05/24/16 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright everybody, introducing the great Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent in Britain.
That's Independent.co.uk.
And they reprint all this stuff also at UNZ.com.
UNZ.com.
And the very latest is ISIS unleashes death squads as Iraqi forces advance on Fallujah.
Also at issue, another recent one, after the recent battles in Syria and Iraq, how close is ISIS to losing the war?
We'll talk about that a little bit.
Well, it's all one big story.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you, sir?
I'm fine, thank you.
Let me mention the book here, too.
It's Chaos and Caliphate, Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East.
It's at OR Books.
And it's a huge one, too.
A compendium of an entire terror war worth of articles and essays.
Alright.
So, yeah, the attack on Fallujah.
I guess at least as far as artillery, it's on.
Can you tell us much more about the Iraqi government, Shiastan government's forces and their assault on the town of Fallujah?
Yeah, it's a very complicated business because there are a lot of people involved.
A lot of people who dislike each other, maybe only a little bit less than they dislike Islamic State.
Fallujah, as people may know, is about 40 miles west of Baghdad.
It was captured by Islamic State, ISIS, Daesh, ISIL, whatever you want.
I'm going to call it ISIS for me.
On this occasion, in January 2014, it was the first big victory of ISIS.
And the Iraqi government hasn't been able to get them out since.
In Baghdad, there's a deep feeling that Fallujah, which is a Sunni Arab city, is the source of many of the suicide bombs that have killed thousands of people, mostly almost all civilians, almost all Shia in Baghdad.
And so one of the reasons we have this offensive now is that about 200 people were killed earlier in the month by these suicide bombers.
So the demand of the government is to do something about it.
Inside Fallujah used to be a city of about 350,000, kind of a trucking town.
It's on the road to Jordan, also known for being a center for Islamic fundamentalism, for Sunni fundamentalism.
There are about 60,000 people that are left there now.
Maybe people say 900 IS fighters.
I don't know how they counted them.
Do they stand in ranks so they can be counted?
And around it you've got the Iraqi army, which is advancing, which is not that big.
They've got a couple of brigades of special forces, two divisions they can use.
A rather bigger group called the Hashd al-Shafi, which is the militias, which were raised in 2014 to fight ISIS.
And these are both Shia and Sunni.
The Shia ones are disliked by the U.S. because they're Shia, and some of them, not all, are backed by Iran.
And you also have Sunni militias.
Now, the coalition today said that they would bomb in southern Fallujah in support of the Iraqi army and the Sunni militias, but not the attackers on the east and west of Fallujah.
And you'd think Fallujah is not a big place, so you have to be rather careful on who you're bombing in support of.
What's going to happen?
Well, ISIS is pretty good at house-to-house fighting using snipers and IEDs, improvised explosive devices, that is, mortars and so forth.
They can fight a long time.
The question is, will Fallujah be destroyed?
Because Ramadi was recaptured by the Iraqi army, backed by very intense U.S.-led airstrikes some months ago, which is great, except Ramadi doesn't really exist anymore because most of it's been destroyed by the same airstrikes.
So I was talking to somebody yesterday who's from there.
He said only about 15% of the population was back months after it had been recaptured.
All right, well, for now, back to the headline about these death squads.
And the lead in the article is about Islamic State fighters warning people that, even civilians, they're not allowed to flee Fallujah.
They're trying to make a little Stalingrad out of it.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's kind of the shape of things in these cities.
I don't know about Stalingrad, but they don't want the civilians out because they know that that will make it more easier for the U.S. and the coalition to bomb them.
So they want the civilians to stay.
So you might have a building, let's say, of five stories, and four stories have families in them, and the fifth floor has ISIS fighters in them.
So the Iraqi army has been saying people should walk along the main road out of the town, which is full of mines and bombs and snipers, and houses that want to surrender should wave a white flag as a way of ending up dead very soon.
This is probably difficult to surpass because ISIS would shoot you immediately.
Also, it doesn't do you much good waving a white flag because ISIS fighting positions often do that just to lure Iraqi government forces forward and then open up.
All right.
Well, I don't know how to do it on a scale of one to ten or on a scale of Baiji to Ramadi or how you measure it, but do you have a guess about how hard they're going to fight for the city as compared to just try to melt away and live to fight another day for Mosul or another town later?
Couldn't say.
I don't think they'll melt away just like that, which they did in some recent place in the town called Rifa, right over towards on the Syrian border and another place called Hit, which they didn't fight for.
But these are kind of smallish places.
Fallujah is much bigger.
It's more important.
It's close to Baghdad.
It has political and military significance because this was Fallujah, remember, was the center of the uprising against the U.S. in 2004, was the target of two sieges by the U.S. Marines, famous at the time.
So and also it was their first great victory.
So I don't think they'll just sort of pull out, but they may not.
They may not absolutely, you know, pour all their troops in.
At the end of 2014, there was an ISIS besieged Kurdish town called Kobani, you might remember it, and, you know, just kept at it and lost 2,000 men to airstrikes.
I doubt if it'll do that again, but I don't think it'll pull out again.
So exactly how they play it, difficult to predict.
And now you talk about the decimation of Ramadi.
I wonder about whether, well, I guess there's not much to come back to, but the early indications seem to show that the Shiite militias want to go ahead and cleanse the town and take it and keep it for the Shia and expand the borders of Shia-standard Ramadi or not?
Well, Scott, they don't have to cleanse it because it's a heap of ruins, you know, and there isn't anybody there.
I mean, to cleanse people, if you want to sort of rush in and say, here I am, the Shia militia, I'm going to kill all of you.
Well, but I mean, do they plan on keeping them from coming home?
Most of them are up in Kurdistan or they're elsewhere.
They're displaced people.
Well, you know what I mean, though.
I mean, do you think they want to let the Sunni ever come home or they're just going to keep it now?
Well, you know, it's not exactly the militias.
They aren't really in Ramadi.
It's mostly army.
But the government, you know, this is a Shia government.
People from there, they're not so much frightened of the army.
It's more the interior ministry of troops.
And there are at least said to be 1,000 people there from Ramadi in a very small prison unit.
It's very hot up there, you know, without space to lie down, people being tortured, people being shot.
That's what people talk about.
I mean, I can't authenticate that, but that's what Sunni were talking about to me.
And there was an Amherst report recently about this particular prison.
I mean, it seemed like the Baghdad government position before the rise of Islamic State was basically more or less let Sunnistan go and go bake in the sun and tough for them.
Now, obviously, they want to fight the Islamic State, but it's a pretty big question, isn't it, whether they want to really conquer and rule these areas that before were predominantly Sunni, or whether they want to get rid of Islamic State but more or less still let Sunnistan go.
No, I'm not sure.
I think it worked a little different.
Initially, they sort of held it all.
They marginalized the Sunni, and that would have worked, except the Sunni had the uprising in Syria, and that sort of changed the balance of power in the region.
And first of all, you had protests among the Sunni.
They were about a fifth of the Iraqi population.
There were about 33 million Iraqis, so we're talking about, what, six, seven million people.
The press protest didn't get anywhere.
They were transmuted into armed resistance.
The armed resistance was taken over by ISIS.
Do they want to recapture Mosul?
Yeah, they do.
Do they want to recapture the rest?
They do, but there are also, as you said, doubts about it.
Can they hold it?
Do they want to hold it?
They'd quite like to hold it, but are they prepared to get a lot of people killed?
Do a lot of people want to?
Are families prepared to see their sons killed trying to get these places back?
That's a slightly different question.
The U.S. is pushing hard for an attack on recapture of Mosul, recapture of Raqqa, but when I talked to senior Iraqi officials, they said it's not going to happen this year.
Well, I mean, it seems like from the daily news the Baghdad government can barely hold it together on a day-to-day basis anyway.
It seems like conquering these places, not just driving Islamic State out, but trying to really expand their borders and all that would be biting off far more than they could chew at this point.
It might be.
You know, Iraq's a funny place.
It never quite falls apart, but it never quite comes together.
There are people who've got sort of centers of power.
You know, it might be the Kurds or the different Kurdish parties.
It might be the Shia, you know, the Sunni.
All these groups are divided within themselves, you know, and certainly the Kurds are divided.
You know, what kind of holds them together is fear of Islamic State.
The Shia, very divided as well.
The government, you know, you can't have some force, you know, military force.
It has some money.
You know, it has U.S. support.
So you can't rule them out.
They're not negligible, but they don't control the game either.
Yeah.
Well, now, as far as the current assault on Fallujah, does this include massive airstrikes like Ramadi so far?
Not so far, but might be.
I think there's some embarrassment, although there ought to be some embarrassment about what happened to the Ramadans.
You know, this was declared to be the great victory, but won by the Iraqi army and forces.
But one, it certainly wasn't by them.
You know, they're quite small detachments of special forces.
Some say only about 750 men were really in the front line and really calling in airstrikes that sort of battered the place to pieces and surviving ISIS members, you know, eventually left.
So, you know, if this had been in the Vietnam War or some other wars, there would have been more of an international outcry about this.
But because it was against ISIS, who are considered, you know, international pariahs with some reason, and because not many people could go there to see what happened, there hasn't really been any sort of protests about what happened.
It might be a bit more embarrassing if they did the same thing to Fallujah or Mosul.
But, you know, we'll see.
It hasn't happened yet.
But, you know, you can see, you know, bombs landing and spouts of smoke going up and so forth.
But we'll wait and see.
And now you also say in your article too that there are reports that you're hearing there in Kurdistan, out of Fallujah, that the humanitarian situation for the average Joe is also really bad right now there.
Yeah, people are saying just sort of absence of food because this place is sort of besieged and there is one road in, but everything is very expensive.
You hear the same thing in Mosul.
And there isn't much money to buy these things because people have been in that, you know, Mosul has been in a near sort of state of war since early 2014 when Islamic State took over.
So, you know, there isn't, people have run through what money they had.
So people are talking about, you know, a 50 kilo bag of flour costing, you know, seven, eight hundred dollars.
Most people can't afford that.
So, and I hear the same thing from Mosul, you know, that there isn't very little in the shops.
Prices have sort of shot up over the last year.
It didn't happen initially when Islamic State took over, but it's happened since.
And so, you know, also absence of electricity and fresh water and stuff like that.
All right, now, so let's talk again, if we could, about Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric and sometimes backer of the government to some degree.
And he and his guys keep marching on the green zone and they keep getting further and further into power.
It seems like they're right on the eve of actual revolution, but they keep backing down.
What's the status of all of that?
Well, yeah, I mean, in one way, yes, you know, they breached the green zone, which has been this sort of center of power since, well, Saddam used to be there, but it became a sort of fortified enclave under Brammer when the U.S. moved in, and the Iraqi government, the same thing.
It's kind of a sort of forbidden city.
To my mind, a completely, apparently bad thing, because it means the rulers can sort of sit behind their fortifications without really much idea of what's happening in the rest of Iraq, and maybe not caring too much what happens to the rest of Iraq.
And the only time they leave would be to go to the airport, to go to their houses in Europe or Jordan or somewhere like that.
So, you know, progressively, the followers of Muqtada, the Sadrists, they broke in, and now they've done it again.
A couple of people were shot.
Muqtada said he wasn't so responsible for the latest one.
This does lead to a sort of certain, this does empower the streets to a degree, but I think Muqtada is, they don't want, in a way they can influence, maybe for a time, control popular feeling in the streets, but they're very frightened of having a rerun of 2003 of a sort of mass looting of all government buildings.
You know, a lot of poor people in Baghdad who, if they poured into the green zone, would simply remove everything that isn't nailed down, and a lot that is.
So, and then the army might move in, a lot of people might get shot.
Muqtada doesn't really, is looking for reform rather than revolution.
Whether that's feasible, I don't know.
I suspect the Iraqi system is pretty irreformable, actually.
You know, it's kind of jelled.
You have people who've got the interest, their interest in sort of running all the ministries and the government and so forth.
I'm not sure they're going to cede much or any power.
Yeah.
Well, and as you've talked about on the show before, their budget and their economic system in Iraqi Shia-stan is just, it's an equation for bankruptcy at today's oil prices.
They just can't do it.
It looks like that.
I mean, the price of oil has gone up, which must be a relief to them.
What, $50 or something now?
I don't know what the Iraqis are netting out of that, but they're getting a bit more money.
The thing is, you know, you have a very corrupt system.
Secondly, you have a kind of patronage system, a client system, like Tammany Hall in New York, you know, 100 years ago that people have jobs, or at least they're on the payroll.
If you're, you know, close to the ruling party, you're on the payroll.
And you may do some work, you may not.
Your guys get the contracts.
It's sort of corrupt, but a lot of people are involved.
So, you know, to pay, there are about 7 million people in Iraq who get pay or pensions from the state, and that costs about $4 billion a month.
Recently their revenues were running about $2 billion a month, so they were running through their reserves.
They can borrow some money.
They can sort of probably keep it going to the end of the year, you know, but it's getting very tight.
Yeah.
Well, and so no wonder there's all the pressure for reform, but I guess as you've also described and as you're just saying, it's sort of too far gone, right?
It's such a kleptocracy that's been built up here.
It's a kleptocracy, but it's also, you know, I mentioned Tammany Hall.
You know, there are quite a lot of people who benefit from that system, and that means it's quite difficult.
It's even more difficult to get rid of.
You know, I think there are some states in sort of sub-Saharan Africa where everything gets stolen by an elite, which may just take off, you know, when there's a revolution.
But in Iraq and, you know, these oil states, the guys at the top steal a very large quantity, but there's kind of this sort of, as I said, sort of patronage system that if you're on the right side of the government, quite a lot of people are getting money, and they don't necessarily want that to change.
Right.
So they're smart enough to bring enough people in on it, but they're too clever by half because now they're stuck between a rock and a hard place when they just can't afford to keep the gold.
Yeah, but it all works until the price of oil goes down.
Right.
You have to have the money.
It's the same up in Kurdistan, you know, where I am at the moment, that, you know, they used to advertise themselves the other Iraq, you know, that worked, wasn't so corrupt.
Actually, it worked exactly the same way in Baghdad that, you know, they had revenues either from Iraq, the oil revenues or their own oil revenues, and there was fantastic corruption at the top.
But you had about 700,000 people in the state payroll, most of whom are not being paid at the moment, you know, so there's nothing else.
You know, these oil states, you know, about the resource curse, if you have a state that depends on oil or gas or minerals and nothing else, or from, you know, just all other sort of forms of economic activity and because everything's too expensive and it's cheaper to import it.
So if you're in Baghdad or you're up here, even the sort of tomatoes you get come from Iran.
Everything else you eat probably up here, about 90% comes from outside the country.
And that works until the oil revenue stops and then it stops working.
All right.
Now, if I can ask you a couple of Syria questions here real quick.
Well, there's a few different ones.
First of all, am I really, I keep hearing this, but I don't know much about it.
Is it right that America and Russia both support the Syrian Kurds and their fight against the Islamic State?
And I know there are some special forces, U.S. special forces embedded with them, but they say now approximately 300.
But I don't know much about the Russian role in that.
And then if you could also just talk about whatever progress they're making against the Islamic State on their side of the war.
Well, the Syrian Kurds have been doing quite well.
You know, they belong to the PKK.
They have their own group called the YPG, which is about 25, 30,000 pretty well-trained, disciplined troops.
And they are really the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers' Party of Turkey.
And they get support from the U.S., obviously, when they're advancing, you know, from U.S. airstrikes.
They say they weren't getting weapons, but that the airstrikes were important.
From the Russians, yeah, getting some air support as well.
Not quite so much.
But what worries the Kurds there and here is, you know, it's okay so long as they are the big local ground allies, ground troops, supplying ground troops against Daesh, against ISIS.
But what happens to them if, let's say, Daesh disappears, gets defeated?
You know, is the U.S. going to support them against Turkey?
You know, is it going to support them against Damascus?
Iraqi Kurds ask the same question, you know.
Everybody loves us, so internationally, while we're fighting ISIS.
But what happens if there's no more ISIS?
Then, you know, they'll feed us to the dogs.
So there's that feeling in Kurdistan.
I mean, somebody was saying to me yesterday, an Iraqi Kurd, who knows, who's been around, and he was saying, yeah, we're kind of, the U.S. government doesn't employ Blackwater anymore, you know, to do its fighting for it.
You know, it has us instead.
So we are sort of, we Kurds are sort of the America of a new Blackwater for the U.S. government.
You know, there's a lot of truth in that.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, in American politics, that's what they all say.
Oh, yeah, we've got to fight them, but, you know, we're going to make the Kurds do it for us.
We've got to arm the Kurds.
And so, I mean, they are, they're talked about in exactly that way.
They exist only to serve as our foot soldiers in a war we don't want to fight anymore.
Yeah, exactly.
And they also feel pretty vulnerable because they know their neighbors, you know, in Baghdad and Damascus and Ankara and Tehran, for that matter, don't like them very much, you know.
So they really need that support.
And they think they'll be hung out to dry if, you know, if they're not needed.
And Daesh, because Daesh has gone down.
Yeah.
I think they have a right to be worried.
Well, now, so I've heard at least some of their leaders say that they prefer Assad to a revolution against them and, you know, Daesh or al-Nusra or whatever other groups taking power in Damascus in place of them.
But I don't know really much about the Damascus regime's relationship with the Syrian Kurds before that.
Or I don't know if you could, you know, take a guess at what it might be in the future.
Well, the Damascus regime always oppressed the Kurds.
You know, it marginalized them.
A lot of them weren't even citizens.
The first real uprising against Assad was in 2004 by the Kurds.
As they point out, the first people to be sort of knocking over statues of Assad, Hafez al-Assad, were the Kurds.
They now say, but look, you know, the so-called al-Nusra and the other opposition, you know, and all fight together against us and say they have no intention of giving the Kurds autonomy and seem to be viscerally anti-Kurdish.
So, you know, they feel bad, as Assad is, that the opposition are even worse.
But then, so, if the day comes where the Islamic State's defeated, the al-Nusra Front's defeated, the next is a war between Damascus and Syrian Kurdistan after their common enemies are out of the way?
Well, it could be.
It could be.
You know, they don't have U.S. support.
You know, whoever is in Damascus is reasserting control over the country.
You know, they could find, you know, that they were, you know, oppressed once more or just driven out of the country.
You know, that's kind of what Saddam did in, you know, in 1991.
So, you know, they feel in some ways they're very powerful at the moment because they've got the U.S. and Russia backing them, but just for how long, they feel.
So they're strong momentarily, but weak in the long term.
Well, now, so, I mean, I guess it seemed like the so-called ceasefire was to a great degree dependent on the Arar al-Sham and the other groups splitting off from the al-Nusra Front, and that never seemed to happen.
And so the Russians are still bombing America's allies there, and the Americans seem to just keep on supporting at least some of the jihadist groups against Assad.
You know, it's always been a bit of a myth that there is a sort of opposition of significance, which is separate from ISIS and al-Nusra.
So, you know, at one point the Russians were saying, and I think at one point the Americans very agreed, that those opposition, the so-called moderate opposition, that were not, should sort of physically separate themselves on the ground from al-Nusra, so the U.S. and the Russians could sort of bomb them.
The opposition didn't, but they can't because it's not strong enough, and it knows that if it did without al-Nusra, first of all, the Syrian army would roll over it.
And secondly, if it tried al-Nusra, it would probably shoot them.
So, you know, it's one of the curious things about this war, there's this sort of pretense that there's a sort of third way, that there's a Syrian moderate non-fundamentalist, non-fundamentalist Islamist opposition, which doesn't exist.
And not only do people sort of, you know, if it were just propaganda, it would be one thing, but actually through U.S. policy for a long time was based on the fact that this non-existent group existed.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the way they say is, you know, the FSA group, so Jaysh al-Islam and this, that, the other thing that, well, geez, they don't behead or at least as much as al-Nusra and ISIS and, you know, and after all, they do have different names.
So if they were really exactly the same, they would just call themselves al-Nusra, right?
Yeah, you see Jaysh al-Islam, you know, they made a propaganda video about the Druze saying, you know, which became very clear that they regarded the Druze as 3% small minority there as non-Islamic and people you could enslave according to, you know, their variant, extreme variant of Islam.
So they're not really, logically, they're not really much different from al-Nusra and ISIS.
Yeah.
Well, and even going back to the earlier days of the war, the Northern Storm Brigade that met with John McCain, their guys were on video, Time Magazine, saying, yeah, we fought with Zarqawi against the Americans in Iraq War II and we're proud of that.
Anyway, thanks for the support.
They were pretty moderate.
Yeah, they said a bit of deception, you know, sort of self-deception on the part of the U.S. and sometimes not.
Sometimes they know exactly what these guys are like, so pretend otherwise.
And, you know, it's prevented any real policy emerging.
You know, my own feeling is you can't really, the only thing, what you need to do is sort of have the war, the level of violence reduced.
You know, the politics of war are very different from the politics of peace.
You know, the politics of war, in war, extreme groups that are prepared to get killed, like Islamic State and al-Nusra and Jaysh al-Islam, they come to the fore.
You know, people who feel differently, don't want to get killed, don't want to carry a gun or aren't very good at it, they're marginalized.
Similarly, in Damascus, currently people who maybe don't like much like Assad but feel that the alternative is guys are going to chop their heads off and force their wives and daughters to be covered from head to foot in black cloth.
They think, you know, we prefer to stick with Assad.
You know, if you go, if you couldn't stop the war, even for a time, then people in Damascus would begin to think they've got other alternatives.
Yeah.
Well, and, yeah, there doesn't seem to be too many of those.
And as far as Turkish support, you know, Phil Giroldi, the former CIA officer who was stationed in Turkey back when he was a CIA officer, said that he went there, I guess, in 2013, 2014, and there were guys raising money for the Islamic State on the street, no problem whatsoever, I guess in Ankara or Istanbul, I forget.
And I just wondered what exactly do you measure the Turkish level or how do you measure the Turkish level of support for Islamic State?
And has it changed at all?
Yeah, I think they're now fairly hostile to Islamic State.
They gave sort of, you know, they tolerated them before.
They allowed them to move backwards and forward across the border.
You know, all these thousands of foreign volunteers came across the Turkish border.
The Turks say somehow they couldn't detect them.
You know, they were wearing long beards and so forth.
Now they're more hostile to them, but they still sort of seem to cooperate with or tolerate al-Nusra and the various other groups and pretend there are also a lot of groups.
Are they no longer buying Islamic State oil?
No, no, no.
Probably a bit is coming through.
It's more difficult to do now because the Assyrian Kurds have closed along the border.
And there is oil that used to.
There used to be oil coming out.
It used to go over to the sort of Western rebels who sent food back to Islamic State areas.
And then it used to go up to the Turkish border.
You know, all from this is that they sell it from the wellhead to guys, you know, put it in their tank, take a risk, hope to make a bit of a profit.
And that'll go across to Turkey.
It'll go all over the place.
You know, it goes from one bar to another.
Thank you so much for your time.
I'm sorry for keeping you so long, but I really appreciate you talking to me as always, Patrick.
Not at all.
All the very best.
That's the great Patrick Colburn, y'all, author of Chaos and Caliphate, Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East.
And, of course, you find him at independent.co.uk and UNZ.com.
This one is ISIS unleashes death squads as Iraqi forces advance on Fallujah.
And the other, after the recent battles in Syria and Iraq, how close is ISIS to losing the war?
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Hey, I'll Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new e-book by longtime future freedom author Scott McPherson.
Freedom and Security.
The Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms.
This is the definitive principled case in favor of gun rights and against gun control.
America is exceptional here.
The people come first and we refuse to allow the state of monopoly on firearms.
Our liberty depends on it.
Get Scott McPherson's Freedom and Security.
The Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms on Kindle at Amazon dot com today.