All right, y'all, real quick, here's how to support this show.
First of all, buy my book, Fool's Aaron.
It's at foolsaron.us and the audio book is now available as well.
Sign up for the show feeds, iTunes, Stitcher and RSS, this, that, and everything.
It's all at scotthorton.org and also you can subscribe at youtube.com slash scotthorton show, the full archive, 4,600 interviews, all available for you on YouTube as well now, and then check out scotthorton.org slash donate, um, for 20 bucks, you'll be able to get the audio book here very soon.
Uh, from there also, uh, $50.
If you want a signed copy of the book, a fool's Aaron, the paperback, a hundred dollars, you get a QR code, silver commodity disc, and anyone who donates $200 or more gets a lifetime subscription to listen and think libertarian audio books, uh, take, uh, PayPal one-off and monthly donations take all different kinds of Bitcoin and digital currencies, especially Zen cash that Zen system.io.
But anyway, all those addresses are there at scotthorton.org slash donate.
And of course there's patreon.com.
There was a problem with it, but the problem's fixed now.
Patreon.com slash Scott Horton show.
If you want to donate per interview, uh, that's how to do that.
And anybody who donates a dollar more on Patrion or signs up for a dollar more per interview, we'll get two free audio books from listen and think audio.
And that could include my book now too.
So there you go.
Uh, find out all about all that stuff at scotthorton.org slash donate.
Thanks guys.
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 it, 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 except as a fact, he came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their 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 the great Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, and he's the author of The Age of Jihad, a compilation of a lot of articles from the entire terror wars, from the very beginning of the war in Afghanistan and all the way through.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing?
Good to be back.
Thank you.
Very happy to have you here.
And speaking of Afghanistan, I just did a great interview with your brother, Andrew, about his new article about Afghanistan the other day.
So that reminded me is I was overdue to talk to you and you've been doing such important work lately.
We run virtually all of it or linked to it all at antiwar.com and writing about Syria.
And so, first of all, the town of Afrin and the Turkish invasion and taking of that town from the Syrian Kurds, I guess.
So my first question would be, could you describe that taking?
They basically withdrew.
And so violence was somewhat more limited than it could have been.
Is that right?
Well, depends how you just define violence.
I mean, Afrin, there it is up in the sort of north of Syria, surrounded by Turkey on two sides and Turkish controlled territory on a third.
So it's a Kurdish stronghold, but it's the population are mostly Kurds around maybe three hundred and twenty three thousand, I think the UN said.
But it's isolated from the main Kurdish area to the east of the Euphrates.
You know, the nearest Kurdish area is about, you know, 70, 80 miles away.
So it's in a very militarily, it's in a very vulnerable position.
Now, what happened was that I was talking to quite a lot of the Kurdish leaders over the last few weeks when I was there, and they seem to be in two minds what to do.
That militarily, this place was indefensible.
They didn't have a supply line into it that runs through territory controlled by the Assad government.
They weren't allowed to send military supplies down it.
At the same time, they were wondering where to make a sort of last stand, you know, as a to make a political point.
But they could see that there was very little international interest by the by governments or the media.
The focus was entirely on eastern Ghouta.
They kept on complaining about this because they said, look, the situation in Afrin is very similar.
We have artillery and aircraft and helicopters bombarding a civilian population.
You know, we have the main hospital hit in Afrin.
We have the main water pumping station hit and destroyed, and this gets no publicity at all.
Well, if that sort of thing had happened in eastern Ghouta, you know, it could be leading the news or high up in the news right across the rest of the world.
But for these reasons, I think they decided not to make a last stand, withdrew their troops.
They knew if they did make a last stand, the Afrin city would be destroyed.
But you asked me, you know, was there any violence?
Well, the violence is that, you know, about two thirds of the population, according to the UN, has fled because they're frightened of the Turks.
They're frightened of the so-called Free Syrian Army, many of whom are going by videos that they posted themselves are in fact ISIS or al-Qaeda members or supporters.
So they're frightened and they've left.
So, you know, you have a queue, you have ethnic cleansing.
You have quite a number of several hundred people dead.
And you have big demographic change in the area.
And this may be only the opening of a generalized confrontation between the Kurds in northern Syria and the Turkish army and Turkish supported forces.
Yeah.
Now, a pro-Syrian government person on Twitter arguing that the Syrian Kurds, they really should have made a deal and invited the Syrian Arab Army, the Assad government into Afrin to prevent this from happening and that they were warned that this would happen.
What do you make of that?
Well, I think it's probably more complicated than that.
What the Kurds were saying was that the Russians didn't want the Syrian army in there, that the Russians had kind of made a deal handing the place over to Turkey.
It's not entirely clear to me that Assad wanted to send the Syrian army in there because it was engaged in eastern Ghouta.
Normally they don't, they fight on one front at a time.
And it's not really clear that the Syrians could deploy enough troops to stop the Turks.
The crucial thing is previously this area was under Russian influence.
There were some Russian troops there and above all, it was under the Russian air umbrella.
So Turkey couldn't invade so long as it couldn't use its planes and helicopters.
In January, the Russians withdrew that protection and suddenly the door opened to invasion on the 20th of January.
So I'm not entirely, I'm not really sure that that option was there.
They're saying that in Damascus now, why didn't you let us come in and stop this?
But were they really going to do that?
Did they have the troops to do that?
Could they do that?
That's a bit more dubious.
All right.
So what exactly is Erdogan's game here?
He just always wanted to take this area for Turkey anyway, and he's seizing the opportunity or?
There's that, yeah.
And basically Erdogan wants, and he says he wants to destroy the de facto Kurdish state, which has been established in Northern Syria since 2011.
He sees this as a big threat to Turkey because it could encourage the Turkish minority, you know, 14, 15 million people, whatever it is in Turkey.
If there was a sort of independent, semi-independent Turkish state just across the border in the south.
So he's always said he wants to destroy the whole thing.
Afrin was the sort of easiest place to get into and destroy.
It wasn't under an American air umbrella.
It wasn't, it's geographically isolated.
And he says he wants to destroy the rest of it.
Now, Erdogan is a kind of a mixture of this sort of nationalist rhetoric and bombast, but it's fairly, he too has been fairly practical.
Look at the Kurdish leaders I was talking to.
Didn't, well, they were divided, but the most senior of them, and I thought the most best informed of them, thought that Erdogan would wait a bit.
There'd be a lot of rhetoric about attacking.
The city called Manbij, which is this kind of next on his list to attack.
It's just on the west of the Euphrates.
It's an Arab town, but it's sort of controlled by the Kurds.
They thought that he was going on about that to divert attention from what was happening in Afrin.
So he could look considerate about that while pursuing a very hard line policy in Afrin itself.
And then, so is it that nobody knows if he's going to keep pushing further and further to the east, or seems likely?
Well, my bet would be that in the long term he will, but in the short term he won't.
Because I was in Manbij, the city I mentioned, and you see U.S. American armored patrol, armored vehicles on the roads with the stars and stripes and so forth.
Pretty humiliating for the U.S. to very openly abandon the Kurds with whom they were allied and who were their main ground force in fighting Islamic State.
The Kurds also think that if the Americans want to have any influence in Syria in the future, they kind of need allies on the ground, which would have to be the Kurds.
Maybe that will change, but that's their view at the moment.
So my betting would be that Erdogan won't attack Eastwood, whatever he says for the moment.
But he'll keep up a lot of rhetoric.
He seems to be establishing a sort of Kurdish, Turkish controlled zone north of Aleppo.
It's a mainly Sunni Arab area.
And it probably won't be very healthy to be one of the Kurdish minority there in the coming months.
So now this is an area that I gather the Americans have never actually, you know, the Marines and whoever, they actually were never with the Syrian Kurds in this particular area to withdraw from.
Is that right?
No, they're free and that was sort of under Russian influence.
But now, so do you think, or do you know if they have a deal with Erdogan, our NATO ally that, yeah, you can go ahead and beat up on them, just stay west of this line or that?
Well, I think they were sort of keeping out of it, hoping that would satisfy Erdogan.
You know, the Russians probably calculated it wouldn't be a bad idea if there was a confrontation between Turkey and the U.S., two big NATO allies.
The thing is for the U.S., they got about 2,000 soldiers there, special operations people.
But the big thing what they got is the U.S. Air Force.
But would they really use that against Turkey?
On the other hand, they don't have many other cards to play if the Turks invaded.
So, you know, I think there's a kind of stalemate at the moment.
But the bad news is, you know, you've got ethnic cleansing there.
That's kind of the name of the game in Syria at the moment, you know.
You know, the place is being divided up into three big zones, really.
Assad, you know, is taking eastern Ghouta.
He will have control.
There are probably about 16 million Syrians still in the country.
There are about 7 million refugees outside.
About 12 million are probably in areas that Assad controls.
You know, one shouldn't take seriously these little maps you see.
There's a lot of Syria's deserts.
Then about a bit over 2 million are probably in Kurdish areas.
Maybe 2 million in Turkish-influenced Saudi Arab areas north of Aleppo.
And every sort of thing else is being squeezed out.
So Syria is kind of being divided up.
And the shots are being called, really, by the, you know, the great powers, the regional powers, by Russia, by the U.S., by Turkey.
But these are the people who are really sort of determining what is happening.
Now, Patrick, if the Americans weren't there, allied with the Syrian Kurds and this SDF coalition with the YPG and all that, would they then, isn't it, it seems obvious that they would, they have no other choice at that point to make an alliance again with Damascus and accept autonomy and not so much independence there as a hedge against Turkey.
Yeah, they say they're not after independence at this stage, that they want to remain against in Syria.
I mean, the Kurds, the Syrian Kurds don't like Damascus, but they're really frightened of Turkey coming in.
So they would make a deal with Damascus if they didn't have the Americans.
But it's not clear that the Syrian government is strong enough to stop the Turks.
It's not clear that the Russians want to keep their alliance with Turkey.
Would the Russians stand by them?
So probably you're right, we're heading in that direction.
But the Syrian Kurds would prefer to have the U.S. Air Force overhead rather than relying on a Syrian army, which is quite effective, but is also quite small and a lot smaller than the Turkish army.
Yeah.
Well, they just have to remember that the Americans are always carrying a dagger in one hand.
So whatever benefit they're getting from us is always going to be temporary.
Historically speaking.
That's kind of true, but it's sort of, they kind of know that, you know.
But it's not an easy choice for them because, you know, a lot of this stuff coming out of Turkey from Erdogan, it's against the PKK terrorists, the Kurdistan Workers' Party.
It's against the Syrian Kurdish, you know, the people's protection units and their militia.
But a lot of it just sounds like anti-Kurdish that, you know, the Turkish government wants to beat up on the Kurds.
Now, you mentioned how there's FSA, so-called mythical moderates, al-Nusra types joining up with the Turks, yeah, in order to fight against these American-backed Kurds, or at least their kin anyway here.
But now I've also read, and I actually didn't spend too much time studying this, I don't know.
But I'd also read that there were former ISIS guys who were joining the SDF in order to fight against Turkey and al-Nusra.
Is that right?
I doubt if there are many, you know, there's a certain fluidity between armed groups there, but not much between the SDF and ISIS.
You know, one thing to keep in mind about this whole area that it's, you know, completely impoverished.
So young men, if they know how to fight, they'll join any military organization.
But most of the ISIS, al-Qaeda guys, either they're dead, but quite a proportion seem to have joined the Free Syrian Army under pretty tight Turkish control.
I was in touch with one former ISIS-Daesh guy who was saying, yeah, that former colleagues of his, comrades of his in ISIS had joined up with the Turks, that they'll be retrained.
And he said that he thought they'd be used as sort of cannon fodder.
And there's also quite a lot of evidence of videos made by members of the Free Syrian Army in which the guys talking, talk exactly like members of ISIS.
They threaten the Kurds, they say, you must convert.
The Kurds are already Sunni Muslims, basically convert to the ISIS version of Islam.
But it's very anti-Kurdish stuff.
It's pretty blood curdling.
And I think that's probably one of the things impelling so many Kurdish refugees to plea.
Well, and they've been bragging about their war crimes as well, posting video of them, of them, you know, desecrating the corpses, at least one that I saw of a female Kurdish fighter that they had killed.
Yeah, I never quite got to the bottom of that.
I think slightly different stories, whether she was mutilated, had been hit by a bomb or something.
But you know, it's not just one.
There are lots of these things, you know.
There are, you know, it isn't just because they're Yazidis.
There's a video of an old Yazidi man being interrogated.
How many times do you pray a day?
In other words, are you a Muslim?
This is the kind of thing that ISIS asked when it was massacring the Yazidis and raping the women and enslaving them and so forth.
You know, this is very frightening for any of the other, but there are Alawites as well.
There are Christians.
All these people are very frightened with these FSA guys coming in that seem to be covertly ISIS.
And, you know, there's another video of a guy saying, we've taken this town, this Kurdish town, we've got rid of the separatists, which seem to be the Kurds, and calling on Arabs from who once lived in Raqqa, the ISIS capital, to come and take the houses.
He said, they're great houses here.
They've got sort of olive, you know, land with olive trees on them.
You know, he's encouraging people to come over and seize the land.
So this is all sort of, this is sort of not just ethnic cleansing, but pretty well advertising, advertised ethnic cleansing.
And now, so I know it's hard to draw these lines and I don't want you to have to speculate too much or anything like that necessarily.
But ever since 2011, we've talked about how America, or at least 2012, we've talked about, probably 2011, how America and Turkey have been working together to support, you know, this mythical moderates, this FSA group, and which in practice has meant Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra to a great degree.
And so now, even the former ISIS guys and these al-Nusra guys and the so-called under the auspices of the FSA are being incorporated into Turkey's invasion of Syrian Kurdistan here.
At one point, the Americans stopped being in on it with the Turks.
I mean, I know that Erdogan has a reputation of really doing whatever he wants, hell or high water and whatever the Americans think.
But how do you think that really breaks down?
Because it used to be there was an American-Saudi joint control room in Turkey where they did the command and control for the Islamic Front.
I think it worked because, you know, from about 2014 on, that was the big change.
When ISIS, you know, captured Mosul and was advancing in Iraq and Syria, and the U.S. found that it couldn't, in Syria, couldn't have the kind of people it had been supporting with Turkey, you know, weren't prepared to fight ISIS, or they turned out to be ISIS.
You know, you remember there was a famous case where the Pentagon admitted that it managed to spend $500 million trying to train a sort of moderate pro-American, non-ISIS force, and that, you know, it produced four or five fighters.
So at that time, the U.S. found that their only real allies against ISIS were the Syrian Kurds.
You might remember there was a siege of Kobani by ISIS.
It became pretty clear that Turkey didn't like anybody much but would prefer ISIS to take the city than the Kurds to hold it.
You know, it closed the border, which is just behind Kobani.
And the U.S. started bombing ISIS, and from that moment on, you had, late 2014, this kind of alliance between the U.S. and the Syrian Kurds, which has taken about, you know, maybe a quarter or a third of Syria.
The question is, what happens to that alliance now, and how far will the U.S. quarrel with Turkey in order to maintain that alliance?
All right, you guys, here's who supports this show.
First of all, the great Mike Swanson.
He wrote this incredible book called The War State, about the rise of the permanent military industrial complex and the new right after World War II.
It's a really important history.
I think you'll really like it.
The War State.
It's on Amazon.com and TheWarState.com.
And also, he gives great investment advice, if you have any money to invest, at WallStreetWindow.com.
WallStreetWindow.com for all the financial news and the great advice from Mike Swanson.
And when you follow his advice, I know he recommends that you keep at least some of your savings in metals.
And what you'll want to do then is go to Roberts and Roberts Brokerage, Inc.
That's rrbi.co, rrbi.co.
And platinum, palladium, gold, and silver, of course, as well.
They take the slightest commission and provide great service.
And if you buy with Bitcoin, there is no service fee at all.
That's rrbi.co for all your precious metals.
And then, of course, ZenCash.
It's a new digital currency, but it's also an encrypted messaging app and file transfer app.
And you can learn all about it at zensystem.io.
That's zensystem.io for ZenCash.
And then libertystickers.com, we've got a brand new website.
In fact, just don't even go to the current website.
Wait like 15 minutes and then go.
We've got a brand new website going up there for libertystickers.com.
It'll be up sometime next week.
And I finally got Illustrator again, so we're going to be getting some new stickers up there.
Lots of good anti-government propaganda for you there at libertystickers.com.
And listen, if you want a new website, a 2018 model website, you've got to keep up with the times for your business or whatever it is you're doing.
What you do is go to expanddesigns.com slash Scott, and you'll save 500 bucks.
Let's talk about this town of Ghouta, which is, I guess, a large suburb east of Damascus here that's been under the control of various Islamist groups.
I guess primarily the Al-Nusra Front, whatever they call themselves these days, right?
Al-Nusra had some strength there.
There are a couple of separate ones, Jaysh al-Islam, generally thought to be Saudi-backed, which holds the biggest town, Douma, and a couple of other groups.
I think two of them have now agreed for an evacuation, in other words, buses that the fighters would be bussed up to Idlib, which is an opposition-held area.
That is held mainly by Al-Nusra, what used to be called Al-Nusra.
I think there's one group still holding out in eastern Ghouta, but that battle is coming to an end, that the armed groups are surrendering, but civilian population is moving out.
So airwars.org, they do a great job of keeping track of the casualties, and it's clear that the Russian and Syrian government's efforts in Ghouta to get rid of these groups have resulted in, I guess, thousands, at least, of casualties.
In fact, the numbers are lower than I might guess, even.
And yet, of course, the propaganda on both sides, on all sides, is so thick when it comes to who's doing what here.
So I don't think anybody would praise Russian air tactics and results necessarily.
But of course, the people who criticize Russia and Syria all day for their violence there, refuse to even mention that America spent a billion dollars a year backing these groups that have taken over this place.
But I guess, so my question for you- Yeah, it's like the whole Syrian war is a bit like that.
The Syrian air force with the Russians, their artillery seemed to have killed about 1,500 people in eastern Ghouta, about 6,000 wounded.
This is very bad.
But what skews the coverage of Syria is when you have, that gets a lot of publicity.
But what's happening in Afrin that we've just been talking about gets very limited publicity.
I was just in Raqqa a couple of weeks ago.
Most of it is destroyed.
This is the US Air Force, meant to be precision bombing.
But actually, all these places that are bombed look exactly the same.
Every building is gone.
It doesn't matter who's been doing the bombing.
In Mosul, there have been proper studies of people being killed.
You might have seen one by a couple of guys, I think it was printed in the New York Times magazine, who did a very definitive study of the results of US bombing in the area.
One area, which I know, Qayyarah, which is outside Mosul, wasn't that heavily bombed compared to the rest.
The US Air Force said they killed one civilian.
Real figure was 43.
The US Air Force said that one out of 157 airstrikes killed a civilian.
The real figure is one in five.
Yeah, the Syrian government and army and so forth killing a lot of civilians by indiscriminate bombardment of eastern Ghouta.
But whenever you go to these cities, whoever's been bombing them, whether it's the Syrians, the Russians, the Americans, the Turks, or the US, they look an awful lot alike.
They seem to have hit everything, and they don't really seem to have cared who they were killing.
Right.
And by the way, for that footnote, that's Anand Gopal, and I forgot his co-author's name, in the New York Times where they wrote about the civilian casualties there for the show.
Yeah, it's kind of a definitive study.
Nobody else put so much work into it.
Yeah, yeah.
He's really great.
Okay, but I saw some footage, and this is sort of a narrow point, but I'm curious if you know the answer to this.
I saw footage that at least purported to be the civilian masses fleeing from Ghouta when there was a corridor that was made where the government allowed them to get out.
And they were saying, oh my God, these al-Qaeda guys were holding us hostage, and they wouldn't feed us, and it was the worst thing ever.
But all the bad things that they have to say are about the jihadis, seemingly, about the jihadis who ruled that territory.
Yeah, I can't really accept frightened people fleeing into government lines.
Sure, they're going to say that.
Outside Mosul, frightened civilians coming off the buses.
Of course, they're terrified of being accused of being ISIS, particularly the young men.
So they were saying, oh, thank God the army is here.
These guys, they held us hostages.
Quite a lot of it may be true, or it may be untrue, but they don't really have much...
They're wholly vulnerable.
They're wholly at the mercy of the people where they're just arriving.
Well, I mean, the other case would be that the population...
I mean, the way that they put it, right, is that Assad is at war with the population, and that whatever these so-called Islamist groups are really just the people of eastern Ghouta, and that really they did have the popular support in that area.
Do you have any idea which way it went?
Well, one doesn't really know that.
You know, I was in touch with some guys inside eastern Ghouta, and one guy was trying to get his family out, you know, but the Jishal Islam, you know, still wouldn't let him get out, you know.
And so, you know, in all these areas, the guys who don't want it to be sort of depopulated of the civilians.
Why?
Because they, you know, maybe they're supporters or maybe they're human shields, you know, but there's always...
The guys inside are trying to prevent the civilian population disappearing.
So, you know, there usually is constraint.
On the other hand, there's quite a lot to be frightened out of if you do get out.
You know, there's a pattern in Syria and Iraq that you have quite small armies backed up by massive firepower from bombers and artillery.
And most of the armies there, you know, whether it's the Syrian army, whether it's the Iraqi army, whoever it is, are usually sort of moving forward under a tremendous bombardment.
You know, the same is true of the Kurds in the U.S. at Raqqa and other places.
And that, of course, means very high civilian casualties.
Most of them are extremely dishonest about this and say, you know, we try to avoid civilian casualties.
No, they don't.
They pursue a strategy which inevitably means high civilian casualties because they don't want to.
They don't have that number of troops.
They don't want to lose them.
They basically want to blow the place up and then use their troops as mopping up forces.
Right.
Yeah.
Then they'll nitpick and say, well, we shoot the bomb from the southwest instead of the northwest so that we only get one side of the house and not the whole thing.
This is part of a non-story too.
Yeah, it's kind of nonsense that, you know, I've heard that kind of stuff.
You actually go to look at the place, you know, it's a great heap of ruins, whoever's been doing it.
As I said in Raqqa, you know, you just look at every building, there are great sort of mounds of debris everywhere.
Yeah.
Well, and of course in Mosul too, where he did all that reporting out of Mosul.
Now, so a year ago, or last year, I guess I should say, we heard a lot of the same kind of narrative about Aleppo, that basically the poor people of Aleppo were being slaughtered by their government and they were being defended by the heroic moderates and this and that.
But it seemed pretty clear, at least the best I can tell from here, that the people of Aleppo, of East Aleppo, that they were really happy to be free of the al-Nusra guys and to be back under government control.
And I know that, you know, pictures control a thousand lies too.
I think the picture I have of Syria is that the poor old civilian population doesn't like anybody very much, you know, but they have degrees of fear.
You know, so in East Aleppo, you had people who supported the opposition, you know, they mostly, the toughest fighters are probably al-Nusra there.
You had people who supported them.
Then, you know, you had people who got stuck there.
You'd have a lot of guys who are military age, who are, you know, runaway, they don't want to be conscripted into the Syrian army.
But I think that, you know, they don't like the government.
They don't probably like al-Nusra very much.
You have the same in Damascus, you know, that you'd have people, you know, support Assad.
And then, you know, in recent years, really for the last three or four years, you've had an awful lot of people who, you know, aren't that keen on Assad, but they're really terrified of the other side, you know, of ISIS and al-Qaeda and others coming in and killing them or turning them into refugees, you know.
So it's kind of, for Syrians, you know, it's often trying to balance between a bad situation and a worse one.
Right.
Well, and we've really seen this and talked about this all along in this war since 2011 and 12, that, you know, I mean, for example, there are a lot of things to dislike about Donald Trump, but we sure wouldn't want to participate in a revolution being led by the Klan against him because that's not an improvement.
And the same kind of thing here, right, is there's plenty of reasons to dislike the Ba'athist regime, but compared to a bunch of bin Ladenite suicide bomber head choppers, there's not much of a question there.
Sure, yeah.
And also it depends who you are.
You know, the Syrian revolution was kind of very sectarian from day one.
People pretend it wasn't, but, you know, it's kind of a sectarian place, you know.
So, you know, a lot of the feeling was against the Alawites, you know, who are kind of Shia Muslim who ran the country.
Assad is one of them.
You know, the Christians, again, terrified of these people, so they're on the government side.
You know, the smaller minorities, Ismailis and Druze.
Initially, the Kurds were, you know, against Assad.
But, you know, generally, if you talk to them now, they don't like Assad, but better him than the Turks or any other possible alternative.
So, you know, you tot up these ethnic and sectarian minorities in Syria.
That's about 40 percent of the population or a bit under.
And then you have people who, you know, who just, they're kind of secular.
You know, they don't, their daughter, you know, has a job.
They don't want her to lose that job.
They don't want her to be forced to, you know, to cover her face the whole time and not go out without a male relative.
You know, so you have this, you know, genuine sectarian situation from the beginning.
And it's getting kind of worse, you know, with the Turks coming in, the Kurds are terrified of that, etc.
Right.
All right.
Now, so back to that in one second, but just to wrap up here on, I guess, the last war, which was the CIA-backed al-Qaeda war against, and mythical moderate FSA guys, war against the Assad regime.
That's nearly over in Ghouta, as we were talking about.
But then their last real holdout is in the Idlib province, right?
How much is left of al-Qaeda power on the ground there?
And how much mopping up, so-called, is still left to be done?
Well, al-Nusra, you know, they're pretty effective.
They'll fight, you know, ISIS and al-Nusra, they always fought very hard.
You know, I was talking to Syrian Kurds who have been fighting them recently.
They said these guys still don't surrender, you know.
And they're making a bit of a comeback in eastern Syria because the Kurds are moving away to confront the Kurds.
I was talking to one brigade that had come up from Deir ez-Zor, that's the main front against ISIS, and they said ISIS now kind of controls about sort of 25 miles of territory along the sort of Iraqi border.
They're making a bit of a comeback.
These guys have been holding a village, which they'd had to give up to ISIS when they retreated.
So ISIS is beginning to take advantage of, you know, the Kurdish invasion and divisions like that.
There are still some ISIS in Damascus.
They made an attack recently.
So, you know, they're not the force they were, but they're still around, and they'll take advantage of any sort of divisions and chaos whenever they see an opportunity.
Hey, y'all, check it out.
The audiobook has finally been released.
Just go to foolserend.us.
That's the shortcut.
It'll take you over to the Amazon page.
And very soon, actually, I got a brand new website going up at scotthorton.org, and so soon you'll be able to buy that audiobook directly from me.
But for now, you can still get it at Audible and at amazon.com, the audiobook of Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
And yes, it's read by me, and I'm sorry it took so long.
I nitpicked the hell out of it trying to get it ready for you guys.
And then plus it took them forever after I submitted it to finally release it.
But anyway, there you go.foolserend.us, amazon.com.
Just search for my name, Scott Horton, Fool's Errand.
And the audiobook is up there for you.
Also, of course, available in paperback and Kindle if you want the 1150 footnotes.
All right, now, so, you know, the Iranians have some kind of presence there.
And if you listen to the Americans, they, you know, act like this is, first of all, I guess, a brand new development, and nobody knows how it got that way.
And secondly, it's the end of the world.
And that's the reason that the Americans have to stay there and back the Kurds, because otherwise, they're basically conceding total defeat to the Assad government and to their Iranian and ultimately Russian allies and Hezbollah as well, I guess.
And so they're determined to stay.
But do you think that there's a plan to what end?
The Americans don't want to necessarily create a complete independent Kurdish state there, right?
They're just in a holding pattern to see what happens or what do you think?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, in a way, you know, this was a frame was kind of started off by Rex Tillerson, you know, the former Secretary of State, you know, you know, people say what adult, you know, Trump is, but actually, some of these guys around him, you know, are actually worse.
I mean, Tillerson, you know, made this speech, I think it was around 15th or 16th of January saying the US would stay in Syria, that it was going to roll back Iranian influence that it was going to set up.
It was going to wanted Assad to go all these very ambitious things, which kind of united the Turks, the Russians and the Iranians against the American presence, you know, very kind of incredibly old judge speech.
And this was about four days later, this is what led to the Turkish invasion and the Russians sort of greenlighting it.
As soon as he made his speech, the Turkish chief of staff and their head of intelligence were on a plane to Moscow to say, you know, this is what the Americans are saying, we want to go into a free and the Russians said, OK.
So, you know, what's American policy?
Well, there isn't really one.
I think I'll probably stick with the Kurds for the moment.
But after that, I don't know, you know, will they ever, to bring an end to the war in Syria, you kind of need the Russians and the Americans to agree.
Will they do that?
You know, it could be done.
But, you know, in the present atmosphere, all this anti-Russian feeling in the US or I'm not sure it's feasible.
Yeah, it's crazy the way the politics intervene with the reality here when the Obama policy is spent.
It's already run out of time and it's already run out of, you know, land under control of the American side in this thing.
The war is all but won.
And so now the last war to win is how do we get the Americans to just come to terms with that and admit it and shake hands like a good sport and leave the field?
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of, yeah, but it's got so complicated now, you know, will Turkey try to march in, you know, would the Syrians try to stop them?
What would the Russians do?
You know, what the US do?
You know, the US policy towards Iran, it kind of confuses the Iranians with fear.
You know, that's kind of different things, but they're connected.
So if you're talking about, you know, Iranian influence, are you also talking about Shia influence?
You know, the Alawites, some of the rulers of Syria are basically a type of Shia.
You know, that whole area from across Iran, you know, from the Afghan border, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, there's a predominant Shia influence.
Often that's taken by Washington, kind of encouraged by the Saudis and others to be sort of Iranian imperialism.
But actually, you know, the most important significant aspect of this is that this is all areas which are Shia or Shia controlled.
So, you know, are they going to try and roll back that, you know, then they're plugging into a sort of religious war.
So and there's no real sense really since 2003 that the US has really got on top of this.
Yeah.
Okay.
So speaking of the sectarian war, you know, Iraq War Two ultimately played out to benefit Iran's friends in the Shiite supermajority and help them take control of Baghdad and the government there.
And then, as you warned, American support for the jihad in Syria was re-energizing the insurgency in Iraq.
And this blew back into the Islamic State, which conquered all of basically the predominantly Sunni parts of Western Iraq.
And then that resulted in Iraq War Three launched in August of 2014 and fought through basically last fall in the end of 2017 before the Islamic State was finally rousted out of Mosul.
So now you have Ramadi, Tikrit, Fallujah, Mosul, and I guess some others too, that have newly been liberated by the Shiite forces backed by Iran and backed by the United States in this one in mopping up the blowback from Islamic State growing so large.
But so I say all that to ask you, sir, now what for the predominantly Sunni Western half of Iraq?
Well, you know, they've suffered a pretty decisive defeat.
You know, the Sunnis turned up as a vehicle for their opposition to the government, you know, ended up with being ISIS.
ISIS is being defeated.
Their cities, Ramadi, you know, a lot of that's destroyed.
Fallujah is badly damaged.
You know, a lot of Western Mosul is gone.
You know, so they've suffered a pretty catastrophic defeat.
You know, the Americans are always telling the Shia government, you know, include the Sunni in, but, you know, they don't really have any leaders to include in.
So, you know, the Shia are now pretty confident.
They've just sort of done a recent deal with the Kurds.
You know, they're not in a bad position.
What worries them?
And I was in Baghdad about three months ago.
It worries the leaders.
What worries al-Abadi, the prime minister, is, you know, where is this confrontation between the U.S. and Iran leading?
You know, is it going to be fought out in Iraq as has happened before?
That's what worries them.
They also want to see the war in Syria ends, ending, because they can see that, again, you know, destabilize them for it led, one of the things led to the rise of ISIS.
They want that ended.
So, you know, so long as that war in Syria goes on, it has a capacity to destabilize the countries around it, to spread sectarianism, you know, to keep this sort of pulse of violence going on.
And, you know, that could still affect Iraq, could affect the other countries neighboring Syria.
And then so, I mean, is there anyone prepared to be the government of Iraqi Sunni, Stan?
Not really.
It's not going to, you know, that kind of beat, you know, there was a government because ISIS, you know, a lot of them didn't like ISIS, but that was the vehicle, you know, and it got defeated.
I mean, a very bad idea for the Sunni to my mind, but, you know, if they'd had some form of opposition to what was going on in Baghdad, that was a bit more inclusive, they wouldn't have got beaten so badly, but they didn't.
And they have been beaten.
Right.
Well, I would say famously, it should be famously, you were on this show a year before the fall of Mosul in the spring of 2013, right around this time, maybe a little later, April or May 2013, reporting that, hey, I've been to Mosul, and all the Shiite Baghdad army have retreated back behind Shia lines, because they sort of felt like they're out there in Fort Apache without good enough, on enemy territory, basically, foreign territory, at least, without adequate supply lines, and they've retreated, and they've basically left Mosul wide open.
And so, we could just see that coming for a year after that, that, I mean, Al-Qaeda and Iraq renamed themselves the Islamic State of Iraq back in 2006.
They made it pretty clear what their goal was.
And so.
Sure thing, yeah.
Yeah, it's sort of, a lot of this, you know, one could see coming pretty easily.
But it's the same question again, right?
If Western Iraq is wide open still, and the Shia government, even with Iran's help, doesn't, can't really rule it.
Yeah, maybe it won't happen that way.
You know, one shouldn't be sort of, become a professional, saying to people in Iraq, they shouldn't become professional pessimists.
You know, Iraq has had 40 years of wars and emergencies, really, since the rise of Saddam Hussein and the war against Iran in 1980.
You know, there's some chance now, there's less violence in Baghdad, there's some chance of a more sort of normal situation.
It's not inevitable, but overall in Iraq, things are getting better.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I mean, are there any specific, I mean, you mentioned how there's basically no one, in terms of Sunni leadership, tribal leaders, or I guess, former Ba'athists, or anybody to even reconcile with.
It's sort of, you got the population at large out there.
Yeah, you can't, you know, there's nobody really to reconcile with, you know, there's kind of leaders, but then you discover they can't go back to their own towns, because they don't have any support there, you know.
So, yeah, so they're not, you know, they're kind of players and so forth, but they kind of lost it.
All right, great.
Thank you very much for coming back on the show, Patrick.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
All right, you guys, that's the great Patrick Coburn.
He's at The Independent, independent.co.uk, and he wrote The Rise of Islamic State, and also The Age of Jihad, a bunch of great books.
All of his articles are reprinted over at unz.com, U-N-Z, unz.com.
And you'll find here, Turkey to launch wider offensive against Kurds after taking Afrin.
And before that, the Syrian war could still be raging in four years' time.
And you guys know me, I'm scotthorton.org and youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
Subscribe there.
Check out my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
It's now available in audiobook, foolserrand.us for that.
And read what I want you to read at antiwar.com and at the Libertarian Institute, libertarianinstitute.org.
And follow me on Twitter, at scotthortonshow.
Thanks.
