11/16/16 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, introducing our friend Patrick Coburn.
He is Middle Eastern correspondent for The Independent in Britain, and he's the author of a great many great books.
One of the most recent is The Age of Jihad, and he's got a lot of great articles.
One of them is running today on antiwar.com, and that's about Tal Afar.
The battle to drive ISIS out of Tal Afar will be bitter and bloody.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you?
I'm great, thanks.
I really appreciate you joining us again here on the show.
And first of all, how many weeks – I know you're back in the U.K. now, but you just got back from Iraq, correct?
Yeah, I was in Erbil in northern Iraq, which is just sort of to the east of Mosul.
And so I was covering that story on the outskirts of Mosul.
All right, so good times.
So let's get to Tal Afar in a minute, but first of all, you have this one from the other day.
Iraqi troops in Mosul could be Trump's first crisis.
This is a question that we had asked, kind of pondering the future.
Are they going to flee or are they going to really stay and fight in Mosul?
And it seemed like – am I right?
– that early reports seemed like maybe mostly they were running away to Syria to try to fight another day.
Well, they seemed to be – early on their sort of morale seemed a bit shaken.
I mean that some of the fighters didn't want to fight.
They seemed to have executed a lot of people very publicly, hanging them from electric poles and from bridges.
And now they're fighting very hard.
You know, it's difficult.
They've got whole networks of tunnels.
So you see the same area being captured by the Iraqi army, so one, two, three, four times, and then ISIS comes back.
I guess one of the questions that's sort of remained a question even during the actual attack on Mosul is just how coordinated are the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Iraqi army, and the Iraqi Shiite militias, and how closely do their agendas consign at this point?
Well, that's the big question.
I mean the big surprise was that they reached an agreement in the first place.
That was probably a big surprise, a nasty surprise for ISIS, was they really don't like each other.
And I think the Kurds are still pretty nervous having a large Iraqi, essentially Shia army right next door and with the big detachments of Shia paramilitaries, militias as well.
There was an agreement that the Iraqi army would go into Mosul but not the Shia militias or the Peshmerga.
But now we'll see what happens.
If the fighting goes on and they can't take Mosul, do they bring in the Shia militias?
It mightn't be obvious that they're doing so because in the past the militias have just changed into federal police uniforms.
So there wouldn't necessarily be an announcement.
The Peshmerga, a bit less likely they'll get involved, but they're just on the edge of Mosul as well.
And what about the Iranian Kurds force?
They're not there for as far as one can see.
They don't have influence, obviously, within the Shia militias.
And also the Iraqi army, it's very much a Shia army.
I was in one town, Karakash, which they captured from ISIS.
ISIS didn't really fight for it.
It's a Christian town just to the east, about 12 miles out of Mosul.
I came to one checkpoint on the road, the man by the Iraqi army, and they were distributing tea and biscuits.
It was rather nice.
But the reason they were doing it was that there was a big Shia festival coming up called the Arbaeen, and they normally do this, Shia do this, to celebrate this festival.
So it made the point that these units are all grown from Iraq's Shia majority.
Yeah, well, it's certainly been that way.
That's sort of how we got here.
People will have to check the archives, right, at The Independent and our old interviews going back for that.
And so now what about the Sunni tribes?
They've said they found some, you know, awakening, quote-unquote, type of tribes to join this fight, right?
Yeah, I mean, they're sort of coming in.
That's not quite, you know, this is often presented as the Sunni tribes are involved, so the Sunni of Mosul won't be frightened.
Often these are parts of tribes who are anti-ISIS and probably got defeated by ISIS or a lot of their family members got killed.
So a lot of these, when these people come back, they're not exactly going to make noise.
I mean, they're going to sort of, a lot of these people are pursuing vendettas against people who killed their family.
Yeah, it's a funny atmosphere there.
You know, it's sort of presented that everybody's going to be nice to civilians and so forth, but, you know, you talk to the, a lot of the, you see these refugees, displaced people coming out of Mosul, and, you know, they go to a camp with white tents.
But a lot of the Kurds, the Iraqi army, the others, they all think these are the families of ISIS.
You know, they don't think of them as just being ordinary displaced families from Mosul.
Right.
Yeah, just as the Sunnis always call them the, how do you say it, the Safavids or whatever, as though it's still the old Iranian empire.
Sure, yeah.
I mean, the Safavids, meaning they're Iranian.
There's a real sort of atmosphere of sort of half-suppressed religious hatred in the area, sectarian hatred.
We were just kind of sort of understandable given the number of people that ISIS massacred.
And now a lot of the units coming back are, you know, have lost relatives to ISIS.
So, you know, in some ways I'm surprised it hasn't been worse.
Well, now, I think I lost track, Patrick, at 10 or maybe right around 13 different armies.
If we include, you know, the Syria side of the war in, you know, Western Islamic State and the Iraq side of the war, it's something like 10 or 13 different armies.
And never mind all of the foreign states.
I mean, I'm throwing in Turkey because their army is actually on the ground.
I guess I should throw in the U.S. would maybe make it 14 if you count the special forces.
But there are so many factions converging on this battle now from all sides.
I wonder, you know, if the Islamic State at some point here within, you know, it's just a matter of time, right?
They'll be rousted out of Mosul, out of Tal Afar, and out of Raqqa, and they'll just be a militia again without any real territory to hold.
But, I mean, really, who knows?
Was anybody even making bets or know even where to start making bets on the different Kurdish and Shia and Turkish and all the different factions and what the next stage of the war is going to be?
Like, for example, I guess I should narrow it down.
Is there a real threat of Kurdish unification and declaration of independence from the four or five states that divide it now, for one example?
I don't think so because in northern Iraq, you know, they talk about the leader, Massoud Barzani, talks about having a referendum on independence.
You know, the problem is, first of all, they're very broke.
In fact, they're bankrupt.
They don't have any money.
And, I mean, they are exporting some oil, but not enough.
So, you know, there's no way that they could be financially independent.
Also, just Baghdad doesn't want it.
The U.S. doesn't want it.
All the neighboring states don't want it.
You know, normally you can get Kurds, you know, if you wave the flag enough, you can get people to vote for independence.
It's not really the big preoccupation at the moment among ordinary Kurds.
It's also that parties are very divided.
So I don't think that's going to happen.
But you're right.
I mean, everybody in the area, including the Kurds, wonders, you know, who fills the vacuum after ISIS is defeated.
You know, what happens in Mosul?
Is it the Iraqi army going to occupy it?
Then you have a big Iraqi army just down the road from the Kurds.
You know, what's Turkey going to think about this?
They've been threatening to invade.
There was a mechanized brigade down the border the other day.
The, you know, things are still up in the air.
And ISIS may not sort of entirely disappear because they could still engage in sort of guerrilla war.
They may have lost their cities and so forth.
But will they be able to do that?
You know, they were pretty effective guerrilla operation before.
They might go back to doing that.
Or maybe they'll transform.
Maybe they'll join some other organization like al-Nusra in Syria and just operate through them.
So it's still sort of very fluid.
But there's a general feeling, you know, this is it.
You know, that if you want to make a bid for a share in power, you do it now.
All right.
Now, I think it was, well, I can't remember where I read it.
I think maybe it was the New York Times.
They were saying that part of the reason that the Americans are bogged down, or why the whole effort really is bogged down there in Mosul, is because unlike in Fallujah and Ramadi, where the civilian population largely fled before the worst of the onslaught, the population in Mosul are basically trapped, which deprives the U.S. of the opportunity to just carpet bomb the place like they did to Ramadi.
And that's kind of what's holding them up.
The civilian casualties would be too high at this point.
Is that right, do you think?
I think there's probably a good deal in that, yeah.
I mean, Ramadi is completely shattered.
Fallujah is pretty badly damaged.
A lot of the population is out still.
By the way, you know, people sort of, this is all a bit nastier than the way it's presented.
You know, in Fallujah, a lot of displaced people left the city, passed through Iraqi army lines when they were attacking it in the summer.
You know, they moved into tents.
But a lot of the young men of military age were picked up by the army and have disappeared.
Nobody knows where they are.
You know, so people in Mosul probably have the same fear.
The thing is that nobody's sort of been inside Mosul.
It's difficult to know what the real situation is.
I was talking to one Kurdish leader who said who had been deputy governor of Mosul for a long time.
He's kind of an expert on the city.
He said he thought about a third of the population supported ISIS.
I don't know.
How do you tell those things like that?
I think a lot of reports of guerrilla action against ISIS inside the city is probably propaganda.
It's exaggerated.
If the fighting goes on, then the temptation is going to be to escalate the bombing.
You know, this has happened before.
And, you know, how is this done?
Basically by saying, you know, we're bombing pinpoint accuracy and we're bombing areas where there are no civilians.
But, of course, there will be civilians there.
So we haven't quite reached that stage yet, but we might.
Well, so now, not famously, unfortunately, you were, you know, one solid year ahead of the fall of Mosul, not necessarily in the rise of the Islamic State in the place of the Iraqi army, but in the Iraqi army's abandoning of Mosul, basically, as, you know, one Fort Apache too far out on the frontier on basically in another country, in Iraqi Sunni Stan, where they were no longer welcome.
And they were basically going AWOL, leaving their posts and going back safe behind Shiite lines.
So now here we are where it's been a few years.
That was three and a half years ago, right in the spring of 2013, when you reported that.
And so now we've had the rise of the Islamic State and now the war against it again.
And we're looking very soon at the Iraqi army, that very Shiite army, as you pointed out, being ready to possibly occupy the city again.
But then the question is, and I don't know if you have any real clue into this, but I wonder whether you think the government in Baghdad maybe is a little bit more realistic about the situation now, that maybe they need more of a confederation and alliance with somebody in Sunni Stan instead of trying to dominate it, which they obviously cannot do.
And their attempt to do that only led to the rise of the Islamic State.
So when people are questioning, and I know you've even quoted the Kurdish leaders questioning whether the Iraqi Shiite army is going to stay.
I guess my question is, do you think they're really dumb enough to try?
Well, I don't know it's so dumb.
It would be pretty nasty.
I guess difficult.
Some part of it's fighting quite hard.
You see, the thing is that the Sunni, they're about a fifth of the Iraqi population.
The Iraqi population is about 33 million, probably about five or six million Sunni in the country.
Now most of their cities have been devastated, you know, Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit.
The same may happen to Mosul and Tal Afar, which is a city to the northwest.
But so they're getting weaker.
You know, people talk about giving us a confederation, but they're getting pretty weak.
So it may well be that Baghdad thinks it can dominate things, and they may be right for the moment.
But, you know, the thing is that some people are getting sort of more and more of the Sunni population is being turned into refugees, basically.
I was talking to one young man from Ramadi some time back, and he was saying, well, we're going to be the new Palestinians.
We're going to be people without a home.
And they might end up that way.
And they don't really have, you see, any leaders apart from ISIS.
There isn't any sort of moderate leadership.
There isn't any real leadership to talk to the government.
There are some tribes, but that's not really enough.
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Yeah, I guess, you know, I had talked with this one kind of historian of the situation in Iraq, and he was, and I think he admittedly, and I'm oversimplifying his oversimplification, but he basically said that power in Iraqi Sunnistan is really a three-legged stool with the tribes, the Ba'athists, and now the jihadists, and how, you know, during the awakening, the tribes and the Ba'athists had made the deal to turn against the jihadists.
And then now what's happened is the jihadists and the Ba'athists have made a deal to turn against the tribes.
So then the question is whether, since none of these factions really are going away, would be whether they could recreate this, basically, the awakening situation where the Ba'athists and the tribal leaders combine to marginalize the jihadists.
But, of course...
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
Also, you know, where are these people going to live?
You know, a lot of their people are now refugees.
You know, they may all have these plans, but, you know, you need a sort of civilian population to operate out of.
You can't do that if all your cities are a heap of ruins.
Right.
Yeah, and that's what's happening, you know.
So I think the thing is all over Iraq and Syria, you have a situation where all communities sort of fear other communities.
You had people who are sort of mixed in with the population, you know, minorities like Christians or others.
But now each sort of community wants its own little bit of territory.
Christians, there are many of them these days, but around Mosul, you know, they want to have their own sort of autonomous area.
They don't want to be ruled by Baghdad.
They don't want to be ruled by the Kurds.
They want to do their own defense.
They may not be numerous enough to do that, but that's true of all communities.
They're all frightened of each other.
And this doesn't just come from the top, you know, it comes from the bottom.
And you may have seen reports, you know, of Saudi Arab villages being taken over around Mosul, and people, local people being shot or tortured and thrown into graves.
So it's, and the same is true in Syria.
You know, this sort of thing, you know, has been happening, happened earlier in Turkey.
You know, Turkey, 1914, 20% Christian.
You know, 10 years later, about 1% Christians were either dead or in exile.
So, you know, this is one more area where you had a mosaic of communities, that now a few communities are merging out on top, and the other ones are dead or having to run away.
Yup.
Yeah, boy, if only we could have a do-over of 2003, I'll tell you.
Yeah, they really let the, they started things going then, didn't they?
Yeah.
All right, now, so Kirkuk.
Now, if I understand this right, Patrick, just to set this up here a little bit, this is a city that's not up in the mountains of Kurdistan, that's really Iraqi Kurdistan, the region, but out there on the plain, and it's been a very disputed territory between Arabs of different factions and the Kurds for a long, long time, and repopulated and depopulated back and forth between different sects over the, certainly over the last century, including by Saddam some, and then during the 2003 war, and during that time, but so now, I guess, my understanding is the Baghdad government, that Shiite government, and the Iraqi Kurdish government both claim Kirkuk basically as theirs, and any federalism in the Iraqi system be damned, they're nationalists when it comes to Kirkuk, and I just wonder, I don't know, part of the question would be, what's the population now, in terms of like 60-40 or whatever, and what, who's Kurdish and Arab in the city, and who has the police power there, and I know that might be a ratio as well, and what you think might be the short-term future of the status of Kirkuk.
Well, Kirkuk matters, you know, because there are the oil fields there, that's what kind of made the city of Kirkuk.
You're right, it's down in the flatlands there, and it has, its population used to be sort of Kurdish-Arab-Turkmen.
In what proportions, this was always disputed, maybe, let's say, they each had about a third.
Then in 2003, the Kurds, who said they wouldn't take it, marched right in and took it.
I remember this, I was there that day, and I remember actually a senior Kurd saying, we're only here for a bit, we're restoring order, my men will be out of here in 45 minutes.
That was in 2003, they're still there.
The Kurds run it, but it's not part of the sort of official Kurdistan regional government.
It comes under Baghdad budgets and so forth, but they have a sort of, actually a pretty effective and good governor called Nazim al-Din Kareem, who, when he wasn't governor in fighting in Kurdistan, when he was an exile, was a neurosurgeon in Washington, but he's pretty effective and non-sectarian and well-liked.
But now there was a very recent episode after the attack on Mosul, I think about the third week in October, when a hundred ISIS fighters somehow got into the center of Kirkuk, took over buildings.
Nobody seems entirely clear how they got in.
They were eventually killed, but it gave us a nasty shock that they sort of got in in the way that Mosul fell in 2014.
And since then, there have been sort of Arabs in the city have been thrown out.
This has sort of increased Kurdish-Arab friction, because the Kurds suspect that the Arabs who live in Kirkuk were complicit, were involved in getting these hundred ISIS fighters into the city.
And some of them seem to have been sort of sleepers who've come from there.
But relations weren't great before, but this has made them much more dangerous.
All right.
So now let's switch to the Syrian part of the war for a minute here, if we could, to wrap up.
I'm sure you're aware of this Washington Post story that says, now post-election, we're not sure if he was trying to stop Hillary or if he basically, after Trump won, he decided to go ahead and do what he always wanted to do and what Trump wants to do, which is abandon CIA efforts to support the mythical moderates and go ahead and let Assad and the Russians take them on, as well as the Islamic State there.
I wonder what effect you think that will have in the near term here anyway, in the lame duck period.
Well, it depends how quickly things move.
You know, rather like Mosul, we have a siege of East Aleppo with the Syrian army outside, with various Shia militia from Iraq and Lebanon supporting them, 5,000 or 6,000 people inside, I mean fighters inside.
Nobody quite knows how many civilians are in there.
The UN says a quarter of a million.
How many people in Tripoli think it's less?
But anyway, quite a lot of people.
I doubt if they'll be able to fight their way in very easily because it's a war in the streets and you've got very tough fighters and it's difficult to use tanks.
Even if you bomb everything, you turn buildings into a ruin that may be even easier to defend.
I think for quite some time it's been evident that the U.S. had decided that its priority was getting rid of ISIS and the whole attempt to produce a sort of pro-U.S., pro-Western groups, armed groups that were anti-ISIS but were also anti-Assad had just been a disaster.
The group they did focus on as being anti-ISIS was the Syrian Kurds.
So they seemed to have rather given up on that quite some time ago.
And it's been pretty evident, it seems to me, that Assad was not going to go since the end of 2012 because he controlled a lot of the country and was supported by Russia and Iran and so forth.
So in a way it's a recondition of reality.
I think they thought so too, right?
They just decided, well, but let them keep fighting and fighting and fighting.
Yeah, they did.
It's kind of Kissinger's awful remark about the Iran-Iraq war.
You know, I hope they both lose.
A million people, a million people are going to get killed.
So they felt they didn't like either of them, so they were fighting.
But it was also the Islamic State changed that a bit.
I think that was their policy prior to that.
Of course, I think that whatever they said about, you know, we must end this war, the kind of political military establishment in America and Britain certainly thought, you know, this isn't going to really affect us very much.
But first of all, it destabilized Iraq.
And then in last year, in 2015, ISIS suddenly starts launching these attacks in France and Brussels and elsewhere.
And then there's the great sort of crisis over migration of Syrians from Turkey to Europe.
So they thought it did affect the rest of the world.
So I think that their willingness to sort of let things just bubble away is much reduced this year.
They really do want to get rid of ISIS.
And their enthusiasm for getting rid of Assad, I think, is well done.
Yeah.
Although, you know, as we talked about before, I mean, the best you can do, you can make them a militia again.
You can destroy the Islamic State, their little so-called caliphate.
Its days are pretty much already gone.
But Assad and Russia and Iran and Hezbollah and everybody fighting together with America out of the way and even assuming America insists that our allies stay out and quit funding the so-called rebels and all that.
Still, you can't really get rid of these guys once you create them.
You know, this is al-Qaeda in Iraq, right?
Yeah, particularly in Syria.
Most of the 60% of Syrians are Sunni Arabs.
Now not all of them are on the rebel side, you know, but Syria is a pretty big constituency.
You can't just get rid of them.
So, you know, this is quite a long way to go yet.
You know, and obviously just like in the States, everybody wonders what the impact of Trump is going to be.
Who is Trump going to appoint?
You know, all these people seem pretty weird.
You know, there's Trump saying non-interventionist policy, or, you know, super-interventionists like, you know, the various candidates being considered.
So, you know, it all seems very messy.
Nobody quite knows what the outcome is going to be, and I'm sure, you know, ISIS commanders just sort of studying the news along with everybody else wondering what it means for them.
Yeah.
Well, I guess I'm placing my bets on they're going to rejoin the al-Nusra Front as the Americans start bombing them, and they're going to kind of move towards each other maybe.
Yeah, we'll see.
I mean, as you said, you know, there's an incredible number of players involved in this.
Nobody quite, you know, all of them want to get a share of whatever happens at the end of this war, but they don't.
It's too late for them to back out now.
Well, I'll say, you know, the whole sort of— there's a sense in Europe, you know, of the Brexit vote, the things that sort of—the smell of disintegration around, you know, now with Trump elected, the feeling that everything's getting more unstable, not just in the Middle East.
Yeah.
All right, now, so last question here, Patrick, and I'll let you go, but just kind of hypothetically speaking, I mean, certainly we've seen Kerry and Lavrov try.
That is, the U.S. and the Russians try, and it makes sense that we could get the Iranians, the Syrian Baathist government.
I guess you have the Iranians speak for Hezbollah or however they want to handle that, but most—many of the groups in Syria, and perhaps—I guess this is where it really comes in— many of the groups in Syria, it seems like they're available to negotiate, even if they don't necessarily want to right now, but they're available to negotiate and be able to enforce a peaceful settlement on their own side.
But on the jihadist side, are there enough so-called moderates at all who actually could be negotiated with?
Because it seems like—I mean, who really?
I don't really know about the Al-Nusra Front.
Maybe we could negotiate with the Al-Nusra Front too, but it seems like at least politically that's impossible.
So is—but is there anyone— is it theoretically possible to do some kind of awakening thing where a power that really can speak for the majority Sunni population of— or even the plurality of the Sunni population that supports the rebellion, somebody that could speak for them who could come to the table and negotiate some kind of peace?
Because if we have a war until somebody wins, it's going to go on forever, right?
Yeah, until somebody wins it, you know, which isn't happening at the moment.
But my—I don't think there is, because the armed opposition in Syria is dominated by jihadis, by Islamic State, by Al-Nusra, by a few other organizations.
But they are sort of—they tend to be very Islamic.
You know, particularly in a place like East Aleppo, you know, they always were Islamist.
The guys who are a bit less Islamist tend to be around Damascus, and so they tend to be losing out, being sort of removed from the ball.
So in a place like East Aleppo, maybe Al-Nusra is only about 20% of the fighters, but they are the best fighters, and they tend to coordinate things.
So they're sort of in control of the non-ISIS armed opposition.
You know, Arar al-Sham, another organization there.
But they're all pretty—you know, all these— first of all, all the armed opposition want to impose— want to introduce a Sharia law in their areas.
But I don't think, you know, there never has been a sort of moderate armed opposition with which to negotiate.
Of course, there are lots of people abroad who are very happy to negotiate, but the problem is they haven't been back to Syria for a long time, and if they tried, they'd probably be dead very soon, not because of the public, maybe because of the government, but more likely because of the opposition on the ground.
So no, I don't think there is anybody really to negotiate at the moment, and that's one of the—remains one of the great problems.
Well, I guess we'll see how powerful they are without CIA support, assuming Trump really does call it off at this point.
Yeah, we'll see.
They don't necessarily go out of business.
The groups that the CIA was really supporting, you know, tended to be the weaker ones.
The—there's no doubt they are weakened, but, you know, they're still— I'm not sure other people like that.
Those guys will fight very hard.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate you coming back on the show as always, Patrick.
No, thank you so much.
All right, Shaul, that is the great Patrick Cockburn.
He is Middle East correspondent at The Independent.
Thank God.
He is the author of The Age of Jihad and a ton of great books, too, but that's the latest, The Age of Jihad.
You can find him at independent.co.uk and at unz.com, and just keep your eye on antiwar.com.
We run everything he writes there, too.
And that's it.
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