For Pacifica Radio, February 9th, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, you guys, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, all available for you for free at scotthorton.org.
Okay, you guys, introducing Suhaddad al-Salehi.
She is a reporter out of Baghdad, Iraq, and she wrote this incredibly important story a couple of weeks ago here, U.S. seeking to carve out Sunni state as its influence in Iraq wanes.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, thank you.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Happy to join you.
Great, great.
So, first of all, The New York Times has a story that came out last night about how, oh, wouldn't you know it, it turns out there's no proof that Khatib Hezbollah did the attack on the American base on December 27th that led to the escalation back and forth, which led to the killing of Qasem Soleimani and almost a war between the United States and Iran last month.
And they're saying that actually, you know what, it looks like it was more likely that the rocket attack was perpetrated by the Islamic State, what's left of ISIS in Western Iraq there.
What do you think of that?
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if I heard that, because at the end of the day, Iraq is an open arena for all the international intelligent services, especially Iran and U.S.
And we know that U.S. have interest to create many stories and to build up on and treasure specific actions.
But actually, I cannot say yes, they were right or not.
I know that how they are working, you know, that they are digging deeply to say that at the end of the day, they have to prove it.
But as I said, I wouldn't be surprised because I know that there were many fake stories which were created or established or built up by U.S. and other intelligent agencies in Iraq last decade and a half just to justify specific reactions.
Right.
Well, we do know that the reason they were there at that base was they're embedded with and working with the Shiite Iraqi army fighting against the Islamic State.
So it would only make sense that it was an ISIS attack rather than an attack by America's actual allies, the Shiites that they're working with to fight against what's left of ISIS there.
Actually, Scott, you cannot be sure in this way, because in the area we have so many Shiite armed factions are deployed there.
Okay.
As I said, I cannot approve it or deny it.
But you cannot say that it is impossible or it is excluded possibility that maybe a Shiite armed factions or an Iran-backed armed faction would involved in this attack.
Right.
It is still that possibility is existed.
Right.
Yeah.
I think that's right.
I don't think anybody knows with 100% certainty, but as they say in the New York Times piece, Khatib Hezbollah hasn't been anywhere near there since 2014.
This is not their area.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is wrong.
I cannot pretty sure saying this, this is wrong.
We have Khatib Hezbollah and we have other Iran-backed allies who are deployed in the area.
Not really very close to the base, but they are deployed in the area specifically along the wild roads, link and bar to the borders.
Okay.
Right.
Well, okay.
So that being the case, I mean, when they took their revenge strikes, the Khatib Hezbollah base that they hit was like 500 kilometers away.
So they didn't seem to know any Khatib Hezbollah targets closer that they could hit at the time.
But as you say, it's really indeterminate.
We don't really know who did that attack, which goes to the real point of the Americans claimed to know who did the attack and immediately responded against Khatib Hezbollah there, which led to then the protest kind of pseudo riot at the embassy and then the assassination of Qasem Soleimani.
And based on the Americans claiming, trust us, we have proof.
We can't tell you what it is, but we know that Khatib Hezbollah did it.
So that alone is cause for concern, whether we know that it was in fact an ISIS attack or not.
Look, first of all, we are journalists, either me or in New York Times, Alyssa Johnson, who did that report, or even you, we are journalists at the end of the day.
Our exercises or whatever we have, our tools to investigate things, it's not, there is no comparison between them and between what U.S. as intelligence or as a state have to prove that or not.
I believe that the U.S. audience have a right to ask to get the proofs that why they involved in such war or why they started such war.
But at the end of the day, yes, as a journalist, I cannot say 100% that Khatib was behind that attack or they weren't.
Okay?
Because I have an area where Khatib Hezbollah and many other armed factions backed by Iran are deployed.
Also, at the same area, we have so many, the remnants of the ISIS are operating there.
The third thing that U.S. already has an interest to fabricate this story.
So all possibilities are not excluded.
All are existed.
Right.
Well, so if we go back to the second Iraq war, 2003 through 11 or so there, it was essentially the situation that America and Iran were both supporting the same groups in power, the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa party.
But then they were kind of having a race contest over who would have the most influence over them at the end of the day.
And the Americans thought that their money and weapons would buy them more influence.
And the Iranians thought that being co-religionists and next door neighbors, and in fact, having supported Dawa and Skiri for about 30 years before the war, meant that they would have that influence.
And so even though we're working together on the same project, it was sort of a contest to see who would come out on top.
And of course, the Iranians have far more influence with the Baghdad government than the Americans.
And they really have.
And this is, I think, kind of the background, really, to set up of what your articles about here is that the Americans really regret that they fought Iraq War II and Iraq War III, the ISIS war, on behalf of not just the Shiites, but Iran's best friends, including, you know, in the Bata Brigade and these other Shiite militias and so forth.
So now this is what your article's about, is another stage of the redirection and tilting back toward the Sunnis, because they're so mad at what they've accomplished in the last two wars there.
Now they want to try to turn around and carve out a Sunni state in, I guess, mostly the west of the country, although there's more to it even than that.
Can you tell us about how you learn this, about the Americans' plans for the Anbar province and the rest now?
First of all, the project is not new.
We have been hearing about it since years, since 2007.
And whenever there is a serious problem or a crisis between U.S. and Shiite parties, this project just appeared from somewhere and put it on the table.
The last one, there was serious, there were serious negotiations over this project in 2014, just like weeks ahead of the big show up for the ISIS.
But at that time, actually, it was backed by Qatar and Turkey, mainly by Ikhwan, by the brotherhood's groups.
And there was also a big map, specific details, specific people working on conferences to back the project everywhere, in Doha, in Turkey, in Erbil, in some other places.
And suddenly, talks stopped because of the big show up for ISIS.
And even with that, many politicians said that the breakthrough of ISIS was a part of this project.
So it wasn't new.
It sounds like every time, whenever there is a problem or tense between Shiite politicians and U.S., they just use this project as a card to pressure them.
Now, suddenly, Sunni politicians started talking about, but actually, first of all, you would feel that we are talking about three different projects.
The first one is we are talking about administrative regimes or regions like, yeah, administrative regions like Anbar region, Mosul region, Basra region, something like this, just to fix the problems between the central government and the provinces, especially in the western areas and southern areas.
And this project, specifically the Islamic Sunni parties are backing this project, which is individual regions or individual provinces.
The other one is, no, it's something bigger, something deeper and something long-standing and would impact the whole country, which is what we are talking about now is the Sunni region, the same old project, but now the adopters, the faces that adopted is a new, not the same faces.
Sounds like Americans excluded the Islamists, Sunni Islamists, politicians who used to work on this project.
And then they just offered this project to their new alliances, like the speaker, Mohamed El Halbousi, and his allies.
The main idea is, okay, you would get investments, you would get money, you would get whatever you want just to create this region.
The idea is very simple.
Shiites are dominating the area and they are acting as or behaving as the victorious people, so they are controlling everything.
They failed to manage everything and the demonstrations that all the Shiite areas have been witnessing since October 1st.
It's a proof that they failed to provide anything for their audience in Shiite areas.
So why you stick to them?
Why you don't create your own region, which would be similar to the Kurdish region?
Usually in the previous years, when there were any talks about this, the main thing that even Shiites were patting on is the conflicts would break up between Sunnis and Kurdish over the distributed areas.
So now, you as official sounds like fixed this problem by saying, okay, you don't need to fix this problem as long as you're going to join the Kurdish region at the beginning as a second step after you create your Sunni region.
Then later, you can fix both of them by giving them Kirkuk, giving them some areas in Mosul, then they will give you whatever you want related to the disputed areas.
So it sounds like there is a clear idea what the U.S. exactly wants and what the Sunni are looking to get, specifically the Sunni politicians.
Well, pardon me if this sounds absolutely insane.
What about the Sunni-based insurgency that fought the Americans and, I mean, to a standstill, didn't defeat them, but certainly were not defeated by them in the war between 2003 and, say, seven or so when Petraeus started bribing them to stop fighting us and stopped attacking them for that matter.
This is who our guys are there fighting now.
What's left of the Sunni-based insurgency led by ISIS there?
And they just think that's going to not be a problem?
Actually, ISIS will be one of the small problems that would be faced by this region or by the people who would be responsible for this region.
Well, compared to their new problems with the Shiites, I guess, right?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Because the last thing that we heard publicly from Mishan al-Juburi was one of the prominent Sunni politicians.
He said publicly on a TV interview, he said, actually, the first thing that would Sunni politicians have to do to convince their people to back this project is, first of all, to justify why they are willing to separate.
So they're going to create or form a new armed factions to carry out specific assassinations and security operations inside the Sunni areas just to treasure Hashid Shaabi or the Shiite armed factions to involve in fighting or to fire back, just to justify why they have to separate and why they have to create problems with the Shiites and why they have Sunnis to tolerate more problems and more concerns to create this region.
So I believe, yes, ISIS will be the smallest problem that would Sunnis face in this case.
Specifically, if we consider that there's the nature of Sunni politicians, most of them are willing to be heads, heads of the tribes, heads of parties.
They have to just, you have to give them positions.
It's all about the prestige.
It's all about shows.
And it's all about, you have to provide them with positions.
So the competition would be created in this very small region.
How you would deal with it?
Everyone has money.
Everyone has armed factions or had has arms, not armed factions.
Everyone has influence.
Everyone has his backup, tribal backup.
So and everyone, of course, has his regional backup.
How would you fix it?
Fix it.
And you have all those people in very small area.
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All right, you guys, we're talking with Suhaddad Alsalahi.
She's a reporter out of Baghdad, Iraq.
And we're talking about the dawn of Iraq War Four here, really, the second redirection.
If people go back and read the famous Seymour Hersh piece from 2007 about the redirection toward the Bin Ladenites then, but then ISIS blew up in their face too big.
So they had to take the Shiite side again in Iraq War Three to destroy the Islamic State.
But now they wish they hadn't done that either.
And so now they're talking about, I don't know, digging up Uday and Qusay and putting them back in power in Iraqi Sunnistan, which is going to lead to a massive war.
For the people who have trouble keeping up here, the Shiites are the super majority, 60% of the country, and their political factions are the ones that George Bush fought Iraq War Two for, and that Barack Obama and Trump fought Iraq War Three for.
To turn around and fight the war against them would be, it should be absolutely out of the question.
I don't know how any of these people think that they can do this without causing a huge, a full-scale war against Baghdad and the people that they've been backing for the last 17 years now.
I totally agree with every single word you said.
How they are thinking, how would they believe that they would create such region or such a state without putting the innocent people who have no interest in such projects on the sake.
This means they are just putting Sunnis at the rage of fires of Shiites, okay?
Because we have weapons everywhere here in Iraq.
We have money, we have weak government, and you have this crazy project.
What do you expect?
Shiites will let it go?
That simple?
No way.
No way.
So let's talk about the map here.
The article is at Middle East Eye.
It's called U.S. Seeking to Carve Out Sunni State as its Influence in Iraq Wanes.
And so very importantly, you talk about the Diyala province here, which is on the eastern border of Iraq, about midway up between Iraqi Kurdistan and Iraqi Shiistan, is this very mixed province which still has a great many Sunnis.
I don't know, please, if you can tell me.
No, no, Scott.
Go ahead, go ahead.
Okay.
First of all, we are talking about the base of this region, which would be Anbar.
Anbar is 100% Sunni area.
This is the far west.
This is west of Baghdad, where Fallujah and all that is, right?
This is the core of the project, because if you control Anbar, means you would control the western part of the Iraq, because the Anbar is represent like a third of Iraq arena.
Okay.
So if you get Anbar, control it completely, means you would control the main roads link between Baghdad and the Syrian border.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
I thought I read in here that you were saying that the plan would include even seizing Diyala province as well, no?
A part, a part of Diyala, a part of it.
Oh, yeah.
Again, back to, the Shiites are not going to tolerate that.
They're going to go to war over that.
Guaranteed.
No, no, no.
The war will not be in Diyala, Scott.
The war would be in Salah al-Din.
The war would be in Salah al-Din.
In the middle, essentially.
Yes.
The Salah al-Din is mixed.
And there is the shrine, the Assyrian shrine in Salah al-Din, which is Shiite.
The shrine, when it was bombed in 2006, we faced the most bloody or the bloodiest civilian war in Iraq since centuries.
Okay.
Dozens of thousands of Iraqis were killed because the sectarian war erupted in Iraq after some gunmen bombed that shrine.
We have it.
Actually, in 2014, in June 2014, when ISIS was advanced toward Baghdad, I was working with the New York Times, and at that time, I said that they would stop when they arrived to Samarra.
Okay.
Because starting from Samarra, then you have mixed areas, Shiite, Sunni areas.
Okay.
And there is no way with, there is no way and there is no reason would force Shiites to give up Samarra.
Samarra, they consider it is a part, it's a part of their areas.
Like, okay.
So no way they would give up these areas and just let it go with a Sunni region.
That means we would face another problem, which means we have now to fragment the provinces themselves.
First of all, to fragment Salah al-Din because we have Sunni and Shiite areas mixed, and we have mixed areas.
The second one, we have to fragment Mosul because we have Kurdish areas, we have Sunni areas, and we have Yazidi areas, we have Christian areas, and we have also Shiite areas.
Then, in Diyala, which the region would include a part of it also, we have many mixed areas.
We have Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite areas.
So it would be insane to consider that such a project will be just existed easily or smoothly without shedding more blood.
Yeah.
Well, and speaking for Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from their graves, and for Ayman al-Zawahiri hiding out somewhere in Pakistan, they want us to do this.
This is exactly what they would like to see.
Yeah, they would be happy, very happy, because American this time would achieve the mission instead of them.
All right.
Now, so back to the motive here, you mentioned previously, and this goes right to the heart of it here, right, is again, they fought Iraq War II and Iraq War III for Iran's best friends.
And now they're terrified that there exists what they call a land bridge, which the rest of humanity knows as a road.
There's a road that now, or a combination of roadways that lead from Iran through Iraq, through Syria, and then even to southern Lebanon.
And this was part of the reason, if you read The Clean Break, this was why they launched Iraq War II in the first place, was they were trying to break this Shiite alliance and all they did was add Baghdad to it.
And so this is why now they're so bent on keeping at least some troops in Syria in the east of the country there.
And now they have this insane plan to try to break off western Sunni Iraq in order to essentially correct for the results of their last two wars over there.
But then like you're saying, this could only lead to another one.
Yes, actually, I believe that this would 100% for sure would lead for internal fighting.
Shiite-Sunni fighting, Shiite-Kurdish fighting, and even Sunni-Kurdish fighting, for sure, 100%.
And now, Soudad, you have American sources for this story too, right?
This isn't all just coming from local politicians.
That's right.
And so what did they say when you told them that they must be completely crazy?
They said, now we are talking.
It's like, for them, actually, this is my sense.
It's like a game for them at the beginning.
They are just playing games with Shiites and with Iran.
So when you ask about details, they said, let me see what will happen.
Let me see what will happen.
It sounds like it's the, look, it's the trademark of US administration in this part of the world.
Okay.
I would assign you to do what I want.
I will pay you.
I will back you, but I don't care what will happen or how you're going to do it.
We have been witnessing such a project since, I don't mean such projects by creating regions, I mean projects that usually you would feel that US administration doesn't account the consequences, or they don't care really for the consequences.
Because I was actually wondering and ask, repeat my question, but so many people, the life of so many peoples will be dangerous.
How you would deal with it?
Well, I mean, we have only 5,000 men in the country right now, 5,000 to 6,000 men, again, embedded with the Shiites fighting what's left of ISIS.
If they have to turn around and fight the Shiites, they're dead.
Or I guess they have to run to Kurdistan as fast as they can.
Otherwise it's going to be like order 66 and they're all going to be gone in a day.
Scott, I don't believe that they're going to let US forces to fight Shiites.
They will let Sunnis fight Shiites.
Well, I'm just saying the Americans don't have force protection for a war like that.
I mean, they're going to have to come up with something.
Exactly.
But in a point they would say, okay, we have massacres and everywhere we have to protect our allies, Sunnis or Kurdish.
It's the same steps all the time.
Watching your ally to be killed by their enemies or the enemies that you create, and then send some troops to protect them.
It's just like a steps of justifications by creating every time, creating a problem, and then justify your response to it.
It's the same.
All right, you guys, that is Suhaddad al-Salahi reporting out of Baghdad for MiddleEastEye.net.
This important story is called the US seeking to carve out Sunni state as its influence in Iraq wanes.
Thank you so much for your time on the show today.
Thank you, Scott.
Happy to be with you.
Thank you very much.
All right, you all, and that is Anti-War Radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of antiwar.com and author of the book Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now going back to 2003 for you at scotthorton.org.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
