07/07/14 – Mitchell Prothero – The Scott Horton Show

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All right.
So again, major developments in the case of the Islamic State last Friday.
The leader.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a.k.a.some other things, the new declared caliph, apparently, led Friday prayers at a very important old mosque in Mosul.
And on the line with us is McClatchy's guy in Baghdad right now.
Pardon me, in Iraq, in Irbil, Iraq, Mitchell Prothero.
And his headline is Islamic State releases video of Baghdadi in Mosul in new assertion of authority.
Welcome back to the show, Mitchell.
How are you doing?
I'm doing pretty good.
Doing pretty good.
Just enjoying the extremely hot, dry, and dusty weather we have here in the Islamic Caliphate.
It's a dry heat.
It only feels like 110.
Yeah, it's not too bad.
All right.
Jokes aside, Irbil is part of the autonomous region of Kurdistan.
They've recently decided that they really don't need any more of this nonsense from the Arabs and are going independent.
So, you know, I'm only about probably 30 miles from what we would technically call the Islamic Caliphate.
All right, right on the edge there.
Well, make sure you have some Peshmerga between you and them at all times, please, if you can.
I assume that's one of your priorities, right?
Well, you know, they do a good job.
You know, the Pesh have been fighting in these mountains for about, I don't know, a thousand years against just about everybody.
So in terms of local security services, they do a good job.
But I do worry they're a little overconfident.
It's been a long time since the Arabs or even the Turks had security forces that could handle them.
So, you know, these guys are a new breed that we've got here in the Islamic Caliphate, and they're tough guys.
And I think the reason why Erbil has been quiet is because they've been concentrating on other things to the south.
Namely, what we saw today is a lot of fighting around the infamous Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib.
And, you know, honestly, if the Islamic State and their tribal allies manage to push any closer to Baghdad in that direction, you start seeing Baghdad International Airport coming under mortar fire, being shut off.
And at that stage, we can almost start saying Baghdad is under siege.
Well, and and speaking of which, the the road to the airport from Baghdad is what, 30 miles a highway there?
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Baghdad to the airport.
That was it was known as the route of death.
It's probably from center from what they call the Green Zone International Zone.
I think it's about five miles less than 10 kilometers.
Okay.
What you're talking about is on the airports are always very big.
The mortar attack that killed the Iraqi army general that is in command of the Western defenses, and he did die today.
We confirmed that his headquarters was about 10 miles from Baghdad.
So that gives you some idea of how close these guys are getting.
If they were able to continue to push in and hold those positions with some of that heavy artillery that the Americans bought the Iraqi army that they then left for the Islamic State, Baghdad International Airport could be within a week or so of being in some real trouble.
I don't know if they could actually take it over, but they certainly can make it so that planes can't take off and land.
Right?
Well, and even just a few good mortar strikes on that highway puts it out of commission and makes that very hard to repair and no security type environment.
Well, that's inside.
I mean, when you're looking at straight inside Baghdad right now, what we've seen is the militias that have flooded in to support Maliki, you know, a lot of these guys in some ways are very good and they're very good at defending their neighborhoods.
So we've yet to see a situation in which significant parts of Baghdad have popped up into open insurrection.
That's sort of what we're all waiting for in a strange way.
There's a strong belief that the Islamic State has sleeper cells.
I mean, I don't even know if you want to call them sleeper cells, but Sunni neighborhoods throughout, particularly Western Baghdad, have begun to show signs that they're ready to join an uprising when the time is right.
And so while internal security, I'm told, I'm not in there.
I am up to the north, but a lot of my colleagues and friends are down there.
I'm on the phone every day.
Life is tense, but normal, but everybody knows, as they'd say in the old movies, you know, the Indians are circling around the wagon train right now.
And it could only be a matter of time before some of these neighborhoods go.
And then we'll simply have to assess where you can go and where you can't go.
Just, you know, in terms of people who want to geek out over maps, my suggestion would be to look at the neighborhoods called Jihad and Amaria, which do link the airport road to the rest of the country.
Both of those have had long histories of insurgencies.
And there's a Sunni neighborhood just to the sort of southern part of the city called Dora, which itself, I think, is a place where we might be seeing some action coming up.
But again, it's a matter of when.
I think they're capable of doing it now.
They just really might be waiting to position their forces and coordinate things in a smart manner.
These guys might be nuts, but we've seen them be very, very smart tactically.
Well, yeah.
And I mean, you wrote about last week this article about how they brought on Baathist military tacticians, real professional soldiers to come in and run this thing.
So the front lines can be school shooters, but they better do what they're told, I guess, by the bosses.
Huh?
Look, they might have started as school shooters, but you're talking two, three years ago.
And these guys have been fighting in Syria and they had, you know, wide open training camps where nobody really could disturb them, as we've learned, in the desert outside of Mosul and the desert on the other side of the border that apparently only means something now to the maps.
These guys don't see the border between Syria and Iraq anymore outside of Raqqa.
So what, you know, while they were easily dismissed early on, and I'm starting to take issue even with some of my colleagues and analysts who say things like these guys are only capable of chopping off heads on videos.
They're only capable of doing things like terrorist, you know, suicide bombings and that they're using the media to terrify people.
All of those things are true.
They do live off their reputation to a certain extent.
They are scary and brutal and I sure as heck don't want to run into them on the street.
But it's very condescending at this stage to say that they are not a competent military force.
They're about the most competent non-government military force in the region.
I'd put them if they're not as good as Hezbollah, who's been fighting the Israelis for 30 odd years.
And prior to this, I'd say was absolutely the best.
They're coming close in some ways to that level of internal organization and military competence.
These guys might have been school shooters, but now they've had two years of fighting, training.
And as my friend joked, when they brought in the Ba'athists, now they've got bureaucrats and clerks to help run everything.
Yeah.
Well, and as you pointed out on the show before, they've won a world historical victory over the Iraqi army here in the way that they routed them and just kicked them completely out of the north and west of the country and drove them back all the way to Baghdad like that in the space of a week.
I mean, that is pretty unprecedented.
That's making the books one way or the other, no matter what.
Well, I'm calling it.
I mean, you see why they're proud.
Well, yeah, they are.
The one thing is I do think they're being a little cocky.
We've seen them overstate because again, this is where the stuff really gets into the weeds, but the weeds are where the truth can really set.
The fact is you're talking about about a 10,000 man group that spans two countries as we see it, but they call it their own caliphate.
These are the guys that are trained and organized and equipped by what used to be ISIS or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Their commanders, we've learned now over time, are a core of hardened Iraqi jihadists.
They have foreigners inside, but they also have a good number of Syrians and Iraqis, and that's what we call the vanguard.
But 10,000 guys, even as good as they are, really couldn't run amok like this with the biggest problem that in a lot of ways the Iraqi government as it, in my opinion, completely flounders incompetently, almost to the point the international community doesn't want to get involved because you can't back people this incompetent.
It's simply throwing bad, you know, bad money after bad money.
But what we're seeing is they have more than that, whether it's that the Sunni tribes throughout a large chunk of, you know, what we'd say, eastern Syria, western, northern, and central Iraq actually want to live under an Islamic caliphate.
I don't know, but right now they're fighting alongside.
All right, hang tight.
One second.
We got to take this break.
We'll be right back.
Everybody with Mitchell Prothero from McClatchy Newspapers reporting from Iraq.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Mitchell Prothero from McClatchy Newspapers.
He's been writing some really great stuff.
This one is called Islamic State Releases Video of Baghdadi in Mosul, a new assertion of authority.
And I forget the title of the one before that, but that and all kinds of stuff about Nusra, basically swearing loyalty over to ISIS back on the other side of what used to be the line.
I guess we can say over there in Western Islamic State now instead of Eastern Syria.
Lots of great stuff here.
McClatchyDC.com is how you read Mitchell Prothero reporting from Erbil, Iraq.
And now, well, let me talk about the siege real quick.
I want to ask you all about everything that you learned about the new, you know, Big Daddy, the leader over there as you report here Mitchell.
But first, when you mentioned the siege, I want to get back to something that you had said.
You had reported this back.
I don't know, a week and a half or two ago now about ISIS, at least pressure or disruption, something on highways to the south and I think to the southeast leading out of Baghdad toward Basra that ISIS had been able to get that far and you mentioned earlier about laying siege in the context of the airport, which I believe is out to the west, right, of Baghdad.
But so what's the latest on that?
Have you heard further developments on ISIS's move to the south and east there?
Well again, if you start looking at it the way that I do, which is that there's this sort of vanguard of guys who move around who are highly trained and well equipped.
What they do is they come in and they hit areas at the exact time that the Sunni tribes who are livid at Maliki and feel like the government oppresses them sort of rise up in a coordinated effort.
So suddenly 500 guys in pickup trucks mounted with heavy machine guns really make a difference because they've got locals helping them.
Right.
What we've seen is what I'd call more probing attacks.
There's a handful of towns back in the good old bad days of the American occupation of Iraq.
It was called the Triangle of Death.
But there's these towns called Iskanderia, Mahmoudiyah in this area that control the highways leading out of Baghdad to the south.
Those have heavy Sunni populations and in multiple occasions they've done what I'm starting to feel like we're testing attacks.
How strong are the, you know, how strong are the security forces?
How seriously are they going to be able to, you know, stop us?
But we've yet to see the what I'd call a primary move from this what we're calling the shock troops of the Islamic State.
I would anticipate that to be the sign that Baghdad is going to be formally under siege, but we just haven't seen it yet.
It seems like they're concentrating their efforts the best they can to the west.
There's still some parts of Ramadi that are in government control and there's a big dam at Haditha that controls the hydroelectric power for Al Anbar.
And from what I can tell, there's still some guys, some government guys hold up inside that.
So, you know, it's step by step again.
They're very methodical and they're very logical and I think I've identified their plan, but I have to say they're so sophisticated.
They might be setting us all up to think they're going to do something and then surprise us with something else.
I just don't know.
But as of right now, you can drive between Baghdad and the south.
I just don't know how long you're going to be able to.
And right now, is the Iraqi army getting it together, preparing for their big assault or this is really the best they can do right now?
The Iraqi army's, I mean, it's a mess.
There are elite units that are pretty good.
These were trained by American Special Forces.
They had some long history of having to fight Al Qaeda, but they're small.
These are what we call, you know, special operations troops.
Those guys aren't bad.
As for the standard Iraqi army, it's really collapsed.
And so as a result, they've had to bring in these militias, a lot of which fought either Sunnis in the past, some were fighting in Syria up until last month, and others, if not all of them, had fought the Americans themselves at one time or another.
They've done a lot of the bolstering job from what we can tell.
So they're in the process of sort of rebuilding an army around this, but in McClatchy and some other news organizations, there were some background briefings with U.S. intelligence and military officials who gave one of the best assessments, clear-eyed I've ever seen U.S. military give about Iraq, in which they basically told us there's very little chance that this government can put together an army that will be able to retake the ground that it's lost.
The actual fall of Baghdad seems unlikely.
There's just too many Shia in it.
They've all got Kalashnikovs and they're all ready to die to protect their homes.
The militias are pretty good at fighting in their own neighborhoods, but in terms of the idea that there's going to be an Iraqi army that forms and with tanks and air support drives up that highway and retakes to Crete and lifts the siege at the refinery and retakes Mosul, that could happen, I guess, but it ain't going to happen this year.
Yeah, with a lot of American and Iranian help, maybe.
Well, that's the thing that at this stage, and something I wanted to say, the Americans, from what we can tell, again, just don't seem inclined to throw in a tremendous amount of support at this stage and they won't come out exactly and say it, but it's pretty obvious is they think Maliki's done.
They think that the political process here needs to come up with a much smarter solution and only then are they going to start possibly risking some more blood and treasure to help these guys out.
If somebody's incompetent and gets themselves into this mess and continues to be that incompetent, how inclined to help them are you going to be?
Right, and now, see, we're so short on time and there's two major questions there, but I guess I have to ask, based on what you just said, isn't it way too late for anyone to put together some kind of new awakening and have the Sunnis marginalize ISIS and form some kind of unity government?
I don't know, Chalabi or Alawi or any other we, how is anyone going to accomplish what they failed to accomplish with the surge of 07 when all those benchmarks were never met and the Sunnis never were integrated into the government?
How is anyone going to do that now?
Look, and again, the biggest blame you get is, he was, you know, Maliki is the one who gutted that whole program.
On the way out, the American commanders, and again, I'm no big fan of the American occupation of Iraq or how it was handled, but I've talked to the guys who were involved in it and they flat out told me, back in 2010, on the way out, they made us leave.
We told them, you better keep paying these guys, you better bring them into the fold or we're all just going to be back here in a couple of years, and Maliki refused the advice.
So what I would say is that description, that's the only way Iraq is going to become, you know, be brought back under any semblance of control, and the government that's in place in Baghdad has yet to show even the smallest sign that they're willing to take that first step, which is to incorporate some mainstream Sunnis into the government and start sitting down, drinking tea, talking to the tribes, and addressing their grievances.
Only at that stage can you then you start talking about awakening councils and bringing this place back under control.
So in other words, they're more likely to accept the independence of the new Islamic State.
It's already a reality, right?
Well, it is a reality right now.
The internal problems of that Islamic State are long and wide and deep.
I know those tribal guys, they're not going to want to sit around with some guy giving lectures telling them exactly what Islam is, and a bunch of British school shooters running around telling them that they're praying wrong.
That's not going to go over real well with this conservative segment of Iraqi society.
But until somebody makes a legitimate effort to reach out to these guys, and Maliki has proven he either can't or won't do it, then this place is going to be a mess.
From a US perspective, my guess would be that they're going to start putting in some special operations troops, probably in the north with the Kurds who they have a good relationship with, and that they'll probably start putting up some armed drones just in case real international terrorists raise their heads that they can zap.
But at this stage, I just do not see the movement on the ground for a significant military effort to help these guys out beyond telling them, well, this is what you should be doing if you weren't such an idiot.
Yeah, which is fine with me, because of course, whatever bad happens to ISIS doesn't need to be the Americans' fault.
It's going to come to them anyway, I think, one way or the other.
Right, on some level.
And I mean, I think that frankly, it's a smart policy right now is nobody really knows what to do.
There's no partner on the ground worth a damn to work with.
So my guess would be that the Kurdish intelligence services are pretty good.
They don't like these guys any more than anybody else.
They're trying to stay neutral, and that there'll probably be some effort to make sure that this doesn't turn into a safe haven that can do damage beyond the areas that it already controls.
Now, if you want to fix the areas that they already control, it's a local solution.
The West can only help.
It cannot dictate.
Yeah, this has to be done by the Iraqis.
And until some Iraqi steps up with a plan and the sand in his belly to actually get some work done and make some hard choices, this place is screwed.
Right.
Now, I got to let you go, but I never even really did ask you to tell me everything you know about this new emerging leader and you know a hell of a lot.
So maybe later this week we can catch up on that.
Yeah, that would be good.
We can actually dedicate maybe half a segment to talking about the Caliph Ibrahim.
He's a pretty interesting guy.
I wish I knew more about him.
I put in an interview request, but I just don't see that happening unless he wants to meet me in a five-star hotel in Erbil.
Yeah.
Well, you're way ahead of the curve there on trying and on what you've already been able to put together about him here in this piece.
So anyway, thanks for your time and I'll talk to you again soon then.
No problem at all.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
Take it easy.
All right, you too.
All right, that's Mitchell Prothero, McClatchyDC.com.
Islamic State releases video of Baghdadi in Mosul in new assertion of authority.
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