea is you set up a parallel army based on the militias.
This cooperates with any remnants of the regular army that will fight, and there are meant to be a few units that will.
And you try and form the militia into sort of proper units.
But this takes time, and it's not easy to maneuver militia units.
I mean, they may fight for their own neighborhood or fight in fixed positions, but it's difficult to make them mobile.
So I don't know how that's going to turn out.
All right.
Now, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dempsey was on TV and saying that, well, you know, he just does not see how, he says, well, he thinks that the Shiites and perhaps the current government can hold Baghdad.
I don't know if he was specific enough to say he thought the army could do the holding, but anyway, but he said he does not believe that they could retake Mosul not without help.
And combined with a lot of the other recent headlines, it sure does seem like quite a bit of mission creep from 300 advisers already up to 800 men or more, combat forces, armed drones, and helicopters are going.
Pretty easy to see from their point of view that they'll be damned if what you just said is going to stand, that the Iranians are going to come and be the most influential power in southern Iraq and take over the defense of Baghdad and the defense of this government.
They would rather do it themselves.
And so apparently they're really moving in.
Do you think that's right?
How much of an American presence is already there and how bad do you expect it to get?
Well, I think, you know, they might use drones, you know, would they use airstrikes?
Airstrikes don't really work unless you've got forward air observers calling in the aircraft.
You know, we're actually watching things from through binoculars.
I think two things.
One, I think, you know, the first of all, the Iranians are very influential in Iraq.
And they're always going to be influential because 60 percent of the Iraqi population are Shia.
You know, 100 percent of the, or near it, of Iran is Shia.
So there's, you know, those close links between the two.
But the Iranians, people say to me in Baghdad, just don't want to get overextended.
There are limits to what they'll do.
They don't want to send in troops either.
So I think that that's a bit exaggerated.
I think there's another thing to bear in mind, Scott.
It's one thing to fire drones at Waziristan up in the northwest frontier of Pakistan, at tribal villages or their equivalent in Yemen.
And these people aren't really much of a threat.
This is mostly PR.
But you start firing drones at people like ISIS, they probably can't stop them coming in.
They'll lose people.
But first of all, this is an organization which is based on martyrdom.
So losing people is not going to make them throw up their hands and surrender or even retreat.
Secondly, what they always do is you do it to them.
They do it to you in spades.
So if drones start being used against them, then I think immediately bombs will start going off at U.S. facilities or in Europe or elsewhere or in the U.S.
I mean, drones seem a good idea to politicians.
They probably seem a good idea to the White House because there are no immediate American casualties.
But, you know, there will be retaliation.
People have to bear that in mind.
I'm not sure they realize that.
Yeah, well, so let me ask you, barring that, say, for example, just hypothetically, that Obama decided, you know what, let Bashar al-Assad and Nouri al-Maliki and Ayatollah Khamenei work this out and get rid of ISIS.
It's their problem, it's their region, and that kind of thing, and stays out of it.
Would you think that ISIS is or is not a threat to the United States at that point?
Because obviously there are going to be some grievances from old times, and I guess it could be a strategy to try to lure us in if that's what they want, although I don't know if that is what they want or not.
But otherwise, do you think that maybe we could just sort of whistle past the graveyard here and let this stay somebody else's problem and not turn these guys west?
Well, I think one of the problems of the U.S. and the Europeans is that they've already sort of intervened in Syria, they've made it their problem.
Now, you know, John Kerry was just in Baghdad, and William Hague is the British foreign secretary, the same thing, and they were producing this policy, which I think is an excuse for a policy, of saying let's arm the moderate Syrian opposition, which is then supposed to be going to fight Assad and ISIS.
Now, there are a number of problems here.
One is the moderate Syrian opposition as an armed force doesn't exist anymore, so far as anybody can see, in Syria.
Just pumping in some weapons isn't going to make any difference.
So that basically is a non-policy.
You know, if they want to fight ISIS, then I think they need to talk to Assad.
If they are a free Syrian army, they should maybe encourage them to have a truce with Assad and both attack ISIS.
But for the moment, you know, there isn't really an American policy.
I mean, John Kerry has struck people in Baghdad, there's so many Iraqis, there's been one of the world's greatest gas bags, you know, so it's sort of, I think they don't know what to do.
But they're dealing with a very serious organization that will really fight.
I mean, it's all about fighting.
That's its sort of justification for existing.
And, you know, its victories are for the ISIS fighters.
This shows that God is on their side.
You know, and so far they're not doing too badly.
If you're in their capital in Syria, in Raqqa, I mean, it's run under a reign of terror.
On the other hand, a couple of days ago, you know, they were showing all U.S. tanks and Humvees and even some rocket launchers, I mean, a big sort of long-range rocket that they've captured.
So these guys, you know, are very attractive to a lot of Sunni young men unemployed.
Suddenly they can sort of join these jihadis and win great victories.
Well, now, the worst of the war hawks, and thankfully I think the American people are mostly rejecting what they say, but Dick Cheney and William Crystal are saying, you know what, OK, fine, point fingers and all that old stuff, but right now this is a real threat, and if we don't carpet bomb these guys, if we don't send in the Marines, if we don't obliterate ISIS, there's going to be a parade of 9-11s.
Now, I understand you're saying if we take some drones to them, that's certainly going to turn them against us, but what if we don't do anything?
Are they coming for us anyway, like Dick Cheney says, or can we just stay?
If we started staying out today...
Thanks to Dick Cheney, I mean, without Dick Cheney, these guys would never have been heard of, you know.
I mean, it's a bit much, these people saying, forget the past.
What they're really saying is forget our past, forget our actions in the past.
Yeah, we're actually lucky that it's Dick Cheney and William Crystal who are the worst on this, because they're the best poster boys we could want the pro-war movement to have, that's for sure.
But do they have a point, I guess, is what I'm asking.
Are these guys a threat to us, right now, if Obama doesn't run?
They're a threat to whatever you do.
These guys are just a creative caliphate.
They said that all Muslims should now owe allegiance to them, so they're denying the legitimacy of Arab or Muslim rulers across the world.
I mean, 1.6 billion people in the world, about a quarter of humanity, are Muslims.
Anybody who isn't a Muslim they consider a potential enemy.
Also, I think that the U.S. policy in Syria has and is one of the things that led to the rebirth of Al-Qaeda, and that hasn't been recognized.
You know, Iraqi politicians, I don't have a great deal of time for them, but they have been saying to me for the last three years, and some of them are actually pretty good, like Ashraf Zabari, the foreign minister.
He was saying to me, I mean, he said to me a couple of days ago, you know, he said, I've been telling the Western leaders, American leaders, you know, for three years, if you go on, unless you close down the Syrian war, this is going to destabilize Iraq, and that's exactly what happened.
You know, they kept the war going, but they kept saying, you know, no peace talks if Assad remains.
The only, Kerry was saying earlier this year, peace talks must be about transition, i.e.
Assad going, but Assad controlled 13 out of 14 provincial capitals.
Why should he go?
So if you say that, you're basically saying the war should go on.
So people like Kerry, people like the administration in Washington, people like the governments in Paris and London, and of course in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, have really fostered the growth of ISIS, and nobody has really held them responsible for this.
Right.
Well, and I can testify that you've been saying that on my show since, I don't know, at least the summer or the fall of 2011, you know, at the very latest, you know, that the jihad in Syria was already blowing back to Iraq right there from the very beginning, and how the Western powers were stoking it with Saudi money and, like you say, Obama's statements, Assad must go, nobody should have to deal with him, etc.
Same way they do in Palestine.
You don't have to talk with the terrorists, that kind of thing, and keep the crisis going.
Yeah, but also pretending that the opposition, the military opposition in Syria, was somehow moderate, and, you know, the jihadis were peripheral or marginal, or somehow they were, you know, the biggest force was these moderates, but the moderates still weren't very big to begin with, and they kind of don't exist now.
They've really sort of collapsed, certainly since the end of 2013.
But now it looks like the jihadis have become strong before.
Yeah, well, and now it looks like the split between Nusra and ISIS is coming to an end, as Nusra just declares loyalty to ISIS, and ISIS consolidates control in cities, small towns in eastern Syria that had been under the control of al-Nusra just a couple of days ago.
Yeah, because I think for a lot of members of Jabhat al-Nusra, I mean, which is the official al-Qaeda affiliate, you know, when they look at ISIS, these are the guys who are victorious, so that's very attractive for them.
And, of course, ISIS is also saying, you know, join us, swear allegiance to us, we'll kill you.
And they have the means to do that.
You know, they've been mopping up towns and villages all over eastern Syria.
They've taken over all the oil wells.
So we haven't mentioned that, but they've taken over oil wells in both countries, and you can't get a full market price for it, but they can get money.
So these guys have revenues, you know, which are really very high, so they can afford to pay a new army.
I mean, an Iraqi security official told me the other day, somebody from the National Security Agency in Baghdad, that their studies in the past had shown that where the al-Qaeda type group takes over an area, let's say with 100 men, then it gets about 500 to 1,000 local recruits.
So it quintuples or multiplies by 10 the original force it used.
So, you know, it's taken over a vast area with, I don't know quite what the population would be, but, you know, we're talking about sort of 5 million people maybe in Iraq and Syria.
I'm plucking that out of the air a little, but it's around about that figure.
And there are an awful lot of young men there, so it can get an awful lot of recruits.
Do you think that ISIS poses a threat to the Kingdom of Jordan?
I think it does, yeah, because it's right on the borders.
And, you know, they don't like Abdullah, and also, you know, there are tribal links.
You know, they sort of, the borders, it's old Sykes-Picot again, the borders sort of cut through communities.
So what happens, you know, what happens in Iraq affects communities in Syria.
What happens in Syria affects Iraq, affects communities in Jordan.
So automatically the transparency of what happens there into Jordan.
I'm actually in Jordan at the moment, so it's, you know, but it's kind of rocky, but quiet.
But maybe it won't stay that way.
Well, and then, you know, the talk is already that if there's a real fight in Jordan, then America and Israel will have to immediately get involved, which would put Netanyahu on the side of Kemeny, at least for a minute.
Yeah, I think this sort of Israeli stuff, I don't know, I think it's kind of, I don't know quite what they mean by it.
You know, I don't think it'll quite work like that.
How will they intervene?
You know, I don't think they're just going to take over the government in Jordan.
And, you know, it's just like, what does the U.S. do, exactly do in Iraq?
You know, anything they do will create, you know, a reaction like the original occupation, you know.
Why was there an uprising against the occupation?
Well, partly people just don't like being occupied.
So if the U.S. comes back into Iraq, then there's got to be retaliation.
And if it presses people like Turkey to close the border against the jihadis, then there'll be retaliation against the Turks.
And the same thing in Saudi Arabia.
The Saudis moved 30,000 troops, according to their television station Al Arabiya, that they found.
I think it was last Thursday they moved 30,000 troops to the border with Iraq to prevent Saudi jihadis coming back.
You know, so the whole pot is bubbling here.
Yeah.
Well, you know, when I talked with Jonathan Landay from McClatchy Newspapers last week, he was saying that the FSA, to his understanding, he said he'd seen them in northern Jordan training, and he talked to CIA guys there training them, and how they had said that the FSA, you know, as vetted and trained by the Americans, they're basically just the border guard.
They don't really do anything.
They're, you know, inside the country in terms of fighting against Assad or even fighting against ISIS or anything.
They're basically there because, as you've talked about, America has done such a great job of marginalizing the government of Bashar al-Assad there that somebody's got to protect the border between Syria and Jordan.
And so that's what the FSA is really doing this whole time.
And again, and he was even saying, you know, to the degree they even really exist and to the idea that they could be built into some sort of third force that would oppose ISIS and Assad and be the new secular democratic government of Syria someday or something, forget about that.
You know, that's the impression I get that, you know, it's just not happening.
I mean, the Jordanians, when I talked to them, I said, what about the Southern Front?
We all kept hearing about that the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Jordan were going to sort of fund, support, train a sort of army of so-called moderates, it sounds more like Muslim race to me, to fight Assad in southern Syria.
And the Jordanians will say, forget it.
You know, it's just, we don't want to be on the front line.
We don't want to be the target for retaliation for that sort of thing.
We're not going to let that happen.
I would have thought their incentives for doing that were even less.
All right.
All right.
Now, I've already kept you way over time here, but if I could ask you about Kurdistan for a minute here, it's been in the news that not only is Benjamin Netanyahu quite publicly calling for Kurdish independence, it seems like he would keep that under his hat for a minute, but he never really was that good at PR, I don't think.
But anyway, the Kurds are saying that, yeah, they're going to hold a referendum on independence.
The days of Kurdistan being an official part of Iraq seem to be numbered.
Patrick, what do you think?
I think it's still a bit up in the air.
I mean, first of all, the Kurds have taken over sort of 40 percent of the territory that they'd, on top of what they held already in the Kurdistan Regional Government, which is sort of an autonomous part of Iraq, but actually is pretty independent and has its own actually quite large army, 120,000 men.
Now, it's expanded into Kirkuk during the present turmoil and added 40 percent to its territory.
And I think its leader, Massoud Barzani, is obviously thinking of this, and they'll set it up to have a referendum.
But there are some reasons for not doing this.
One, while they have the potential to have big oil revenues in the future, they don't actually have those revenues yet, and they wouldn't have for a few years, and they're dependent on getting a share of Iraq's oil revenues, which is, I forget what it is, around $12 billion.
They need that to pay their own people.
So there's a big immediate problem there.
There's also a question, you know, that the Turks maybe would go along with it these days, but would they go along with it in the future?
The Iranians wouldn't like it.
The Americans don't like it.
There are some reasons for not doing it.
You know, you declare independence.
What's really important is that other people recognize that you've done this.
So you become part of the international scene.
So that might happen, but it's not a sure thing.
So I think there are still divisions at the top in the Kurdish leadership about this, although all Kurds feel that they have every right to be a nation and they have every right for self-determination.
But it's a more practical question.
Is it in their interest to do that at this moment?
Right.
And, yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned there that they seem to be getting along with the Turkish government right now and maybe could even get away with it as far as the Erdogan government is concerned that they wouldn't object too much.
Are they no longer concerned that the Turks, the Turkish Kurds, would want to secede and join with the Iraqis?
Well, they're not as concerned as they were, you know.
A few years ago, if the Kurds had taken Kirkuk, the Turkish army would have come pouring over the border.
They said that's a complete red line.
Now they seem pretty philosophical about it.
I think what they think that new Kurdish, independent Kurdistan will be very substantially dependent on Turkey, that its oil pipelines will run through Turkey, that there will be benefits there for Turkey, and they'll have a sort of measure of control over Kurdistan, and the Iraqi Kurdistan as an independent state might be a sort of way of quieting down the Turkish Kurds.
That's the way they feel now, but as you said, it might start going the other way, that the Turkish Kurds would look to join to this new independent entity so it can make Turkey's problems worse rather than better.
The whole southeast of Turkey is basically Kurdish.
It's a big chunk of the country.
So a lot of people, because the Turkish army destroyed a lot of villages, moved to Istanbul and other places.
Half the taxi drivers in Istanbul are, in fact, Kurds, which is why they never know where anything is.
So these people whose villages were destroyed, they moved west to other parts of Turkey.
All right, and now what about Nuri al-Maliki?
He doesn't want to compromise, but he doesn't want to go anywhere, and the parliament met, and then I guess all the Sunnis and Kurds walked out and refused to come back.
But Sistani, I think you report, has outright called for a new president, which is going further than he had before, right?
So what's going to happen now?
Oh, yeah, they want to do leadership.
The Shia religious leaders are obviously very worried.
They don't normally issue political calls.
They haven't even done it since 2003, Sistani, because they don't believe in mixing religion and politics.
They think religion will be debased if the leadership starts getting involved in politics.
But for the first time, they've started doing that over the last week, and they want a new leadership, and they called for volunteers to save the country against ISIS.
The thing is that Maliki wants to cling on.
He's been a complete disaster as a prime minister.
He's sort of become like a Shia Saddam Hussein, secret prisons, torture, so he oppressed and discriminated against.
So he's very much responsible for what's happened.
He appointed all the generals who ran away, all the divisional commanders appointed by him.
But he still wants, you know, he still has a chunk of parliament, and he'll do his usual tactics, which is to draw everything out, delay, delay, delay, and then, you know, hope there isn't an alternative to him.
And I think he'll definitely go.
But even if he does go, it's a bit like Yeltsin in Russia.
He'll want a job that gives him and his family immunity so they can't be prosecuted for all the money that's disappeared while they were in power.
And he'll want somebody to take over from him, but maybe it's from his own gang.
But I'm not sure he'll get that because so many of the parties inside and outside the country are against him.
So I don't think he'll stay prime minister, and I don't think anybody close to him will be prime minister.
All right, well now, so has Iran made it plain who it is that they prefer to replace him?
They've sort of withdrawn support from him.
I mean, that's what everybody says in Baghdad, that, you know, they kind of wanted him as their guy, and they didn't want him replaced by a pro-American guy.
They didn't want it up in lights that they'd sort of lost out.
This has been kind of disastrous for the U.S., what's happened with Mosul, but it's pretty disastrous for the Iranians, too.
So they're looking for somebody who can sort of turn things around, but they don't know who it is.
I mean, the thing is that in 2010, the U.S. and Iran made a big mistake of finally endorsing Maliki, despite the fact that he was turning into a mini-dictator.
They both endorsed him to come back.
This turned out to be a big mistake, but they're still not quite sure who should replace him.
And one of the problems about Iraq is, you know, that the U.S. has a say, the Iran has a say, the Kurds have a say, the Sunni Shia different factions have a say, and you often end up with the guy with the least enemies, but not the guy who's most effective.
And at this point, effective would be what?
Being able to reach out and subsidize the Sunnis enough that they would quit wanting to fight?
Is that it?
Well, you know, they try and do that to try and divide them.
But one, you know, that worked before, but, you know, would it work again?
It's not so sure.
You know, it's the other side can see you coming, you know.
You know, as we were talking earlier about, you know, if you want to stab somebody, the Sunni that are allied to ISIS, some of them may think, ah-ha, we've used these guys, you know, now we're going to drop them.
But, you know, you don't drop people as dangerous as that.
You know, they see you coming.
They think you're going to stab them in the back.
You know, they'll chop your head off, which is what they do.
So I'm not sure it's going to happen like that with these guys.
They've declared their caliphate.
They're raising a lot of troops.
They've got a lot of money.
They're not just going to roll over.
So it's going to be difficult for anybody to do.
You know, things would have been easier a few years ago, you know, five years ago, to conciliate the Sunni, to give them jobs, to make sure they're, you know, they're not economically or politically marginalized, to not have a young man thrown into prison, you know.
You know, you go out to Fallujah and the villages there, you know, half the young men are not young men around, but they're all in prison.
They've been picked up, and a lot of these guys have been, they've all been tortured, and a lot of them guys have confessed.
So you have people on death row, you know.
And, you know, sometimes they're on death row for crimes that somebody else has already been executed for, you know.
It's very arbitrary.
So no wonder these people are pretty angry.
You know, there's a certain period in Iraq history, I think, from around the U.S. invasion and certainly from the first Iraqi parliament, 2005, to just this month, you know, when there was an attempt by the Shia, backed by the U.S., to create a Shia-dominated state.
You know, and it's just falling apart.
Well, so then let me ask you this.
It looks like the lines are sort of already at stalemate then.
That, you know, again, as we talked about back then, the reason for the decline in casualties, as you explained it then, of course, correctly, was that the Sunnis had lost the civil war.
They'd lost the war for Baghdad, and they had too many enemies.
They had the al-Qaeda coups, they had the Shiite Baata Brigade, and Mahdi Army militias, and the Americans.
And so they kind of called it quits for a little while.
But so now I wonder, are we waiting for the other shoe to drop, and there's still a massive civil war for control of the whole country that remains, or we already have a Declaration of Independence, that's what the Declaration of the Caliphate is, is that Western Iraq is now called Islamic State, and so maybe from Baghdad to Basra is now the Islamic Republic of Iraq, and there is no more Iraq, right?
Yeah, I think of that, you know, there's a lot of truth in that.
I think there might be something called nominal, you know, called Iraq, but Shia can't move into the Sunni area, or vice versa, or either of them into the Kurdish area, so it's more divided up than most regions of the world.
So I think that that's kind of happened.
But I don't think the war is what's happened to Baghdad, and ISIS isn't in the business of negotiating with anybody.
ISIS is a fighting organization.
So I think there's a lot more war to come.
All right, well, we'll leave it there.
Thank you.
I've kept you for a whole hour here, Patrick, and I really appreciate your time, as always.
No, thanks a lot, Scott.
All right, Shaul, that is the heroic Patrick Cockburn reporting for The Independent, that's independent.co.uk.
His latest book is Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Future of Iraq, and the newest one coming out later this month, The Jihadi's Return, ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising.
Find his archives at independent.co.uk.