02/19/15 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, it's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest today is the great Patrick Coburn from The Independent.
He's the author of quite a few books on the Middle East, including Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia Revival and the Future of Iraq, and the very latest, The Rise of Islamic State, ISIS, and the New Sunni Revolution, which is a bit of an updated version of The Jihadi's Return that came out last year.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick, how are you?
Fine, how are you?
I'm doing great, really appreciate you joining us on the show again.
Very important piece here in The Independent, byline, Irbil, Kurdistan, Paranoid but Determined Islamic State is ready to fight to the death in Mosul, and I take it you have been interviewing as many refugees and I guess other people who have cause to be in Irbil who've been in Mosul recently, huh?
Yeah, Irbil, the capital of Kurdistan, is only about 50 miles from east of Mosul, so you can talk to people who've left there, there aren't very many who've got out, but you can talk to them, so they're recent eyewitnesses of what's happening there, and occasionally you can talk to people by mobile phone still inside Mosul.
The Islamic State, ISIS, has banned people using mobile phones because they think they'll be used for espionage, for identifying where ISIS leaders are, and they give people 30 lashes for using them, but people still use them from the roofs of their houses or hilltops near the city.
And so, well, can you give us some telling anecdotes?
Well, Mosul itself is under very tight grip of the Islamic State.
Women can only go out wearing the niqab, which is cloth covering the head and the face, and even the eyes showing too prominently can lead to punishment.
There was one woman recently who was arrested because they could see her eyes at a checkpoint.
She was taken to a police station and forced to bite on a bit, you know, a bit that goes in a donkey or a horse's mouth, and she was forced to do that until, you know, she was injured, her mouth was injured, she had to be taken to hospital.
So it's a pretty violent society.
On the other hand, it's sort of, they control it quite well, I mean, in the sense that administration is quite good.
So a lot of people who are there say, well, things are not so good, that the water, there isn't much clean water, there's sort of clean water, electricity is rationed, there isn't much of that.
But you have to keep in mind, these people are also very frightened of the Iraqi army.
They are Sunni, the Iraqi army is mostly Shia, they're even more frightened of the Shia militias.
So bad that the Islamic State is, they're frightened that the alternative may be even worse.
And that's what they tell you?
I mean, do they go as far as saying we prefer the Islamic State to the Iraqi army?
They'd phrase it differently, Scott.
They'd say we don't like either, you know, but they don't want people to think that just because they, you know, I'm talking to mostly to people who've left, so they've pulled out.
But so it's surprising that some of them still say, well, the Iraqi army is even more frightening for us.
Yeah, which it is surprising, although, you know, I don't know, I guess they really look at the Iraqi army, such as it is what we call it as a really an alien force.
And they look at the Islamic State as as less of an alien force.
I mean, it's local guys, but it's not their usual way of living under religious totalitarianism there in Mosul, right?
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those situations where all the alternatives are not just bad, but they might be fatal.
You know, they don't like the Islamic State, this whole, it's not part of their tradition that women should be second, third class citizens treated as chattels.
It's not part of their tradition of blowing up of mosques that the Islamic State can should consider shrines.
It's very fundamentalist.
So all things like that create great anger.
But you also have local people who are joining up.
The Islamic State is conscripting people.
The calling of the army is talking to one guy who'd left because his younger brother was going to be called up.
The Islamic State previously, if you were under 18, you weren't conscripted.
Now they're calling up under 18 year olds.
So this guy wanted to get his younger brother out before he was forced to become an Islamic State fighter.
This means that, you know, they're raising pretty large armies and they're fighting pretty hard.
On Tuesday here, about 30 miles west of here, about 400 of them attacked and 34 were killed, you know, but it's not that far from Erbil.
So they're punching up and down the whole 600 mile common frontier between the Kurdish region where I am and the Islamic State.
And it's very difficult to defend all of it.
So they're punching up and down the line.
Well and speaking of that line, is there a way to measure how much the Peshmerga forces of the Kurds have been bolstered by the Americans since June, for example, new training, new weaponry, more numbers?
The main thing is airstrikes.
You know, that they're in contact with the American Air Force.
So when they face resistance, when they were advancing west of Mosul some weeks ago, you know, they received the benefit of American airstrikes.
Also when ISIS attacked the other few days, a few nights ago, same thing.
So that's the main benefit.
Otherwise they complain that they don't have heavy weapons, you know, they don't have tanks, they don't have helicopters, they don't have enough artillery.
And they haven't received much.
They received a few heavy machine guns, but not much else.
And now, so that's quite a frontier, 600 miles, and that includes Kirkuk, which is out in the desert, not up in the Kurdish hills, right?
Well, most people actually live in the plain here.
People associate Kurds with living in mountains, but actually not many of them actually live in the mountains these days.
They mostly live in the plains, partly because their villages were destroyed by Saddam Hussein 30 years ago.
So all these places are kind of vulnerable to attack.
Of course Mosul is vulnerable to attack from the Kurds, but in each case, either side, you know, is not far from being able to bombard the other side's main cities.
It doesn't sound like either, it sounds like the line is pretty much already drawn.
That doesn't sound like the Islamic State could take Kirkuk or, and doesn't sound much like the Kurds could take Mosul either.
Yeah, I mean, on the one hand you're right, it's a stalemate.
On the other hand, I was talking to a senior Kurdish official this afternoon who was saying, yeah, but we can't go on living in Erbil with this sort of enemy capital 15, you know, miles down the road, you know, a constant source of insecurity for people here.
So I think it will eventually come to a battle, but it's difficult to see it happening in the immediate future because the Kurds and the Iraqi army aren't really strong enough to do it.
So there's a good chance that the presence of a rather bloody stalemate will continue.
All right.
And now, as far as the Iraqi army, is there any news as far as them getting their act together at all?
What's left of them?
Have the ghost enlisted men, have they been erased from the roles and we're now dealing with actual soldiers and actual officers and actual weapons?
Yeah, but it's not a big, very big force, you know, maybe it's a dozen brigades in theory that's what, 48,000 men.
But I doubt if they have that number, you know, maybe 30,000 plus.
It's not that big.
Maybe ISIS has got 100,000 or more now.
You know, the CIA seems to be sticking with 30,000 or so for the Islamic State, but you think that's low, huh?
Yeah, I think that's absurd.
Absurd even.
All right.
Hold it right there.
It's the great Patrick Coburn from The Independent, author of The Rise of Islamic State.
We'll be right back.
Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of The Future of Freedom Foundation at fff.org slash subscribe.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
Through the magic of space age technology, I'm talking with Patrick Coburn, even though he's in Iraq, Kurdistan, former Iraq.
And where the break interrupted, we're talking about the numbers.
Patrick is estimating 30-something thousand as far as the actual so-called Iraqi army, 100,000 maybe or more for the Islamic State.
And I guess I didn't get a chance to ask you how many Peshmerga there are and how many members of the prominent, the most powerful of the Shiite militias.
Do you have?
There are about 70,000 Peshmerga.
The Shia militias, maybe 120,000.
And they are the most effective fighting force of the Baghdad government.
But that brings a problem because they're seen as wholly sectarian and very frightening by the Sunni community here, about a fifth of the population.
And so if the Baghdad government advances using the militias, then all the Sunni, whether they like the Islamic State or not, won't have much alternative but to fight alongside the Islamic State fighters because they think or they believe that they're going to be treated as if they were supporters of the Islamic State regardless.
So this makes it very difficult for any assault on the Islamic State to defeat it if it's seen by the whole Sunni community here and in Syria as being basically a Shia attempt to wipe them out.
Well, you know, you quote, I guess, a Peshmerga fighter saying, why should so many Kurds die for a Sunni city like Mosul?
I'm sure the same question is being asked down in Baghdad.
Why should so many Shiite fighters, militia fighters are in the army?
Why would they go and die for Mosul?
Which kind of leads me to go back in time a little bit and ask about Iranian intentions here if going back 10, 12 years, because it seems like, and I know it's summing up a complicated subject briefly, but it seems like if I remember your reporting and other good reporting from back then, well, it was the Iranians intention to use the Dawa party and the Supreme Islamic Council and their army, the Bata Brigade, to ally with the United States as basically with the U.S. as the Ayatollah's useful idiots to kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad and then, but to create what they called even then a very strong federal government, which meant screw the Sunnis, we'll just take the capital.
And then it seemed like what they always wanted was just to run off, the parties that America backed in power in George W. Bush's war were the ones who just wanted to run off with southern Shiastan and never really wanted to rule Fallujah or Mosul.
Maybe that's a big part of why the army turned and fled, because it's basically alien territory that they never really meant to rule.
There's something in there, I mean, but I think they wanted to control just as much as they could.
I mean, what really changed things here was, you know, the war in Syria.
Syria is mostly Sunni Arab that reinforced Al-Qaeda or Al-Qaeda type organizations here.
Yeah, but, you know, they never really did try to, you know, Petraeus was saying, pick up where I left off, pay the sons of Iraq and the concerned local citizens and the Sunni tribes to more or less cooperate with you and keep the jihadists down.
And the Dawa party government in Maliki refused to do that whatsoever, right?
Yeah, they didn't pay these guys.
I mean, first of all, this is about one of the most corrupt governments on earth.
So, you know, any free cash floating around and tended to end up in their pockets because that's the way they were, not just for political reasons.
Then they saw them as Sunni.
They didn't want to help them.
And thirdly, and this is sometimes underestimated, Al-Qaeda was continually letting off suicide bombs, big truck bombs in Shia neighborhoods, you know, outside mosques, in markets, you know, where you get, you know, over a month you get hundreds and hundreds of people killed.
And one of the purposes of this was to make sure the Shia went on hating the Sunni.
And then, of course, they'd retaliate against the Sunni.
And then the Sunni would have nowhere to turn but to Al-Qaeda type organizations, ISIS and these days the Islamic State.
So, you know, a lot of this is blamed on Maliki, why wasn't he nicer to the Sunni and so forth.
But actually the Al-Qaeda and ISIS had a very carefully thought out and, I mean, extraordinarily cruel plan to make sure that sectarian hatreds remained high and that the Sunni and the Shia were never going to get together and that the Sunni would have no one to turn to except Al-Qaeda.
But didn't Sader always denounce Hakeem for being such a federalist when he wanted an Iraqi Arab nationalist alliance against Iran and the United States?
Yeah, I mean, they were shifting alliances here then as now.
I don't think the Iranians, first of all, didn't want the U.S. to dominate Iraq because the U.S. was the great Satan and the enemy.
So they wanted to stop that, which they did pretty successfully.
They wanted a government under their influence in Iraq.
And they've got that in spades at the moment.
But at the same time, I don't think they were ever keen to fight another war here.
I mean, they're engaged in helping the government of Syria.
They're suffering from sanctions.
They're suffering from a fall in the price of oil.
So, you know, I think this is a bad news for them, what happened here last year when the Islamic State was created.
Oh, yeah, no, I guess I didn't mean to imply that the Islamic State was what they meant to get as a result.
But it does seem like they were sort of abandoning Sunnistan rather than trying to really incorporate it into Shiite-ruled Iraq.
Well, they tried quite hard.
You know, maybe they said to me, they said nominally 60,000 soldiers, but maybe 20,000 soldiers last year.
But they all ran away.
Now, you might say, you know, the Shiite soldiers didn't want to fight and die in Mosul.
But, you know, a lot of this has to do with the corruption of the Iraqi state that the army was really a sort of kleptocratic machine.
It was built by the Republicans, so that's pretty much how it goes.
All right.
Now, so my best idea is for the United States and its allies to completely butt out as much as we can and let the Islamic State burn themselves out because they're such bastards.
As you reported from the time they marched into Iraq last summer, they were taking polls of who has marriage age daughters because we might just want to run off with them.
You're talking about lowering the conscription age on the show today.
These guys make people hate them everywhere they go because they're the sons of Zarqawi.
They're terrible men.
And it doesn't seem like they have that many great natural resources or that much foreign power backing them up.
America could certainly, well, could probably make the Saudis cut back a lot if we really tried to force them.
And so I wonder if you think that's even plausible that maybe even if Iraqi Sunnistan, never mind Syria for now, if it remains independent, that maybe it would still be run by the old Sunni tribal system over the long haul rather than the new pseudo caliphate here.
Because, of course, all the other arguments are only we can solve this problem we created.
No, I don't think so.
I think I think that the caliphate is, you know, very strong and, you know, we'll see what happens.
I think that's sort of what the US goes wrong is, you know, there are a lot of people, a lot of countries, a lot of movements that hate the caliphate and the Islamic State, but they're completely disunited and opposed to each other.
You know, Turkey is meant to say, yeah, we regard the Islamic State as terrorists, but we also regard the Syrian Kurds as terrorists and we regard Assad as a terrorist.
So it's diluted a lot.
And at the end of the day, they aren't all lining up together to fight the Islamic State.
You know, one of the main opponents of the Islamic State in Iraq and Iran is obviously Iran.
But the US, you know, so it has parallel interests with the US, but there isn't the degree of cooperation which would really threaten the Islamic State.
And that's one of the reasons it stayed in business is the disunity of its opponents and their unwillingness to get together.
Occasionally they get so frightened they get together for a bit, they have big conferences, but nothing much comes out of it.
Well, and it seems like, as you talked about, you know, their enemies, really their worst enemy is the Iranians.
And if the Iranians got a real project to get all the Shiite militias together and go march on Mosul, that would just drive that many more people into their camp.
I mean, maybe there could be some gigantic, decisive battle, but more likely it would simply backfire, right?
It might, you know, it's like all those things, you know, an awful lot of people run away or try to run away.
And some people, you know, get even tougher.
And it would probably work that way this time around.
Meanwhile, a big chunk of the Iraqi population, you know, are refugees inside their own country.
Most of them, I was talking to an aid worker today, most of them, you know, there's around two and a half million people here who aren't, you know, they've fled once to another province.
Was it safer than that?
Suddenly it gets dangerous.
They flee somewhere else.
These people, you know, are continually on the road.
They've got nothing left.
They've spent all their money.
They, you know, they sell their vehicles.
They're reduced to nothing.
So this is, you know, just at a human level.
You know, Iraqis are living really in this sort of hell at the moment where there's no way safe.
Well, am I right that the Islamic state really just wants war with whoever they can get war with at this point?
I mean, it seems like a suicidal policy.
But then again, their leader walks around in a suicide belt, doesn't he?
And there it seems like they're trying to bait the Jordanians into escalating.
They're trying to bait the Egyptians into escalating probably in Sinai and in Libya, if they can.
They're hoisting that black flag everywhere they can, trying to get Colin Obama went on and, you know, in high definition and putting it on YouTube.
It seems like they're trying to get as many neighbors involved in this thing as they can rather than trying to eke out their their fledgling state.
They've just been able to barely carve out here.
Well, they've carved out a pretty big state, not too many people have done that, you know, it's got about six million population, bigger than Great Britain.
Who else has done that recently?
You know, to my mind, they're a bit like a sort of Islamic Camarouge, you know, with a mix of religious fanaticism and military expertise.
And, you know, that tactic is to say, you know, do anything to us, we'll do it back to you.
You know, you drop bombs at us, we'll take a pilot and roast him to death, you know, so all these atrocities and they like to dominate the headlines.
And sometimes, you know, looking at some newspaper online and you see the most, you know, the stories that are most get the most hits and you see that out of 10 stories, you know, about eight of them are to do with the Islamic State.
So when it comes to publicity, all these atrocities do their work for them.
Yeah, and they're much more media savvy than Zarqawi's group was back a decade ago.
They just sit on Twitter all day, these head shoppers.
Yeah, not just, but it's not just Twitter, you know, it's just that they know, you know, when they hold somebody hostage, this Japanese, they beheaded, you know, they demand 200 million dollars.
Why do they say 200 million dollars?
Because they know that's going to make headlines.
You know, you say two million dollars, you know, they don't really expect to get 200 million dollars, but they're kind of savvy like that, that they know how to dominate the news agenda.
And likewise, you know, when chopping off people's heads in front of a camera isn't creating the shockwaves it once did, because people have got to get used to it, they do something even more atrocious, which is to burn a guy to death in public.
So, you know, what they go for is impact and they don't really care how many enemies they make along the line.
Ultimately, they think, you know, they'll create fear and they kind of succeed, too.
Do you have time for me to ask you one more thing?
One more.
OK, did you see where Robert Ford has come out, the former ambassador to Syria and said he no longer supports arming the rebels?
He didn't quite say switch back to Assad.
But I wonder what's your reaction to that?
Yeah, I mean, that, you know, it's been a long time coming.
You know, he's been a longtime supporter of that.
It seemed to me he was supporting arming the so-called moderate rebels, quote, unquote.
But, you know, when the moderate rebels, you know, were practically an extinct species, you know, maybe he's changed his mind for that reason.
You know, but it's this idea that there's a moderate rebel Syrian group that really poses threat to anybody, to Assad or to the Islamic State, you know, is just wishful thinking.
So maybe he's finally appreciated that.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time.
I sure appreciate it as always.
Thank you.
All right.
So that's the great Patrick Coburn.
He's at The Independent.
His brand new book is The Rise of Islamic State, ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution.
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