09/17/15 – Mitchell Prothero – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to my show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
First guest up today, it's our friend Mitch Prothero.
Oh, hey, Mitch, how you doing?
I'm doing pretty good.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing good.
Turn your speakers down just a little bit for me, would you?
Okay.
Hey, where are you?
I am in Erbil, Iraq.
Erbil, Iraq.
Okay, good.
Back in the land of the two rivers.
All right.
Well, what used to be called that, anyway.
All right, so, wow, boy, do you have a scoop here.
They finally published it.
I don't know what took them so long.
U.S. training helped mold the top Islamic State military commander.
Come on, what's this conspiracy kookery in the pages of McClatchy here, Mitch?
Well, actually, I mean, in some ways, that's the least interesting thing about Abu Omar.
But he did get trained by an American special forces unit when he was part of the Georgian special forces.
If you remember, back in 2005 and 2006, the Bush administration was really making a push to sort of bring Georgia into the EU-NATO fold.
They'd even sent a battalion of guys to fight in Iraq, although Omar was not one of them.
And, you know, as a result, this guy who showed a lot of promise and training because of his experiences, as it turns out, had been tapped to be part of this elite unit.
And, you know, they got to be trained by the Green Berets for a bit.
All right.
Now, when you say Abu Omar, this is, am I right, this is the Chechen with the big red beard in the various Islamic State propaganda photographs and videos that virtually everybody has seen that we're talking about?
Yeah, that's him.
That's him.
His name's Tarkan, originally.
He's from the Pankisi Gorge in northeastern Georgia, just adjacent through a mountain range to Chechnya.
He's an ethnic Chechen.
In Georgia, they're called Kists.
Or actually, his mother is.
His father is an ethnic Georgian Christian.
So even on his paperwork, there would be no real red flag on the guy in terms of getting him training as a Georgian soldier because he would have been registered as a Christian.
And now, how certain are you that he is the military commander, the highest ranking, he's the Islamic State's chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff over there?
How does that work?
He's pretty close, if he's not.
We definitely know that he's responsible for the area of operations around Raqqa, Aleppo, and the Azzaz front, basically, the most active front that the Syrians are fighting, or the Islamic State guys are fighting on in Syria.
He's definitely in charge of that.
Now, I've also been told that he is a top military commander overall for the group.
But again, they're not exactly the most transparent organization.
But we do know that he sits on one of the top leadership councils.
So he's in the room on major decisions and tactics and stuff.
He's generally considered to be more of a strategy and tactics, logistics-oriented guy, less on the ideology and politics and things like that.
He's a straight-up soldier.
Yeah.
Well, and I don't guess I've ever heard anyone make the case that the Chechens are anything but the most valuable fighters that the Islamic State have.
I think, certainly, John Dolan, the war nerd, writes that these guys would be nothing except that, boy, they got some Chechens.
So they are the little something, at least.
It gets bigger than that, even.
And Omar's responsible, I think, for a lot of the recruiting because of his reputation as he's developed it.
And again, this is a guy nobody'd heard of really before June, July 2012.
But he rapidly became very well-known.
And he clearly had contacts throughout all of the former Soviet states, speakers along what we'd call the stands, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Dagestan, Chechnya, these areas that have sort of ex-Soviet influence.
Everybody'd speak Russian but are predominantly Muslim.
And a lot of those guys all had military experience and had fought either sometimes against the Americans in Afghanistan, as we saw a lot with the Tajiks and Uzbeks.
The Chechen guys, obviously, they have a lot of experience fighting against the Russians themselves.
So, yeah, he's a commander of what we call a core sort of Praetorian Guard or the shock troops or special forces for the Islamic State.
Man.
All right.
So take us back to 2008.
This is, I guess, it's the sidebar but it's just as interesting.
You actually have met this guy.
Tell us the story again.
I have.
Basically, I was covering the 2008 Georgian-Russian War and had spent the day out on the front lines where the Russians had basically taken over a town called Gori in central Georgia.
And we were returning to our hotel.
A colleague and I, a friend of mine, were returning to our hotel after a long day of getting guns pointed at us by the Russians and the heat.
And suddenly, the Georgian military had set up a defensive perimeter on the main highway on the outskirts of Tbilisi.
So, of course, we stopped and tried to shoot it.
Ended up taking pictures for a while.
And a guy came up to me and said, have you been out to see the Russians?
And we go into a tent and he pulls out a map and is like, can you show me on the map where the Russians are?
And I said, no, I really can't do that as a journalist.
It's not my job.
And he sort of implied that I was being detained and maybe it would be better if I cooperated.
And then I actually joked around with him.
I joked around with him a little bit and pulled out my passport and everybody started laughing.
It was a pretty affable arrest.
And then when the pictures of him popped and, of course, I'd been following the guy as somebody who's been covering Syria and Iraq for years now, I was aware of Abu Omar, but it wasn't until the Georgian government admitted that he'd been a special forces soldier for them and put out a picture of him in his Georgian uniform that I made the connection and immediately called my buddy and said, hey man, you need to send me that picture you took of us.
And he sent it to me and it turned out to be him.
Man, that's really something.
All right, now listen, Mitch, I don't really think that this is a good question, but it is one that a lot of people would ask.
And so I think, you know, it's worthwhile to entertain it.
You certainly don't say anything along these lines in the article, but is there any indication that this guy has still worked for America all along and that basically not just the Islamic State is a kind of unintended consequence but it's so much exactly what America wants that really the CIA's been running this guy all along, that kind of thing.
He had a pretty acrimonious breakup with the Georgian military.
He'd been, you know, fighting as a teenager in Chechnya.
I think his exposure was like one of, you know, to U.S. troops.
Again, there's training programs all over the place for, you know, particularly a staunch, you know, ally of the U.S. like Georgia.
You know, the U.S. government's given them a bunch of money for various things, including border police and things like that.
So I think it was a fairly nominal influence.
It wasn't like he trained or was deployed to Iraq.
It wasn't like he worked out of Fort Bragg for six months or anything like that.
It was just a case of, you know, Green Berets, this is what they do, they go around and teach guys small unit tactics and, you know, counterinsurgency techniques and he was part of this unit.
But he eventually ended up drummed out of the Georgian military under some very strange circumstances.
They claimed he came down with tuberculosis and wasn't fit to serve anymore physically, which I think we can all say is pretty healthy to me now.
And as a result, he was pretty bitter.
And then on a trumped-up gun charge that, you know, again, was very mysterious circumstances, they claimed they found a box of ammunition in his father's home in Pankisi, threw him in jail for a year.
And during that time, he was in jail.
His mother got sick with cancer.
She died just after he was released.
At that point, he'd become a lot more religious and told his father, like, I'm being harassed for being a Muslim and for being from Pankisi, you know, in a country that's 91% Christian.
And I'm going to take off for Istanbul.
And that was late 2011, early 2012.
And then he just, you know, reappears in Aleppo in June of 2012 alongside a bunch of other Chechens that had formed their own independent brigade.
They didn't even join ISIS until...or the Islamic State until January 2014.
Maybe November 2013.
He might have joined a few months earlier.
But for the longest time, you know, they were known as the Army of the Immigrants.
And they were considered an extremely disciplined and competent fighting force of pretty religious guys.
But they were known as the Chechens.
And they worked with the FSA.
They worked with Jabhat al-Nusra.
They worked with the Islamic State.
They even tried to broker some ceasefires between the Islamic State and some of the other rebel groups, you know, trying to keep everybody focused on taking down the regime.
But then over time, he just, you know, with the jihadi fighters, more and more, and eventually swore his allegiance to Baghdadi.
And now, am I right in the way I read this, that you went back to Georgia in order to report that part of the story of what happened to him and why he left?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's talk more about that on the other side of this break.
It's Mitch Prother, a special correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, reporting out of Iraq for us today.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Mitch Prothero from McClatchy Newspapers, reporting out of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Talking about this recent piece, U.S. training helped mold top Islamic State military commander.
U.S. trained him, then he was a quote-unquote hero on the Georgian side of the Georgian-Russia war back in 2008.
Then, well, basically he was harassed right out of Georgia and decided to go and join up with the jihad against Assad, and now he is at least among the very most powerful leaders of the Islamic State's military forces.
Mitch had actually met the guy during the war with Russia in 2008.
And now, where we left off at the break, I was asking you about how you reported this story.
Once you figured out, hey, this is that same guy that I know, you decided you wanted to write this up.
Basically, once I realized it, it looked very much like the guy.
I decided to confirm it, and my very patient boss let me spend about six months on this project, off and on, in between my other duties.
But what I did was I first went to Turkey and managed to find the smugglers who brought him in to Aleppo in the first place, along with about 14 other Chechens, which was sort of the vanguard of foreign fighters, who were the guys to sort of go in in 2012.
Then I managed to find some guys who'd fought alongside him, and eventually took it up to Georgia, where I interviewed former comrades of his, defense officials, and even went up to Pankisi Gorge and sort of met with the community up there to learn a little bit about this, because, you know, it's complex stuff.
Am I right?
You're directly quoting his father there, or not?
No, no, no, no.
I'm not directly...
I wasn't able to reach his father.
They kept telling me he was in the hospital.
But I had also been told that the community has basically decided enough is enough.
They've had a couple journalists come looking for the guy.
He's just kind of an old man who's a little confused how this all happened, and his son's notoriety has him a little freaked out.
And I've also been told that Omar had called back to Pankisi and said, keep foreigners away from my family.
So as a result, it's pretty hard in an environment like that to put it mildly.
It's a tribal insular place.
Once they've decided you're not going to meet somebody, you're not going to meet them.
But you were able to talk to, it seems like, quite a few people, and you have the one old man saying, yeah, basically, or I don't know how old he was, the elder, anyway, saying, yeah, all our sons, they all up and left, basically.
You say they only had two or three choices of different things to do, and one of them was to go fight Assad, and so off the whole neighborhood went, kind of, huh?
Well, yeah, to an extent.
What's happened is over the last 15 or so years with the wars next door in Chechnya, this community's always been considered a logistical stronghold and a recruiting center to go fight over the mountain in Chechnya.
But since Putin and the government in Moscow basically crushed that insurrection, a lot of guys had to get out of town.
And over that period of war, what we've seen is a lot of radicalization of the youth in that area.
A new mosque has come in with sort of a Saudi-style fire and brimstone preacher, which is sort of an alien version of Islam to the Chechens who are a lot more Sufi-oriented, sort of mystical.
Certainly there's a lot of drinking going on in the Chechen community.
They're fairly hard partiers, and as a result, there's this generational disconnect where people would tell me, like, on a Friday afternoon for prayer, one mosque would have the moderate Sufi preacher and everybody, and it would be over 40.
And down the road would be a smaller, much more extreme what we'd say, like, sort of jihadi Salafist-tendency mosque and everybody and it would be under 30.
And so at least now, the numbers that we've got are between 150 and 200 guys from that community have already gone to fight in Syria.
And when you reflect 200 people out of 10,000, that's a noticeable chunk when you're talking everybody's 18 to 30.
And now the Saudi-backed mosque up there, that's not just an adjunct of Saudi intelligence.
It's sort of its own thing.
They just got some money?
Or that's really just part of the Saudi state, in a sense?
It's the...
There's the line between the Saudi state and their charitable, shall we say, preaching and sort of conversion process.
It's called dawah in Arabic.
They take it very seriously, and so they have a tendency to fund mosques through these religious endowments that are basically controlled by the government, but do have some sense of independence.
And this is why all around the world, the Saudis have very much pushed their version of Islam, that they consider the true one, that has a tendency to really run into cultural problems in a lot of the places around the world that much more moderate strains.
People have described it to me in a dozen countries since I've been covering jihadis and terrorism and this stuff as an alien version of the religion that the culture had come up around.
So we've seen this, and this has been going on since pretty much the late 1980s.
Alright.
Now, so I guess if you could maybe catch us up a little bit?
It's all very complicated.
Could you help us to understand Turkey's role in the war in Syria as it stands right now?
I think that's the million dollar question, and I think a lot of your policy makers in the United States would like to know that as well.
Turkey happens to see the Kurdish separatist movements as at least as big, if not the biggest threat to the modern Turkish state, definitely even compared to the Islamic State or jihadis in general.
They're certainly more comfortable with them.
They also very much want to see Assad go, and they've got very close relationships with a number of militant groups, some of which they're open about and some of which they're rumored to have and deny, including the Nusra Front, which the official position of Turkey is that they have no contact with Nusra, but they're playing a word game here.
Nobody really believes that.
The question is, how much have they been directly aiding the Islamic State, and has that changed since the Islamic State has become a much bigger threat?
Certainly, U.S. officials have constantly complained that the Turks haven't done enough to stop the fall of foreign fighters, that they didn't secure the border, they were certainly letting people go back and forth up until a few months ago.
There does appear to be a crackdown on this stuff, and it does seem as though the Turks have started taking it more seriously.
The question is whether or not this is just for show or whether it's substantive, and we're just going to need time to see whether this is a real change in direction for them.
But they've certainly been playing with fire, at least, to put it charitably, in tolerating groups that are going to eventually cause more problems than they're worth if you're just trying to get rid of Assad.
And certainly the Islamic State appears to be one of them.
Yeah.
Well, now, you know, I don't mean to assume that any foreign government is run by people with any greater intelligence or ability to think in the long term than the people who run this government that I live under, but it does seem like, well, the Turks, they do have to live next door to Syria from now on, kind of.
So they have to have thought through a little bit and decided that, you know what, I guess, I mean, apparently, that if Nusra and or the Islamic State, maybe they merge back together, whatever, one or the other, same difference anyway, if they end up ruling Damascus, eh, that's fine.
They don't seem to mind that.
The Turks, you know, they don't just want rid of Assad.
They don't have anybody else to replace him with other than al-Nusra, do they?
So, you know, it seems like, actually, that makes sense from a Turkish point of view.
If I was, you know, the wannabe Saladin, I might go ahead and have the Arabs fight and create as much of a caliphate as they can before, you know, me and my guys swoop down and take it all over and recreate the old days.
You know, I mean, there's certainly they've shown themselves, I mean, it's an Islamist government in Ankara and they've shown a certain level of comfort working with groups that the United States, for instance, is not comfortable working with.
Whether Nusra, I mean, I'd say that their closer allies are Al-Sham, which is much larger than either Nusra or the Islamic State and has been pretty effective in fighting the regime, but again, these guys are pretty religious.
Certainly, some people call them, at least elements of Ahrar, as extremists and they were founded originally by members of Al-Qaeda who'd left Afghanistan and had come back to Syria, so they have a very strong Islamist sentiment about them.
And I'm sorry to interrupt, but you say Ahrar al-Sham is much bigger than the Islamic State?
Yeah, in terms of fighting men on the ground, yeah, I'd say so.
They're just more scattered.
The Islamic State basically has been defending certain areas that it's taking control of, but I think if you look at the number of actual men under arms, Ahrar would be bigger as part of its coalition with other smaller Islamist groups.
Even the FSA probably, well, at one time, if it did ever exist, probably had more guys than the Islamic State as well.
But remember, they're going to be scattered around in units of 100 here, 100 there, guys fight near their villages and where they're from.
It's not like they can put together 60,000 guys in a modern army sort of style, which is, sometimes you see this being done by the Islamic State.
But in terms of sheer manpower, I would assume that Ahrar's larger.
And I'm sorry, please continue, because you were saying about Turkey's view of these jihadists.
Turkey's pretty comfortable with Ahrar al-Sham.
They have a direct relationship with them.
They deny a direct relationship with Nusra, and so I think that they probably wouldn't be that unhappy to see Ahrar prevail in some kind of coalition with Nusra and take over and put in a heavily Islamist-flavored government in Damascus.
And maybe at that point, then they might get more aggressive in helping clean up people who didn't accept that deal.
Obviously, Nusra would probably have some problems with it, and the Islamic State, of course, still will remain somebody that everyone needs to fight.
Ahrar's been fighting them as long as the last two and a half years, off and on.
They've murdered quite a number of top Ahrar commanders and stuff, which again just shows you how screwed up Syria's become, that you've got a case where the Islamic State guys are killing former members of al-Qaeda for not being radical enough.
Alright, now, just real quick, I don't know how much you know, because I know you've been in Turkey mostly lately, but can you give us some kind of thumbnail update on the battles of Fallujah, Ramadi, maybe Baiji?
Yeah, inshallah tomorrow, is what everybody says.
There's not much more.
Manana in American.
I think that right now they're trying to reconstitute an Iraqi army.
Every couple of days we get this statement from the defense ministry saying the operation's going to be underway tomorrow or something like that, and that they expect to liberate both cities within a week, and these are patently ridiculous claims.
At this stage it's really hard to tell if they're going to be able to put a sizable push anytime in the next couple of months on Ramadi and Fallujah, and that's not even taking into account, who knows if they'd even be successful.
They've certainly gotten their butts handed to them every time they fought these guys.
There's not a lot to think that they're going to be more successful going into a place like Ramadi with nearly a million people, Fallujah with well over half a million people.
These are big, dense towns, and it's very hard to fight house to house if you're not very well trained.
It's even difficult if you are very well trained.
So really this seems like a mess.
Baiji has been going back and forth.
Simply put, other than Tikrit, which is sort of an isolated area and some of the places around the Kurdish enclave, the Kurds have done much better.
The Iraqi army really hasn't liberated anything from the Islamic State that fell in those first two waves we saw in January 2014 and then May 2014, or June.
They just haven't been able to retake any substantial territory from the Islamic State.
The Kurds have done a little bit better, and the Kurds have done a lot better in Syria, but in terms of the Iraqi Baghdad government, to say that they've been completely ineffectual is probably underplaying it.
So yeah, this is the same conversation we had a year and a half ago when they first declared the caliphate.
Basically, the lines are already more or less drawn.
They might move a little bit, but the Iraqi state is over.
It would take something on the order of an Iranian invasion of their entire army to try to back up the Shiite militias and the Iraqi army to try to take these Sunni lands, but then that's just going to... that wouldn't happen in a vacuum.
You'd just have Saudi and Jordan and everybody else doubling down on their support for the Islamic State at that point to try to ameliorate that or fight back against that.
So, it sort of seems like the Islamic State's here to stay.
Anybody you send in powerful enough to get rid of them doesn't want to go, and maybe it would only backfire anyway.
Yeah, and to give them credit, I can't say I've been thrilled to think that they've been particularly effective in terms of the overarching strategy on the part of the United States, but when you talk to U.S. officials, they're pretty clear this is a years-long effort.
This is not going to be some quick fix where suddenly they're just going to storm into Mosul and retake it.
I think they were deeply embarrassed by some of their rosier predictions, and over time they've realized that the Iraqis just aren't close to fielding a competent military at this stage, and so whenever you talk to U.S. defense officials, they say this is going to take years and years before it's finally taken care of.
I think that the strategy for now appears to be let's try to contain it, make sure it doesn't get worse, slowly grind these guys down, but I don't think anybody realistically thinks even a year from now that the Islamic State won't hold large chunks of Syria and Iraq.
Yeah, and we're over time, and I forgot to ask you specifically about your great story about the Turks betraying the mythical moderates that the DOD had trained up and sent in there, which was a great story from a couple of weeks ago, but at least I had a chance to mention it.
Everybody go check out Mitch Prothero and his archive at McClatchyDC.com.
Great one there about the Turks' betrayal, and then this one, incredible.
You might win some prizes and things for this, man.
I don't know.
I wouldn't doubt it.
Thanks a lot, man.
I really appreciate it.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
No, you deserve it.
Your training helped mold top Islamic State military command at McClatchyDC.com.
Thanks again, Mitch.
Oh, okay.
Take it easy, Scott.
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