08/24/16 – Jonathan Landay – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, introducing Jonathan Landay, now over at Reuters.
Check out the new movie coming out, Woody Harrelson starring as him in Shock and Awe, I guess, next year, something like that.
And here you are writing with our old friend Ned Parker.
How's he doing?
Ned's great.
You know, Ned is now – it's good to be back on the show.
Yeah, welcome back.
Ned's great.
I know he's now based in New York.
And it was just – it's been a great experience working with him.
Yeah, it's been quite some time, but I used to interview him back during the days of Iraq War II pretty regularly.
So anyway, you guys have a story here about that same war still going on, the Shiite militias.
And this is something that has obviously been a real big kind of outstanding question of how are the Shiite – how's the Shiite army, so-called Iraqi army, the Shiastan army, and the Shiite militias?
How are they going to treat the Sunnis?
Are they going to take and occupy and cleanse the formerly predominantly Sunni cities like Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, or whether they're going to work with the tribes and work with the Sunni populations and let them back in?
And you've got an update on how that's looking so far.
Jonathan, go ahead.
Yeah, I don't think there's any question, Scott, that the Iraqi security forces, the professional forces in particular, units like the Counterterrorism Service and the Golden Division, the units that are really professionally trained and have undergone even human rights training from the International Red Cross and the United States, et cetera, et cetera, there's no doubt that they're going to be okay.
In fact, it was through their professionalism and really training and actions that, you know, somewhere around about 100,000 Sunnis were safely evacuated along established escape routes, escape routes established by the Iraqi security forces that they were able to escape from Fallujah.
How long it's going to be before they actually get back to their homes, that's a big question right now.
And as far as the militias are concerned, you know, I think some of them are probably, you know, maintain themselves under the command and control of the Iraqi general staff and the military.
There's a couple of militias, though, which happen to be some of the biggest and most powerful that appear to be problematic, at least according to the people that we talk to.
And in particular, one of the biggest called Kitab Hezbollah, raised, armed by Iran, trained by Iran, very, very close to Iran.
And from what we were told by both Western officials and diplomats and survivors of the abuses in Fallujah, we're responsible for the majority of the abuses there.
And that's the problem, because that was a city of just over 100,000 people.
When you're talking about Mosul, the population estimates go up to as many as 2 million virtually, and as far as we know, all Sunni, because if you weren't Sunni, you either escaped or you were killed when Islamic State took over Mosul.
And that's, therein lies the lesson from what happened in Fallujah, and that is that some of these militias are just totally outside the control of the Iraqi military and outside the influence of the United States and the American ability to ensure that they remained under the control of the Iraqi military.
And now, so are they just taking revenge and torturing some people, or this is real terrorism with a real purpose of warning to the population of Fallujah, don't bother coming home?
I think that's a really good question, Scott.
The question is, it goes to the situation post-Mosul after they deal with what remains to be the biggest city, the sort of ad hoc capital, if you would, of Islamic State in Iraq.
What is the intention of these Iran-influenced, in certain respects, directed Shiite militias when it comes to the Sunnis?
And it's not apparent.
Look, if you want to talk about a potential model, let's talk about Tikrit.
From what we understand, you know, a lot of the Sunnis, most of the Sunnis have gone back, or a lot of the Sunnis have gone back, but they're living under the thumb of the Shiite militia.
We've been told that the militia itself has based itself in Saddam's old palace, that the police are kind of under the intimidation of these militias.
And so what are the intentions of the Shiite militias post-Mosul?
Good question, not apparent.
It's not looking good, though, you know, in terms of the degree to which they're prepared to return what was predominantly Sunni areas, cities, towns, villages, to their original inhabitants.
Or is this something that they're, or do they intend, do they intend to put what was sort of these predominantly Sunni areas of Iraq under their thumb post-Mosul to ensure that, or at least in some kind of effort to prevent, you know, Islamic State 2.0?
That's the big question.
Yeah, I mean, it seems like under Maliki, he was content to basically just cut them loose.
And, you know, since all the oil is up in Kurdistan or down south near Basra, and the Shiites got the capital city now thanks to the USA, then you Sunnis can just go rot in the sun, and who cares about you?
But now that we've got Iraq War 3, and we got, you know, this massive displacement of civilian populations, maybe they'll decide to bite off even more of Iraq, you know, and expand the borders of southern Shia State.
I think the question really comes down to what does Ayatollah in Iran want?
I'm not sure it's the Ayatollah.
I think it's General Qasem Soleimani and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Quds Force that he oversees, and how they decide that they want to ensure their security.
You know, let's not forget history didn't start yesterday, or even with the American invasion.
Iraq invaded Iran, started under Saddam, started the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, which, you know, killed, I think it was, you know, don't get at me if I'm wrong, but I think somewhere an estimated one million Iranians, and that they were having their capital city and other cities pummeled by Iraqi scuds with chemical weapons.
They don't want that to end, and they faced Iraq under Saddam Hussein that was developing nuclear weapons.
They don't want to ever have to face that ever again in terms of their national security and the threat potentially posed by their neighbor, Iraq.
They want to make sure that there's a benign Sunni-run, sorry, Shiite-run Iraq that's never going to threaten them again.
And so that is really where Iran's interests lie, I think, in where Iraq is going.
Right.
Important footnote here for the audience.
Don't get it twisted.
When Landay says Saddam was making nukes, he's talking about in the 1980s when he was still our friend and up until 1991.
He's the guy who debunked Saddam's current nuclear weapons program, so-called, in 2001, 2, and 3.
So don't anybody misunderstand like you were just hearing Cheneyite war propaganda because you weren't.
Good point.
Good point.
But it is a fact that he was, you know, after Israel bombed his IAEA-safeguarded and inspected nuclear facilities, that then he took them underground and started making weapons out of them, or trying to.
But not just that.
I mean, he did have a fully-fledged effort going to figure out how to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.
And he had everything, including the design of a nuclear weapon, and he had the missiles.
What he didn't have was the fissile material, the fuel for a nuclear bomb, and that's what he was never able to develop.
That's the key that he was missing, and that's what Cheney said that he had managed to solve, that he was close to having a nuclear weapon.
Well, he never was able to get that most crucial step towards getting a nuclear weapon.
That's just more of that footnote.
Right.
All right.
Now, I'm sorry, I've got to cut you off because we've got to do Andrew Coburn on Yemen next, and I know you're in a hurry, too, but this is really great work here.
I'm sorry we didn't really have time to go over all the bits and pieces here, but very important work in Reuters by our friend Jonathan Landay with Ned Parker, too.
Special report, massacre reports show U.S. inability to curb Iraq militias.
Thanks, Jonathan.
Sure, Scott.
Take care.
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