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Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the wax museum again and get the finger that FDR.
We know Al Qaeda Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say and I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name, been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys introducing Patrick Coburn.
He is Middle East correspondent for The Independent and the author of a great many extremely important books.
The latest being The Age of Jihad.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm doing good.
Good to be back.
Good.
I really appreciate you joining us.
Patrick's on the phone, on the line here from Baghdad today, covering Iraq War Three for us.
And so we've got a lot of big doings, I guess two major topics.
And then you can take these whichever way you want, Patrick.
First of all would be the liberation of Raqqa from Islamic State in eastern Syria.
And then, of course, also would be the Iraqi armies marching into the city of Kirkuk and taking that from the Kurdish Peshmerga forces there after their joint victory over Islamic State in Mosul.
So tell us what you can and then I'll come up with some follow up questions for you, please.
Well, the two things go together because they mark the defeat of the caliphate that Islamic State established three years ago after they captured Mosul in June 2014.
And they fought very hard for these cities.
The siege of Mosul went on for nine months.
U.S. military thought at first it would take about two.
Raqqa went on for four months.
So they fought very hard, but they lost at the end of the day.
So the caliphate is basically destroyed.
ISIS is sort of still in business, but it'll probably be as a sort of rather fragmented guerrilla force.
Now, this has transformed the politics of the region.
I mean, both Iraq and Syria and has wider repercussions beyond there.
It's transformed it because of the Baghdad government and of Haider al-Abadi, the prime minister and the Damascus government of Bashar al-Assad.
President Bashar al-Assad are both much stronger.
They both won victories two or three years ago.
They were on the back foot.
Now they're victorious.
They're going to stay there.
Other issues come to the fore, which is the Kurds in both countries benefited in a sense from the rise of Daesh or ISIS because central governments were defeated.
They could expand.
The Iraqi Kurds sort of took a lot of disputed territories.
They did the same in Syria.
There are only about two million plus Syrian Kurds, but they've taken a whole wedge of country in the northeast of Syria backed by the U.S.
And so you have these kind of quasi-Turkish states in both places that are now under a lot of pressure, under pressure in Syria and in Iraq.
Of course, it's just imploded with the fall of Kirkuk.
President Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish leader, had this, to my mind, completely idiotic idea of having a referendum on Kurdish independence at the very moment that the central government in Baghdad was stronger than ever.
They just won a big victory in Mosul and was likely to respond militarily.
This happened and the Kurds didn't have a military option.
They abandoned Kirkuk.
They abandoned the oil fields of Kirkuk, which were really essential if you're going to have a Kurdish state.
But that seems to be out the window now.
In the last few hours, there's been a ceasefire between the Kurdish and Iraqi government forces.
But not only have the Kurds lost the disputed territories, all the territories they've gained since 2003, but they're likely to find that their degree of independence they have in their core provinces is going to be much more limited in future.
The Iraqi government wants to get control back of its borders.
At the moment, you can go Kurdish areas without a visa.
You can't do that in Baghdad.
So there's a big transformation of what's happening in the whole of this area, in Iraq and Syria.
All right.
Now, to hone in on one point here, the Iraqi Kurds, without control over Kirkuk and the adjacent oil fields, they really have nothing, right?
That's their everything in terms of income for their national income there.
Correct?
They have a few oil fields of their own, but that's kind of limited.
It's much less than they had before.
It's not clear they'll be able to export it independently of Baghdad.
So they had actually a pretty high degree of independence beforehand.
They controlled their own borders.
They had their own army.
They controlled their own oil fields.
They had big oil revenues.
They kind of threw it all away by challenging Baghdad at the moment, as I said, when it was pretty strong, and when the Kurdish referendum was opposed by pretty well everybody, by Turkey, by Iran, by Baghdad, but also by the U.S.
And so they didn't have any allies.
So it was, you know, one of the great self-destructive acts that I've ever seen in the Middle East or anywhere else.
Well, now, I talked with Joe Lauria, and he's been living there in Erbil for a while, and he certainly agrees with you about just what a foolish maneuver it was to do in terms of public relations and relations with the other countries in the region.
But he said that the referendum itself was still far short of a real declaration of independence.
It was really mostly for show, and that, boy, everybody sure did overreact as though it was a full-fledged declaration of independence.
Well, yeah.
It gave an opportunity for people who might want to squeeze the Kurds anyway.
You know, if the Kurds, they sort of brought on a confrontation, which they were likely to lose.
The bad amounts of power had switched against them.
You know, the Iraqi armed forces three years ago were running away from Daesh.
The whole northern army broke up.
They lost Mosul.
But these days, they just recaptured it.
You know, they fought pretty hard.
It was a big victory.
So this was not a moment to challenge them.
So I think that the Kurdish leadership either, you know, just miscalculated through arrogance and misinformation.
Probably they thought the US would veto any military action by the Baghdad government.
They just got it wrong.
So, and probably it's too late now for them to get much back.
They're very much on the back foot.
You know, they're known to be defeated.
People used to see them in other states in Europe and elsewhere, used to see them as a sort of force for the future.
And they won't say that and see that anymore.
When Tillerson, Rex Tillerson, the US Secretary of State, was here a few days ago, normally that sort of visit state, you know, the US Secretary of State would go to Baghdad and also Erbil to see the Kurds.
This time he just came to Baghdad.
So the Kurds are suddenly a much less political weight as regards Iraq and the Middle East in general.
Well now, so do you think that Baghdad then is now, you know, extra confident in their ability to push the Kurds around and maybe consolidate their control and be willing to negotiate, be less willing to negotiate with the Kurds about such issues?
Well, you know, they have all the high cards.
The Kurds don't have too many.
But, you know, they've just agreed to a ceasefire.
I think probably the sensible thing for them to do is, you know, they've got back to the disputed territories, Kirkuk, they probably will have substantial control, is not to push it too hard.
They've got far more than they could have expected a month ago.
And it's usually a mistake in Iraqi politics, you know, it's the basic building blocks of politics in Iraq are, you know, Shia, Sunni and Kurd.
And it's usually a mistake to squeeze another community too hard, because they'll react, they'll find foreign allies, you can't permanently put them out of business.
You know, even somebody as brutal as Saddam Hussein couldn't ultimately crush the Kurds.
And I think al-Abadi is probably sensible enough not to do that.
But on the other hand, you know, people are fairly cock a hoop in Baghdad.
They feel, you know, we've been pushed around by these Kurds long enough, let's, you know, really make sure we're in control in future.
The Iraqi army is feeling, you know, its best units are feeling also, you know, we're, we can handle anything, we're not going to have sort of rival powers in Iraq.
So, you know, that might happen, but probably won't.
All right, now, so, well, I want to talk about the Syrian Kurds, but I want to sound like I'm just picking on the Kurds here, Patrick.
So let me first ask about the predominantly Sunni Arab areas of Iraq in Anbar province, and I guess it's Nineveh up there by Mosul, right?
But so that would include Tikrit, and I guess Ramadi and certainly Fallujah and Mosul.
So what's going to happen to them now?
Because of course, as you reported in real time, and on this show, in the lead up to the creation of the caliphate, the Baghdad government wasn't really exercising much control over these predominantly Sunni areas.
That's why it was so easy for the Islamic State to march right in, just as you predicted that they could.
Yeah, it was pretty, you know, it practiced enough oppression to really alienate the local population, but didn't, wasn't really have the power to control the areas as much as possible.
Well, you know, these days, it's very different because a lot of these cities are in ruins, you know, Ramadi is mostly in ruins, Fallujah isn't quite so bad.
West Mosul is, a lot of that's in ruins, and a bit of East Mosul.
So, you know, their main cities are destroyed.
The, or a lot of them, the Sunni villages along the roads have often been leveled.
And the people are, you know, in IDP camps or in refugee camps, because they were seen, these villages were seen as the sort of source of, you know, bases for guerrillas and people partying, IEDs.
So, you know, ISIS has been defeated, but the Sunni community, which was their base, Sunni Arab community, there are about 5 or 6 million Sunni Arabs in Iraq, you know, has also taken a tremendous hammering.
A lot of them have been reduced to refugees.
One Sunni journalist told me, you know, some time back that he thought that we Sunni in Iraq were going to be the new Palestinians, you know, basically lose, you know, most of our homes.
And this has sort of happened.
Now, it may be considered unjust that all the Sunnis should be blamed for ISIS, but that's the way things have worked.
ISIS became the dominant sort of political military force in the Sunni community.
And now the Sunni are going to pay a price for that.
All right, hang on just one second.
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It's interesting.
Just before talking with you, I was talking with Matthew Ho, the former Marine Corps captain, Iraq War veteran, and also was the whistleblower in the Afghan War.
And he brought up Negroponte and the El Salvador option of hiring the Bata Brigade, Shiite militias, to kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad and really helped to provoke the Sunni insurgency far more than they prevented it back in 04 and 05.
Yeah, I wouldn't go along with that.
I wouldn't go along with that, Scott.
I think that's conspiracy theory stuff.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I don't, for a moment, go along with that.
You know, an awful lot of things that people think are generated from outside Iraq are generated from within.
You know, there was always going to be a conflict between the Sunni and the Shia in Baghdad because the Sunni had been the ruling, the dominant group in Baghdad under Saddam, but under the British, under the Ottomans.
And, you know, so this was a real sort of social transformation when the Shia, originally what you had was already a Shia Kurdish bloc taking over, which here are about 60 percent or two-thirds of the Iraqi population.
The Kurds are around 20 percent.
And that sort of bloc ruled Iraq for quite a long time.
Then began to break up.
The Kurds began to become less interested in having power in Baghdad.
Baghdad became, sort of, felt like being shortchanged by the Kurds.
Now the Shia bloc is very much in charge.
And we'll see what's going to happen with the Kurds and the Sunni.
Probably the wise thing, as I said, for the Shia is to play it cool, is not to really drive these other people into a corner.
Well, they'll look to come back militarily and look for foreign allies.
They need to sort of cut them in.
They need to give them a cut of the cake, cut of power, cut of money, cut of jobs.
And they could do that, but we'll see if it really happens.
But it's not correct that in the early years of Iraq War II that America allied with Skiri and their Bata Brigade forces.
I mean, in that the core of the Iraqi army as we know it today, in that Hakeem's faction.
No, there wasn't much of an Iraqi army at that stage.
In the early days, you know, the Americans overthrew Saddam.
Then, you know, a sort of Kurdish-Shia combination took over.
There wasn't much of an Iraqi army.
The American occupation didn't sort of look to have much of an Iraqi army at that stage.
Then you had the rise of Al-Qaeda and so on.
But Al-Qaeda very much took the initiative in murdering people, you know, those suicide bombs exploding in civilian crowds, killing hundreds of people.
This was very much something that was coming from Al-Qaeda-type organizations and from the Sunni.
And one of the ways the mechanism worked was you had to blow up a lot of Shia.
You know, they might have a couple of Al-Qaeda people in some Sunni district here.
They'd go and shoot or blow up a lot of Shia.
Then there would be revenge attacks.
Then the Al-Qaeda would say, right, we're the defenders of the local community.
And the local community had no choice but to look to them.
And to a degree, that mechanism still goes on.
Al-Qaeda or ISIS provoking sectarian hatred and then posing as the defenders of the Sunni community.
Of course, the whole result of all this has been catastrophic for the Sunni.
But that's really the way it was.
Yeah.
Well, you know, you had talked about how, you know, again, in the run-up to the creation of the Islamic State, you had quoted leaders of the Shiite government in Baghdad saying that, hey, American support for the revolution in Syria is helping re-energize Al-Qaeda in Iraq here.
And this could lead to a real problem.
And so then, you know, that was all to check Iranian power in Syria.
It ended up getting so bad that it led to the creation of the actual Islamic State.
So then America went back to war for the Shiite factions again.
So now it's sort of like they repeated Iraq War II, only they've spread Shiite power even further to the west and to the north.
As you've talked about, these cities are pulverized and the Sunnis are kind of pushed out.
Do you think that the Shiites are actually going to expand the borders of Iraqi Shia-stan?
Oh, no, I don't think so.
They're not sort of ethnically cleansing people.
You know, it's in the nature of things that they have sort of taken over.
I mean, they are the power in Baghdad.
And I don't think they'll necessarily sort of drive people out.
But they're the dominant fact.
In Syria, you have a complicated situation in which the US and Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the Europeans were trying to get rid of Assad and replace him with some moderate secular figure and some moderate secular movement and were supplying arms.
The problem was there never was such a moderate secular movement which actually had armed strength in Syria.
There are plenty of spokesmen sitting in London, Washington, and Istanbul, but they don't have any armed strength on the ground.
So if you were sitting in Damascus, you know, lots of people there were anti-Assad, but they're even more terrified of the opponents of Assad because they knew these were ISIS and al-Qaeda.
You know, there was this peculiar American and European intervention, which is kind of based on a fantasy, and they were encouraging the supply of weapons.
But actually, these ended with ISIS and al-Qaeda.
So it was always contradictory.
Ultimately, of course, the US ended up by having itself with the Kurds against ISIS and fighting the same enemy as Assad while at the same time condemning Assad.
It was always a pretty contradictory policy under Obama and rather less contradictory, frankly, under Trump.
Yeah, it seems like he's at least backed off the support for the jihadists in the west of the country, as far as I can tell.
Yeah, I mean, it goes up and down, but they seem to have, and you know, it seemed to me one of the more sensible things that Trump said during the election.
It was always a bit bizarre that Hillary Clinton was still pumping up this, you know, this failed policy that really was based on a fantasy.
All right, now, so you mentioned that the Syrian Kurds, the YPG, aka, also known as, too many acronyms, too many initials, the YPG, also known as the SDF, under American Special Operations Command, you know, Advisory Command and Control over there, they have made a huge gain in liberating Raqqa from the Islamic State.
And you mentioned that they have expanded their territory.
So then the question is, you think they're going to try to bite off more than they can chew and hold on to some of this territory, or that the Americans really want them to, or they're going to, job done, retreat back to their own lands?
It's a big question.
Nobody quite knows.
You know, it's a very long way from cool Kurdish areas for them to be fighting in the far east to the, you know, in this oil province, Darazor, their local Arab tribes who could be recruited.
But, you know, all that's a messy...
