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Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to 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 put away.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as 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, Ben, say it, 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 from The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
And Patrick, I'm sorry, I'll ask you to turn your speakers down just a little bit if you could, getting a little echo there.
And yeah, he writes independent.co.uk and he's the author of The Age of Jihad and Muqtada al-Sadr and many important books about the terror wars.
And he's got two new articles about Iraq and they're reposted at unz.com, unz.com as well.
Iraq executes 13 and orders hanging of hundreds more.
And Iraq isn't as dangerous as it was, but many still live in fear.
Reporting live from Baghdad.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you, sir?
I'm fine, thank you.
I really appreciate you joining us again here.
So, well, and live for me, recorded for the rest of you.
So, Iraq war three is basically over now.
ISIS has been rousted out of everywhere, but as you say in the article, a couple of spots inside Syria, but they don't seem to have any major safe haven left inside Iraq.
Is that correct?
Pretty well.
I mean, there are a few isolated places.
There's a place called the Hamreen Mountains, which is between Baghdad and Kirkuk.
And it's quite close to the sort of main road north where ISIS have, they killed, shot eight police and security guys last week, which led the Iraqi government to execute 13 prisoners that they said belonged to ISIS.
But overall compared to three, four years ago, yeah, they've lost that territory.
Yeah, I think I remember your earlier reporting about that, about some of the ISIS guys who fled from Mosul didn't flee into Syria.
They fled back south again across the Iraqi government and militia lines to cause havoc as smaller groups inside.
And it sounds like it's still, that's still going on.
But so I really appreciate this story about what life is like for the regular civilian population of Baghdad, who you're talking to in the aftermath of all these wars here.
You want to tell us a little bit about them?
Yeah.
I mean, for a long time, you know, Iraqis were completely focused on their own security and their families, you know, how to stay alive, how to stop your children being kidnapped.
You know, what is the safest place to go on the streets where you won't be hit by a suicide bomber?
Now, security is a great deal better.
It's better than at any time since 2003 when the U.S. invaded.
But that means that people have the time and the energy to focus on how shabby things are otherwise.
They notice that, you know, there's been practically no new building in this city for 40 years.
The infrastructure, the roads and so forth were built for a city of 2 million people.
Now it's got 8 million people.
It's the second biggest city in the Middle East, biggest after Cairo in the Arab world, I must say.
And then, you know, lack of electricity goes on and off.
You know, where I'm staying, the electricity, there's an emergency generator, but it flickers on and off the whole time.
People complain about water.
You know, the Tigris and Euphrates are lower than they've ever been.
And we have the worst traffic jams probably in the world.
So people focus more on that.
And that said, you know, things are better.
But Iraqis, ordinary Iraqis have had such terrible time for so long, you know, that anything that happens like, you know, an ISIS ambush, you know, five or six people are killed.
They think, oh, my God, ISIS is coming back.
You know, there are sleeper cells everywhere.
They get really frightened.
You know, a couple of kidnappings, everybody thinks, God, it's going to be my children next.
So they take their children to school, you know.
So the things have got better.
But, you know, it's taking quite a lot of time for people to feel less nervous, to be less on edge.
And maybe with reason, you know, because in the past things have got better for a bit, then they got worse.
I think that this time there's a much better chance of them staying better.
But, you know, Iraqis have learned the hard way that you can't rely on them.
Well, now, so what's lucky about me is I've been able to talk with you for years now and read all your great journalism and then follow up and speak with you about this.
So before Iraq War III broke out, in the meantime, between the last two wars there, you had done such a great job of warning that this was going to happen, that there was Sunni representation in parliament, but they didn't really have the ability to deliver the goods to the predominantly Sunni parts of the western half of the country.
And how the Shia government, dominated government in Baghdad and its army, didn't really have much authority over those places, especially in far-flung Mosul and that kind of thing, as you reported a year before Mosul fell.
And so then this, you know, raises to me the question, right, is now in the aftermath of Iraq War III, what is to become of these predominantly Sunni areas and which factions will be the tribal leaders or the former Ba'athists or who is going to have the power in Sunnistan and what kind of reconciliation can be achieved so that this doesn't happen again?
Well, I was up in Ramadi and Hit in Anmar province, which is the great sort of Sunni province, Sunni Arab province west of Baghdad yesterday.
You know, there's a lot of destruction, but actually quite a lot of reconstruction as well.
I was in a town called, city called Hit, about 100,000 people.
It's on the Euphrates.
You can't get across to Euphrates, but it was the main bridge is blown, the only bridge is blown.
And I was joined by members of one particular tribe called Albu, Albu Nimr, which ISIS Daesh sort of tried to wipe out and killed at least 900, maybe 1,000 of them, another 1,000 disappeared.
Now, these people, you know, they're still pretty nervous, you know, guys like that.
I was talking to one guy, he said, yeah, well, you know, we climb onto our roofs, our flat roofs here every night with my gun in case ISIS should come back.
There isn't much sign of ISIS coming back.
But when people have, you know, been subject to genocidal attacks, you know, they don't want to find that it's happening to them again.
You find that all over.
This tribe is a particularly sort of one example of people who lost an incredible number of members were murdered by Daesh.
But you find all over this sort of nervousness.
And again, you know, there are questions of, you know, a lot of these guys in this particular small city I was in, which I mentioned, he'd had their houses blown up by ISIS.
If ISIS couldn't get its hands on them, in which case it killed them, but even if it did, it could blow up their houses.
Now, when they've come back, they've taken over the houses that ISIS was previously in.
Now, some families who would they say are the families of ISIS members are coming back, wanting these houses back.
So you have this tension over real, you know, who owns stuff and so forth.
And that isn't going away.
The, you know, all these guys, they watch, you know, television, LRB and they hear about ambushes in other parts of Iraq.
It makes them really nervous.
But this isn't violence on anything like the scale before.
But, you know, the way this place is traumatized enough, it doesn't take much to get people really on edge, you know, again.
You know, the place is pretty secure so far as I could see, you know, there was no real trouble on the road, not a lot of soldiers around, looking at pretty effective health checkpoints.
That's really the pattern of things improving, really improving quite a lot, but the degree of sort of terror that people feel hasn't gone down anything like the same amount.
Yeah.
I just spoke with Elijah Magnier and he'd been to Mosul and he said, you know, yeah, it had been a devastating air war as you've done really the best work in reporting or some of the best work, at least, I should say, in the war and the consequences for the people of Mosul there.
But he also said that they seem to really be back up and running and they're okay now, basically.
The war really is over and they're getting back to work and things are going to be okay kind of attitude about it.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, you know, it's, you know, it's comparative.
Right.
Yeah.
People survive, you know, you know, in bombing, you know, you know, the dead don't vote, you know, people think the guys who suffered worse aren't around to say how bad they feel about it because they're dead, you know, people who survived, you know, they try to get on with their lives.
What else can they do, you know?
Um, so I think things are a lot better there.
Um, but, um, you know, one problem if you're a Sunni you have in Iraq is what if you go to the road, you leave your native province, you know, guys from Anbar, I was talking to somebody from Anbar yesterday, his photographer, and he said a real problem because in Iraq, your province, the province you come from is on your ID, which is where you show, show it every checkpoint.
As soon as they see the name Anbar, they think, aha, maybe this guy is ISIS.
So they give you a hard time.
I don't necessarily mean they beat you up or anything, though that could happen, you know, but you spend hours in the sun, you know, it's very, very hot here at the moment.
And the same thing in Mosul, you know, can you move around?
Can you get out of town?
It's a question you have to ask in any city in town here, particularly if Sunni, you know, they may say they're okay where they are, but they may be really difficult for them to get out.
I was talking to a farmer in a place called Qajish in Baghdad, a Sunni area used to be strong, the guy says stronghold there, but it isn't anymore.
And a farmer there was telling me some people from this area haven't been to Baghdad for 10 years, although it's only an hour and a half's drive down the road, because they're frightened of the checkpoints.
They're frightened, you know, maybe, so you know, some people get picked up just because they have a name similar to some name on a list of the soldiers.
You know, you can spend an awful long time in jail because of that.
So, you know, that's sort of a pattern here.
It's, he's right in saying, Bagna is right, some very good stuff.
He's right about saying, you know, it's better, it's getting better.
You know, they're very relieved that ISIS isn't ruling them anymore.
You know, but there are lots of pretty nasty things that can happen to you all the same.
All right, hang on just one second.
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Well, and so, speaking of which, since we've last spoken, sir, Muqtada al-Sadr and his group and coalition did the best in the recent parliamentary elections.
He didn't win a majority, and he himself wasn't on the ballot, of course, but his faction and his men.
And I guess the last I heard is he's going to go ahead and make an alliance with Abadi and the Dawah guys again, because that's basically how it's been.
But I'd like to think at least, Patrick, but I don't know, that part of what helped him was that he, even though he has been part of sectarian war in the past, he's also has spoken very magnanimously about how there can be a new, you know, national future and a brotherhood with the Sunni as Iraqis and limit the influence of Iran and America, that same line he's been pushing.
And I wonder if you think there's any kind of change coming with him?
Yeah, Iraqis, so yeah, kind of has changed.
He always was an Iraqi nationalist, you know.
That's something the US never understood when they were fighting him in Niger in 2004.
You know, they said he is a pawn of Iran and so forth.
Well, you know, he's fighting Americans, you need weapons and you need ammunition and you need money, you get it from wherever you can.
But, you know, he and his family have always been strong Iraqi nationalists.
The other interesting thing about this election is, you know, the non-sectarian element.
He had an electoral alliance with the communists, which is rather amazing for a religious cleric who has semi-divine attributes to many of his authorities.
But he said, you know, that his movement had been protesting against social conditions here, lack of electricity, lack of water, corruption, and so forth.
And the communists were doing the same thing.
So they had an alliance.
Now, for a certain number of people here, particularly sort of intellectuals and so forth, you know, this was a sign that he was serious about social progress and secularism, if you go as far as having an alliance with the communists, who, you know, are quite well respected here.
They were sort of tortured out of existence by Saddam and so forth.
But I mean, they did make something of a comeback.
They're not that big, but it was a sort of sign to a lot of voters here that Muqtada really was serious about secularism and really serious about social progress and attacking corruption.
The problem is here that the way this place was set up is a bit like Lebanon.
You know, there's a quota system for different sects, the Kurds and the Sunni and the Shia, which effectively are different parties.
So each party sort of gets hold of, you know, if it's in government, one or two ministries, and then that ministry becomes a cash cow for that party and for the individuals leading that party.
So, you know, every contract, you know, there's so much money or the contract is awarded after a big bribe and so forth, some of which will go to individuals, but it also will be funding some political parties.
That's how they do it.
So you kind of institutionalize corruption here.
Until you end that system, that's going to go on.
All right.
Well, thank you, Patrick.
I know you're in a hurry and need to go, but I really appreciate your time again on the show.
No, thank you.
Thanks very much.
Anytime.
Okay, guys, that is the heroic Patrick Coburn.
I really mean that too.
Out there really getting the work done reporting from Baghdad for us.
He's at theindependent.co.uk and he's the author of The Age of Jihad and the Rise of Islamic State and Muqtada and more than that, I'm forgetting.
Hang on.
I got them on my shelf.
Where's my Patrick Coburn section?
Oh, there you go.
Chaos and Caliphate.
That's the one I was trying to think of as well.
Chaos and Caliphate.
Great book about the Islamic state there.
All right.
Thanks, guys.
All right, you guys, and that's the show.
You know me, scotthorton.org, youtube.com, scotthortonshow, libertarianinstitute.org, and buy my book, and it's now available in audiobook as well, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Hey, it's endorsed by Ron Paul and Daniel Ellsberg and Stephen Walt and Peter Van Buren and Matthew Ho and Daniel Davis and Anand Gopal and Patrick Coburn and Eric Margulies You'll like it.
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Thanks, guys.
