02/19/16 – 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, et cetera.
Introducing a star witness to the slow-motion train wreck of American Middle East policy, the best reporter we got, Patrick Coburn, from The Independent at independent.co.uk, author of The Rise of Islamic State.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you?
Fine, thank you.
Very happy to have you back on the show here and happy to read you.
You're one of the few who can make sense of the mess going on in Syria right now, so I guess my first question would be what of the ceasefire, the so-called ceasefire arranged between the Russians and the Americans?
Well, you know, there isn't a ceasefire in Syria, and there isn't likely to be a full ceasefire.
And the arrangement that they made actually excludes Islamic State and al-Nusra.
So since they are the two biggest armed opposition groups and control about half the country, much less the population, but a lot of it's desert or semi-desert, that means that fighting is going to go on.
But I think one can be too skeptical.
I think what is important was that this meeting in Munich on, I think it was the 12th of February, you had the U.S. and Russia saying, one, that convoys would go to these besieged cities, which does seem to have happened, and secondly, that there was going to be this partial ceasefire.
What's important here is that the two biggest military powers in the world who wanted this have clout in Syria.
And when Assad said he wanted to fight for a complete victory, then some senior Russian official immediately came back saying, no, we're not backing that.
So what's important is that the guys who organize the ceasefire, even if it doesn't actually turn into even a 50% ceasefire, are really influential.
They do have the clout.
These are what used to be called the superpowers.
Well now, I guess it's pretty easy to see how much influence Russia has over the Syrian government.
If Putin wants Assad to do something, then he's pretty much going to do it.
We saw that with the chemical weapons.
And of course we know that America has been training up these so-called mythical moderates, whoever they are, for years and years here.
But how much clout does America really have over which factions?
They don't even seem to have clout over their allies in Riyadh and Ankara, much less the proxy armies.
It's more than they pretend.
They kind of want to...
The Turks would like to invade northern Syria, so the Saudis don't quite like to do that if the U.S. doesn't want it.
I suppose they might go for it.
But what the U.S. has been trying to do is basically seal off northern Syria.
They wanted to do that with the Turks originally, but Turkey was letting supplies into ISIS-held areas, volunteers going there, oil out of ISIS areas.
So eventually the U.S. was doing it with the Syrian Kurds, sealing off the border from the Syrian side rather than from the Turkish side.
But yeah, I mean, one of the reasons it's a great mess is the U.S. is kind of doing this, really what it's done since 9-11, which is it sort of wants to do something to the jihadis, to ISIS, to al-Qaeda-type organizations, but it doesn't want to quarrel with its big Saudi allies, notably Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
How many Saudis...
I mean, there are various reports of Saudis sending some kind of field army to bases in Turkey in preparation for something, but that just doesn't really ring true.
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, they're sending planes.
You know, Saudi policy is kind of pretty crazy at the moment, with Prince Mohammed bin Salman as the young prince who sort of seems to dominate his father, the king.
They started this war in Yemen, which isn't going too well.
They executed this Shia religious leader earlier in the year.
Now they say they're going to get involved in an invasion of Syria.
This is pretty crazy stuff.
You know, what Saudi Arabia has is money.
Well, there's less of it these days with the price of oil down.
But when it gets involved in operational things like air wars and so forth, things never go so well.
Yeah, I mean, they're getting beaten even in Saudi territory by the Houthi rebels in northern Yemen right now, right there on that border region, it seems like.
Yeah, they got sort of...
You know, they've sort of got involved.
I mean, in Turkey, the same thing.
You know, they talk really tough.
President Erdogan talks, you know, about really sticking it to the Kurds.
I mean, that's the real enemy.
It's not Assad or ISIS or anybody else.
It's the Kurds thereafter, particularly the Syrian Kurds.
But they don't really do much.
But their policy is kind of...
To make it up on the day or on the week, you know, they shot down this Russian bomber last November, which wasn't a great idea because the Russians send more planes and anti-aircraft missiles.
Now Turkey would quite like to move into, send its army to move into northern Syria, but then now they're facing all these Russian planes, so they can't get air supremacy.
So if they did want to move into northern Syria, it was a really bad idea to shoot down that plane.
Yeah.
Yeah, I could see that being a tactical mistake for their strategy.
But now, so when you say that, I mean, it's pretty clear, too, that Assad is second place to the Kurds in the sights of the Turkish government there, but I wonder how distant of a second place is the Assad government.
Are they...
Is the Turkish government past their goal of regime change at this point in Damascus?
They go on repeating like this, like a sort of demented parrot, sort of to Saudi Arabia.
It's perfectly obvious Assad isn't going to go, you know.
The government isn't going to go.
You know, they control most of the population.
They're backed by Russia and Iran.
Their army's advancing.
Why should they go?
But they don't seem to have a policy.
You know, one way of looking at this is, you know, things have...
You know, at the beginning of the war, I guess you had local forces in 2011 deciding what happened.
Then you had sort of regional forces from about 2012 to 2014.
Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Gulf monarchies, Iran in a rather different way.
But they never...
I mean, they wanted to overthrow Assad.
They failed.
You know, they...
ISIS developed.
And then it's...
Now it's got much more sort of internationalized with the U.S. and Russia playing a much bigger role.
And the regional powers aren't quite so powerful.
So, you know, that is changing.
I think, you know, I mean, the prospects of something happening are positive, have gone up a bit, I think, because we don't just have the Turks and the Saudis saying, you know, we want to overthrow Assad and pretending that these jihadi organizations are moderate when they're not.
Well, am I reading the Democrats right when John Kerry is kind of laying out the plan here that they mean to have a peace at some point in the somewhat near-term future between the mythical moderate groups and Assad, and then everybody from there is supposed to turn on al-Nusra and the Islamic State or fight them all at once?
Well, it sort of is even more complicated than that because who...
You know, you have al-Nusra, but then you've got these other two groups that the Russians wanted to say were also terrorists, which is al-Sham, which is close to al-Nusra, and Jaysh al-Islam, which is kind of east of Damascus, sort of basically financed by the Saudis.
They're both sort of extreme Sunni fundamentalist organizations.
The problem, you know, for the U.S. and American allies is that if they allow these to be labeled as terrorists, then, you know, they don't have any moderates left.
Right.
But also, you know, it's kind of hypocritical.
You know, you watch television, you see on the newspaper that the Russians are only banging moderates.
Nobody ever says who these moderates are or where they are, you know.
And if substantial parts of Syria are run by moderates, why don't journalists go there, you know?
Why do they sit in Turkey or sit in Beirut?
Of course, the reason is very simple with this.
They know if they actually turned up there, you know, they'd be in the boot of a car in 10 minutes.
They'd be kidnapped, you know, because these guys aren't so moderate.
All right, hold it right there.
We've got to take this break.
They're not moderates.
We'll be right back, y'all, with Patrick Coburn from The Independent, author of The Rise of Islamic State, right after this, independent.co.uk.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
Darn commercial messages interrupting our show here.
Scott Horton talking with Patrick Coburn, the great Patrick Coburn from the independent, independent.co.uk.
This latest piece here is called The Winners and Losers Are Becoming Clear in This War, in the Syria War.
Great piece, and again, he's the author of the book, which you've got to read it, The Rise of Islamic State.
And, yeah, where we left off, Patrick, you were talking about the kind of irony.
It's kind of funny, in a way, to see people like Jeb Bush say, you know, all of them, the politicians and the media, everybody, the D.C. consensus, that those darn Russians, how dare they bomb anybody but ISIS in Syria, which they just leave this huge omission where we know what they mean is al-Qaeda.
They're mad because Russia's bombing al-Nusra and Arar al-Sham, which are both loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, right?
Sure, yeah.
It's kind of absurd.
In Britain, the government would identify the moderates, but that might put them in danger.
They're meant to be 70,000 of them.
They're meant to be armed, you know.
What makes them so shy?
The government's so shy because they don't really exist.
You know, you have guys on the ground in Syria, some village militia, some local warlord.
Somebody pays them some money, they might join up.
But that's why you have these sort of endlessly different groups.
They're all sort of small gangs.
But to describe them as moderates is absurd.
Well, and even back in 2012, they said, well, look, the Al-Farouk Brigade, they're moderate, they won elections.
But then that was their commander on film eating a dead soldier's heart.
So, yeah, so much for that.
Yeah, but this sort of, you know, this happened from the beginning.
But, you know, things have changed.
You know, the Russian intervention last September, last year, that means the Syrian army has this sort of air force, just like the Syrian Kurds have got the U.S. air force, and that puts a lot of pressure on ISIS.
And, you know, so they're losing their connection to the Turkish border because they always were very dependent on being accessed through Turkey.
And so I think that ISIS is getting weaker at this within sort of Iraq, Syria.
Of course, they're popping up elsewhere in Libya and so forth.
Have they completely lost Aleppo at this point?
Aleppo, you know, is sort of there are different groups there.
Al-Nusra is quite strong there.
Al-Nusra, you see, you have local groups that are not Al-Nusra, but often that's operating under license, you know.
You know, it's a bit like the mafia, supposedly, used to operate.
You know, you might have people who weren't necessarily part of the mafia, but they only operated, you know, under license.
Yeah, sort of like the al-Qaeda in Iraq was under license as a smaller faction of the larger Sunni-based insurgency during Iraq War II.
Yeah, and it sort of, so these, you know, and also they know that, you know, you can't, it's difficult to have Turkey or Saudi Arabia or Qatar give weapons directly to Al-Nusra because the Americans, the Russians, might object.
But it's much better if you let some other organization down the road continue to exist.
And then that gets the tar missiles, whatever it is, and they hand them over to you.
In fact, just yesterday, Patrick.
That's a pretty practical reason why Al-Nusra would want these other groups to go on existing.
And also, you know, they just move into, they're close enough to, they're kind of Arar al-Sham and Al-Nusra are much different.
They just sort of don't put up their flags close to the Turkish border where Western television can see them.
You know, they put up Arar al-Sham flags instead.
So they're quite sort of clever about publicity.
So it would be a bad idea to sort of have all these Al-Nusra flags within sight of a lot of television cameras.
Yeah, that's funny.
The moderate groups basically is just kind of different names for the arms acquisition part of the Al-Nusra front.
There's a quote from the State Department spokesman just a day or two ago where he said, the reality of the situation in both Syria and Iraq is that equipment and various weaponry, while given to the good guys, sometimes end up in the hands of the bad guys.
Yeah, I mean, it's not just sometimes.
You know, there's a continual flow.
But, you know, now the last sort of corridor really linking the opposition north of Aleppo to Turkey is sort of under attack at something called the Azaz Corridor.
The Turks are havering.
Do they want to get involved or not?
How far will they get involved?
On the other hand, if they don't do anything, then they can see their whole policy in Syria since 2011 turning into a disaster.
They've got half their southern frontier run by the Syrian Kurds.
So they're tempted to do it.
Will they do it?
You know, we don't know.
What they'd like to do would be sort of edge the U.S. into getting involved.
But I don't think that's going to happen.
All right, now you talk a lot in your book about the Saudi donors, the kind of private and pseudo-private Saudi donors who have supported the Islamic State and on this front to a degree.
And I had found this great quote from Prince Saud al-Faisal in the Financial Times where he had told John Kerry, dash, that's the Islamic State, is our response to your support for the Dawa.
And, of course, Hillary Clinton is in there.
I mean, the way the Saudis look at it.
And has that changed at all?
Because, of course, the current narrative is that, well, yeah, the Saudis were donating to some extremists, but we made them stop now.
I see the Brookings Institution guys claiming that.
I couldn't prove the opposite, you know, but it's the nature of money.
But when you have guys as tough as the Islamic State, you know, is it likely they're going to be confined and spend a lot of energy trying to tax the local vegetable market and not try to get money from sympathizers, rich sympathizers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Kuwait and elsewhere?
It seems to me very unlikely.
So there's a sort of consensus that this hasn't happened.
And among foreign experts, I mean, if you go to Iraq itself, or Syria, there's a consensus the other way, that these guys quite certainly are getting money through donations and so forth.
And I think, you know, what Syrians and Iraqis think about this is probably true.
Yeah.
And did you see the Nancy Youssef piece about the Bata Brigade fighting in Syria, where we're backing them in Ramadi against the Islamic State, but then we're backing the rebels, the so-called rebel groups like Arar al-Sham against them in Syria?
I didn't see that one, you know.
But it's always been the case, you know, of sort of a different policy in Iraq from Syria.
Yeah, it's really amazing.
Now I've seen another piece that said that the Iraqi army, the Shiastan army, is building up forces currently in Kurdistan preparing for a joint assault on Mosul.
Do you have any idea when or if that might come?
I'd be a bit dubious.
I was just in Kirkuk and in KRG.
I didn't see much sign of that.
The Iraqi army, despite all this talk about having taken Ramadi, you know, still has its very limited number of combat troops down at Ramadi.
The Kurds don't want to get involved in an assault on Mosul, being caught up in street fighting and so forth.
And also there are other problems.
You know, one looks at this in political and military terms, but the price of oil being down means, you know, the Kurdish government's got no money.
It's not that you can't pay people on the government payroll.
You know, that's one of the reasons so many of them are desperate trying to reach Europe.
So there's a real sort of economic calamity there.
It's difficult in those circumstances to, you know, if you can't really pay your own troops to launch an attack on Mosul.
At the same time, ISIS is getting weaker there.
You know, I've just been in touch with a lot of people who just left Mosul, and they were saying it's getting, you know, there's very little electricity, clean water.
Prices are very high.
There are no jobs.
And they also say ISIS is getting crueler and sort of nastier in enforcing regulations, you know, that there's sort of women being sort of wearing not only, you know, a full robe, but also gloves and socks and everything else.
And if they don't, then the man with her gets lashed and so forth, or they get attacked.
And they say this is getting more vicious, particularly from the Saudis and Libyans who are ISIS members.
They do have a way of wearing out their welcome, don't they, these al-Qaeda and Iraq types?
Yeah.
So such sympathy as they did get before, I think, is going right down.
On the other hand, these guys can still fight, you know.
They're not planning to run for election, you know.
Right.
They're losing public sympathy.
But, you know, people just try to get out.
It's difficult to get out because they don't want a mass exodus.
So people have to pay $400 or $500 to smugglers to get them out who may be connected to ISIS, you know, and have to kick back to ISIS a proportion of that money.
Amazing.
All right, well, listen, I could keep asking you questions like this all day, but I will let you go, like, in the deal.
I sure appreciate you coming back on the show, Patrick.
All right, Sheldon.
That is a heroic Patrick Coburn from The Independent, independent.co.uk.
And the book is Rise of the Islamic State.
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