01/27/15 – Mitchell Prothero – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I got Mitch Prothero, reporting for McClatchy Newspapers from Iribal in Kurdistan.
Welcome back to the show, Mitch.
How are you doing?
I'm doing OK.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, thanks very much for joining us on the show again.
So lots of big news to talk about, first of all.
Is it really so that ISIS has completely withdrawn from Kobani and the Kurds and whatever their allies are victorious there?
Yeah, the siege in Kobani appears to be lifted at this stage.
The Islamic State hasn't disappeared.
They control a huge swath of territory surrounding Kobani, which is actually quite small.
But, yeah, it does look like that the combination of U.S. airstrikes and some tenacious fighting by the Kurds has kept the city from falling.
And I'd expect that to hold for now.
And now how severe of a public relations crisis is this for the Islamic State?
Because it seems like their public relations is a big force multiplier or a divider perhaps.
Well, they really went all in.
That's what I find so kind of baffling about this.
In terms of military tactics, since June, when they took over Mosul, they've been pretty careful and very effective, to be perfectly honest.
Kobani was very strange.
They didn't exactly need it.
It would have allowed them to connect a huge swath of territory, but really it was just a small sort of outpost sitting along the Turkish border.
They already had Turkish border crossings under their control around it.
And I think that it was really a case of defiance when the U.S. started doing airstrikes.
They wanted to show that these airstrikes weren't going to hurt them and that they could continue to do as they wanted.
And through October it did seem that way.
But then over time, if you're losing ten armored vehicles a day, reinforcements are getting hit as they're coming up on the road.
And the U.S. is perfectly happy where they've got all these jihadis in one location to keep bombing them.
It turned out to really be important.
And that's not to take away from the hard fighting by a small group of Kurdish militia that were also backed by about 200 guys from Iraq that went to help them.
So it just basically turned into a symbolic thing for both sides.
So, yeah, it hurts them.
It also hurts them because they lost a lot of men and a lot of equipment.
It's pretty hard.
I mean, I don't know the whole history of warfare and whatever, but it seems on its face like it's pretty difficult for an insurgent group like al-Qaeda in Iraq to turn into a government and especially one out of whole cloth.
Right.
We're not talking about a coup in Baghdad against Saddam and they take it over a government that already exists without debauthifying it.
Right.
But just conquering it or something.
But creating one out of whole cloth, a bunch of school shooters, as you call them.
Good luck with that.
Well, yeah.
And that's the thing is they've been very effective militarily.
I mean, this is a group that's undergone a bunch of transformations.
They started off as a small cell of guys that would conduct operations, even what you call terror operations, suicide bombings, attacks on U.S. troops in 2003, 4, 5.
Then they slowly morphed and grew allies to the point where they sort of tried to take over particularly Western Iraq and some central.
That got smacked down by the Sunni tribes as part of what we, you know, the U.S. calls the surge.
You know, but that was primarily an Iraqi reaction to that.
So they went back underground and Syria allowed them to come back as what they'd like to be seen as a legitimate military fighting force that fights a combination of insurgency and conventional.
The problem with being a conventional army is air power really does have an effect on conventional armies.
It's really hard to hit, you know, six gorillas setting up a mortar somewhere on a mountainside.
But it's not that hard to hit a caravan of, you know, 40 or 50 pickup trucks in the desert.
Right.
Yeah, they're just setting themselves up.
And now.
So your most recent piece here or the one before your most recent about Kobani was about the Japanese hostage, I guess.
The one has been killed and they've changed their demands from give us.
I forgot how much it was.
Four hundred million dollars.
Two hundred million.
And they change that to they're trying to get.
Well, you can explain the change there.
But the real question is, again, whether this is a symbol of Islamic State weakness here, that they're basically getting pretty desperate out there.
I wouldn't call this one desperate as much.
Look, as as people often forget, this is really al Qaeda in Iraq.
This is the group that was founded by Abu Musab Zarqawi.
It's just 10 years later.
And they're they're a different group that's in terms of how they've morphed.
But a lot of the same leadership of those guys.
Jordan has a handful of prisoners, including a woman.
I said, yeah, who was an attempted suicide bomber in 2005 and is on death row.
They want her back.
And I can't tell whether it's a legit demand for her release in exchange for the Jap.
You know, the remaining Japanese freelance reporter goto.
But today there was another video where he says it's 24 hours and then they're going to kill me.
And right before me, they're going to kill the Jordanian pilot.
If you swap me for her, I'll live.
If you don't do it in 24 hours, I'll die.
And 24 hours is pretty hard time to set up a deal.
So I get mixed signals from them when they asked for 200 million in 72 hours.
That's I talked to experts.
That's almost feasibly impossible.
Putting 200 million dollars together, getting approval and then finding a guy to deliver it to almost can't be done.
So it was clear they wanted to kill at least one of the hostages to send us send a message with this.
I can't quite tell if they're just setting it up so that they can kill the Jordanian pilot and this poor Japanese freelancer.
Or whether or not they are genuinely trying to come up with a deal to get some of their prisoners back in exchange for people.
They have.
All right.
Well, and you can see what I'm driving at with all this is I'm looking for an easy out.
And I don't want America, America to help the Iranians beat these guys.
I want to see the Sunni tribes decide that they would rather not take orders from Baghdadi and his guys anymore.
And whatever role American airpower can play in that, it seems to be only counterproductive so far.
You know, as far as driving new recruits, that kind of thing.
But I wonder, you know, about the relative power, how you score it and whether what are the chances of another Sunni type awakening, which, as you said, was really an Iraqi reaction, even though they give Petraeus the credit for it.
It was a nationalist reaction to all these foreign jihadis come and showing up and bossing them around, which how long should people be expected to put up with that, whether they're Americans or Libyans?
Well, what it comes down to, to a large extent, is it's the complete lack of trust currently between the Sunni tribes, the Shia led government and the Kurdish guys.
Iraq barely exists at this stage.
And mentally, I'm not sure it exists at all in the minds of its own people.
And that's that's that's a really hard thing to put back together.
The American airstrikes have done a good job so far.
I have to say now that we've watched them over the course of months, they are hurting the Islamic State.
They cannot move guys around like they'd like to.
And particularly in the north, where there's a lot of wide open desert, they've managed to work very well with the Kurds to slowly choke off Mosul, although going inside Mosul is going to be a heck of a military operation and very difficult.
But, you know, if you if you look at a map, you can kind of tell what they're doing, which is they're isolating Tal Afar, Mosul from Syria behind American airstrikes.
And that seems to be going pretty well.
I the question is, does the Iraqi central government, the Shia want to go up and fight and die in Mosul, a primarily Sunni city that hates them?
Well, I don't think I take for granted that the answer to that is absolutely not.
My question is about the Sunni tribes and how long I already take it for granted.
Mitch, since we've talked almost, well, I guess two thirds of a year ago or whatever now that no, the Sunni stand has declared independence from George W. Bush's stand in the southeast there.
And that's already over.
So my question is about the tribes versus the Islamic State.
And who's the boss of who and for how long there?
Because it seems like if the tribes can decide that, no, you're not the caliph.
This is our land and we rule this place, not you.
Then maybe that would be a reason that could be cited, why America could start intervening less rather than more over there.
Well, I could see that being very possible.
I talk to a lot of talk to a lot of Sunni tribal guys.
The problem is this version of Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, is exponentially more powerful than the guys they got rid of back in 2007 and eight.
This is a large conventional army.
It's learned its lessons.
It's got tons of equipment and money and spans two countries.
So it's not a case of, you know, 10 guys in tracksuits with rusty Kalashnikovs showing up and saying, all right, the bad guys are over there and the Americans go and kill them, which is basically what happened in 2007.
There's no trust.
So who's going to give them money?
Who's going to give them weapons?
Who's going to give them walkie talkies to support their own operations and coordinate?
And the biggest thing that I see is back in the time of the surge, one thing the Americans could do was, one, go kill the guys very effectively, that their new Sunni allies were telling them were the bad guys.
The other thing is the leaders could hide out on U.S. bases while they did that.
Right now, if you're an anti-ISIS leader in Fallujah, you're going to get beheaded.
That's it.
All right.
That's it.
Thanks very much, Mitch.
Good to talk to you again.
No problem at all.
It's always a pleasure.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all.
That's Mitch Prothero.
He's writing for McClatchyDC.com.
McClatchy Newspapers out of Erbil, Kurdistan.
And we'll be back.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
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