For Pacifica Radio, March 14th, 2021.
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 editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of the new book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,400 interviews now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Martin Smith from Rain Productions.
He does documentaries for Frontline PBS.
Welcome back to the show, Martin.
How are you?
Good, Scott.
Thank you.
Good to talk to you again.
I'm not even sure if it counts as welcoming you back to the show.
I'm sure it's a different show now.
It's been since, I think, late in the Bush years since we've spoken, but good to have you back on.
It's good to be back.
Very curious.
You're working on a documentary about Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a.k.a.
Jabhat al-Nusra, a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria.
I'm just dying to know what is behind this, and when can I see it?
Well, you know, we're working on it.
We've got a lot of Arabic to translate for my editors, and so we're hoping to air in May, but it may slide a little bit to June or July.
We're not positive yet, so we've just got underway.
I was there just last month.
I was there for seven days inside, spending a lot of time with Abu Muhammad al-Jolani.
And you mean in the Idlib province?
Is that it?
In Idlib province.
It's the last bastion of the resistance to Assad there in Idlib province.
And then I hope you don't mind if I express a little skepticism to start here, as you may or may not be aware, there was a pretty large-scale effort for years there between 2000, say, late 11, early 12, through at least 2016 to somehow play down al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Syria, as not the enemy from the last war, but instead plucky moderate rebels who are just trying to resist the onslaught of their government, rather than the government was trying to resist their onslaught, which was far closer to the truth.
And I can't help but wonder whether this is sort of part of someone's effort to rehabilitate the image of this group somehow, who are now known much more broadly as actually just being murderers and terrorists and war criminals.
Well, you know, it's complicated.
I mean, compared to ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's group, infamous for its uber-violence, and compared to al-Qaeda in Iraq under Abu Musab al-Zarqawi before that and the resistance against the US, you know, they are considerably different in that they don't participate in those kind of large-scale attacks against civilians like al-Qaeda in Iraq or ISIS.
Don't they?
Well, they have mounted attacks that have taken the lives of civilians.
They have mounted attacks against Alawite villages in Syria.
But by comparison, they are much more focused on bringing down Assad and attacking military targets.
So, when you hear people talk about them being different, there's truth to that.
Now, they still run prisons that can be pretty nasty places.
But they are engaged now in an ongoing effort to try to set up dialogue with the West.
They would like to have the terrorism designation lifted.
Jelani himself says, look, you deal with the Taliban, and so why can't you deal with me?
So, there is a difference.
And I can go into detail about that.
But they are much more focused on military targets.
Now, they have had bloody conflicts with their fellow jihadis, interestingly.
But that's another part of the story we can talk about.
Well, in Iraq War II, al-Qaeda in Iraq was the smallest part of the Sunni insurgency.
And yet, their reputation was smeared onto all of it, which most of it was just kind of nationalist.
And yet, here we have al-Qaeda is the dominant force in this insurgency.
You call them jihadists and their fellow jihadists.
These aren't just tribal leaders cooperating with bin Ladenites.
They're bin Ladenites.
This guy sworn blood oath loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City, Martin.
And you sound like a public relations expert here.
I'm not doing public relations.
My job was to go in and challenge him, and to understand and get him to explain his motivations and what he's up to.
Did you ask him about his blood oath to Ayman al-Zawahiri?
Sure, I did.
And I talked to him about his break with Zawahiri.
And I talked to him about his breakup with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIS.
Yeah, but he never denounced Zawahiri.
He just said, well, we're kind of separating ourselves from al-Qaeda.
Roggio and the guys at the Long War Journal, they translated the original Arabic and everything.
There's no real break from al-Qaeda there.
That's just public relations.
I think that he wasn't getting a lot out of al-Qaeda, except branding.
I think you go back, first of all, he makes a deal in Iraq.
He was fighting the Americans in Iraq, and he was in prison for five years or so.
And then he gets out of prison and he goes to Baghdadi, and he gets a deal that says, I'm going to go to Syria, where I'm from, and I'm going to fight Assad.
And that relationship goes on for a while.
And then they have a breakup.
And he never liked Baghdadi, according to him.
And, you know, they were, I mean, that breakup is pretty clear.
He was not in favor of the kind of tactics by 2013 that Baghdadi was engaged in.
And then he stayed with al-Qaeda, I think in part because he was losing fighters to Baghdadi and ISIS, because what Baghdadi was doing was flashier.
He was taking Raqqa.
He was taking Mosul.
He had these big, you know, made these big violent videos, anti-West.
He beheaded people.
And so he wanted to distance himself from that.
But he didn't want to lose his fighters.
He lost probably 60, 70% of them who went over to ISIS.
If he had dropped his al-Qaeda allegiance at that point, he would have probably lost more.
He stays with al-Qaeda until 2016.
Then he, he renames Jabhat al-Nusra as Fatah al-Sham.
And then months later, he renames it.
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
Yeah, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
And that's where he is now.
And people who know him well will say, look, he still runs a pretty tough ship and he went against his fellow jihadis.
Interestingly, he defeated ISIS and he defeated other jihadist groups in order to consolidate his power.
And to do that, he had to go and fight the al-Qaeda chapter that was there, Harass al-Din.
So to say that he still was loyal to Zawahiri when he was in fact killing the people that were pledged to Zawahiri, I think is, you know, I think Roggio has that a little wrong.
Now, I think, you know, that there's quite, there's open questions about what his long-term vision is.
But you know, wait a minute, let me stop you there.
Arar al-Sham was run by al-Suri, who was also loyal to bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but it was still a separate group.
And they always worked well with Jabhat al-Nusra.
I don't know, there may have been small exceptions to that.
But the fact that al-Nusra or Hayat al-Sham fights with Harass al-Din in Idlib is meaningful in what way other than these are just war criminals and warlords and terrorists fighting amongst each other?
Well, that Harass al-Din is an al-Qaeda ally group.
He also went against Arar al-Sham.
He also went against them.
I interviewed the leader also, not just Jilani, but the leader of Arar al-Sham, and they described the bloody battles that took place as Jilani wanted to consolidate his power.
And did that mean that the leaders of Arar al-Sham were also no longer, or that means they are members, are still loyal to Zawahiri because al-Nusra fought them?
I'm trying to follow your logic here.
I don't know why groups that are loyal to Zawahiri can't fight amongst each other.
Arar al-Sham is not, and I wouldn't put them in the same camp as Harass al-Din or Jabhat al-Nusra, the former group that Jilani led.
So that's a different kind of group.
Well, wasn't their leader al-Suri, wasn't he the guy that Zawahiri sent to try to make peace between Jilani and Baghdadi in the spring of 2013, and then Baghdadi killed him?
Yeah, Baghdadi killed him.
Right.
So he was the guy, he was Ayman al-Zawahiri's errand boy, al-Suri, the leader of Arar al-Sham.
Well, was he leader of Arar al-Sham at that point?
I'm not sure that's true.
What I can say with certainty is Jilani is very clear, and I think that the traffic, the letters between them show that there was a real breakup with them in 2016.
It's just funny to me that the frame of this is not how scandalous it is that America's ally, the Turks, are still protecting this group of bin Ladenite head shoppers, suicide bomber murderers, and war criminals, but instead is about how they're really not that bad, Scott, and maybe we could still use them against Assad.
Is that the point here?
It's not my point, but there are people that are making that argument for sure.
The International Crisis Group has said that they're a group that we should look at.
The former envoy for the Trump administration, James Jeffrey, former ambassador to Turkey, former ambassador to Iraq, he calls them the least bad option in the scheme of things.
I mean, that's treason.
I mean, these guys are crazy.
So what?
They said that.
That's credible to you?
This guy who used to be the loyal foot soldier of Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, but is now really, really reformed.
These credentialed, professional think tank people say they're really not that bad compared to Iran's friends, right?
Well, that's why I went there.
I went there to put him to the test and to ask him these questions.
I didn't go there to do PR for him.
I'm not in the business of- You sound convinced, Martin.
I'm sorry, man.
I'm not trying to be mean to you.
I do respect your work.
No, Scott, Scott, Scott.
I'm relaying the opinions of people that see in Jelani somebody who is, for whatever reason, trying to reach out and escape in some Houdini-like fashion from his past.
Look, I said to him in the interview, I said, look, you've got a lot of baggage.
ISIS and Al-Qaeda, you should step aside.
If you're serious about helping the revolution move forward, why don't you step down and let somebody run this organization that doesn't have all your baggage?
Yeah, maybe turn yourself in.
Look, the Americans have a $10 million price tag on his head.
They could kill him.
I mean, I don't think that they're, I mean, they're not interested in doing that.
And I know from talking to officials that they are not interested in doing that because what happens when he falls is that the whole thing goes pear-shaped.
You've got 1.3 million displaced people in camps in Idlib and a couple million others in Northern Syria that are going to then go up into Turkey more than they were already in Europe and in Turkey.
So that's a disaster.
Turkey doesn't want that.
Europe doesn't want that.
And the Americans don't want to pull the plug on this situation and see that happen.
So the Americans, yeah, they have a $10 million price tag, but they're not, you know, the counter-terrorism folks who would like to score and hit him are not pulling the trigger.
Now, the question is why?
It's for the reasons I give.
But I'm not here to say we should embrace this guy.
My job was to go in there and ask him questions and to test whether or not he was, you know, holding, or he was in fact, as you say, you know, reforming.
I don't know that he's reforming.
I asked him about his prisons.
I asked him about torture.
I asked him about his record.
I asked him about his use of suicide bombers, his attacks on Alawite villages.
All that is part of what will be in the documentary.
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I mean you understand what I'm saying too though that if some other reporter had gone to interview Abu Musab al-Zarqawi about all of his feelings and reminiscences of all the different things he's been through and whether maybe he's not all that loyal to bin Laden anymore.
Maybe, geez, we found some think tankers who think they might want to work with him on something.
That would be absolutely laughable.
That's not just asking questions, right?
That's running errands for an anti-Shiite policy overall is what that is, right?
Pretending that somehow bin Ladenite suicide bombers are redeemable could possibly be if they answered the questions right.
Remember the kid who said...
I don't know if the questions being answered right make somebody redeemable, but my job as a journalist is to talk to people on all sides of a conflict and ask them questions.
That's all that I do.
And I am going to include other voices in this that put all this in context, including people that share your view.
I don't really have a dog in this fight.
My job is to try to probe and ask questions, get commitments from him.
I asked him to make certain pledges.
We'll see.
I mean, a lot of dictators around the world have made pledges that they don't keep.
So even that doesn't give him a good housekeeping seal of approval.
But like anybody else, I think it's good to hear from him.
All right.
And fair enough.
And I haven't had a chance to see the thing yet.
And I think you understand what I mean, though, too, about framing can be everything.
And a lot of things that go unsaid can also be very meaningful as well.
Like, for example, how seriously should I take some crisis group who said that I should take this guy seriously?
I said to Ani, I said, why the hell should we trust you?
You know, given who you've been, how do we trust that you're somehow different?
So these are all part of what will be in the documentary.
All right.
Well, I'll be very interested to see it.
You got the title yet?
Right now, the working title is The Jihadist because that's what he is.
You know, his past is interesting.
I mean, he grows up in a sort of middle class or upper middle class family in Damascus and finds his politics through religion.
But he came from a family where his grandfather fought the French occupation, where his father was jailed three times by the time he was 24 as a Nasserite fighting Ba'athists.
There was a lot of political activism in the family.
He found his activism in joining the fight against the Americans in Iraq.
It's a story that's worth hearing, I think.
And he admitted to directly fighting Americans in Iraq or to admitted to killing them.
Yes.
Yeah.
And using suicide bombers.
I mean, it's not an admission, I mean, to credit for it in audio tapes over the years.
So there's no secret there.
But he says that his his targets were military targets.
Now, it that sort of hinges on how you define a military target.
If you have a village that's loyal to Assad and you attack civilians, women and children included in that village.
I don't consider that a military target, but he might.
And you confronted him about the war crimes in Latakia.
Well, that's the Alawite villages we're talking about.
Yeah, I did.
And what do you have to say about that?
He said we we targeted them as collaborators with the regime.
So he considered that a military target, those villages.
So, yeah, he's a war criminal then because that's illegal.
Yeah.
I mean, look, look, though, to be fair, everybody in that war has blood on their hands.
And the Americans also used bombs that killed civilians.
Now, you can say they didn't intentionally target them.
You can get an argument from some people about that as to whether or not they were careful enough.
But everybody has blood on their hands in that conflict in Iraq.
What's your question about that?
Be careful here.
I'm not making an equation between a group like Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Americans.
But but I am saying that both of them carried out operations that resulted in the death of civilians.
Did you ask him about all the help that he got from the CIA and from the Saudis and Qataris and Turks during from 2011 through whenever?
I talked to him about the funding he got from al-Baghdadi.
You know, I'm just not going to believe anything he tells me about the funding he was getting from the Qataris or whatever.
I don't think that the Saudis were giving money to Nusra.
But certainly there were weapons going into that conflict, including from the CIA, that ended up in the hands of Nusra, because Nusra was the best fighting force in the area.
And they were able to seize those weapons.
And it's also that they paid better than some of the other groups, including the CIA funded Free Syrian Army.
And some of the fighters would go over to Nusra.
So it was a mess.
There was a lot of weapons and personnel going back and forth.
Right.
And listen, I appreciate you putting up with my bullying here, Martin.
Back in the day, whenever we talked, we got along just famously.
And I know you've done great work there.
But I will urge you to not emphasize too much this sliding scale of grading on a curve, where Nusra comes off less worse compared to the ultra violence of ISIS, throwing people off roofs and cutting their heads off on camera and those kinds of things.
As you say, Nusra did a lot of those same things, too.
I mean, I'll never forget in 2013, the kid, somebody on the sidewalk asked a kid with a vegetable stand, if he would give him a deal on an orange, let me pay half price for it, something like that.
And the kid said, I wouldn't give you a deal on this orange.
If the Prophet Muhammad came back and a Nusra guy said, what did you say?
Boom, and he shot the 13 year old boy in the face and killed him.
That's who these guys are.
They're totalitarian, murderer, war criminal monsters.
That's who they are.
So if Baghdadi did something on, you know, on the stage in Palmyra, where he had young teenagers cut the heads off of soldiers and made a whole theatrical production about it.
Okay, you got me.
That's in a way more, you know, TV friendly crazy on the part of ISIS than Nusra, but it's not any better in kind.
I think I should take you on my next trip and introduce you to Jelani.
It'd be an interesting conversation.
Jelani says that, I mean, just in case your listeners are interested or you're interested, what he says, a lot of mistakes were made, and that the control over from the center from him, and you're going to poo poo this as being, you know, a lame excuse, and maybe it is, but he will say for what it's worth that his control over his fighters was in those early days was very weak and a lot of stuff happened and he's not apologizing.
He's not making excuses for it.
So he says that today that's not going on.
Now I'm talking to people who say that's not true.
That's still going on.
So, you know, it's impossible in seven days to fully try, prosecute, and convict.
The best I could do is ask him as many hard questions as I could and, you know, and consider them and then talk to other people and provide context to my viewers.
Well, you're a hell of a lot braver man than me.
I wouldn't be caught dead anywhere near there, and I probably wouldn't make it back alive if it was me either.
You might be caught dead if you went there.
That's true.
You know, at this point, they're trying to get the West to warm up to them.
So, and as I said, the West is also, even though they have this $10 million price tag on his head, they're not, I mean, they could take him out if they wanted.
The CIA could take him out if they wanted, and they're not.
And you have to ask yourself, why are they not?
Because there are bigger geopolitical considerations that they're weighing and that they consider Jelani perhaps their least bad option of many bad options where there are no good options.
Well, you know, which could be the topic of your next special about the madmen in Washington, D.C., who look at Bashar al-Assad in his three-piece suit and his clean-shaven chin and his secular minority, religious and ethnic minority-backed sort of, you know, mostly fascist dictatorship there, and think that a guy like Jelani is probably the moderate alternative to him.
And there's your moderates.
We had our moderates all along.
Hillary's reformer, John Kerry's dinner partner, Bashar al-Assad.
He was torturing people for Bill Clinton and George W. Bush for years, right?
Americans are tired of wars in the Middle East.
They do not want to charge into yet another conflict.
And, you know, and I'll also say that by comparison with Assad and his prisons and his use of chemical weapons and his use of barrel bombs, there's no comparison between Assad and Jelani now.
Unless Jelani were to seize power and have helicopters and chemicals, which I'm not buying the chemical stories anyway, but I hear you.
But that's the whole thing, right?
That's why the Russians intervened in 2015, is because ISIS and Nusra were working together to sack Baghdad, and they cut off the road, the highway between, pardon me, Damascus, and they cut off the highway between Damascus and Aleppo, and you had ISIS in the Yarmouk refugee camp, and they were truly threatening to topple the state there.
And it would have been between Baghdadi and Jelani to figure out who would be the new ruler.
And then what would happen to the Druze and the Shiites and the Alawites then?
First of all, they were not working together at that point, ISIS and al-Nusra.
But there's no question that had the Russians not come in in 2015 with their jets and their bombs, I think Assad would have fallen.
And then what would have happened to the Druze and the Shiites and the Alawite civilians?
That's a good question as to who would have really been in control of that revolt.
In 2015, there was a panoply of groups that were fighting.
There's always been a lot of different factions.
And the question is, would Jelani have been the one?
Would some other group have dominated?
That's a big what if, we don't know.
Well, but Jelani's group had dominated since 2012.
Even Obama's State Department admitted that.
They didn't really take control.
They didn't really have firm control of Idlib, which is a small slice of Syria until 2017.
I mean, they were decimated in 2013 by all their soldiers, 70% of them going over to...
I mean, they got their asses kicked by their soldiers leaving to go be with Baghdadi because Baghdadi was doing the flashy stuff.
But that was when they formed the Army of Conquest merger with Jaysh al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham and all those other groups, right?
I think it was a little later than that, but there were all sorts of coalitions and agreements between groups, and then they'd break the agreements.
It's a morass to sort it out.
But I mean, still, it's not exactly apples and apples comparison between Assad's violence and trying to put down this foreign-sponsored insurrection versus the probable violence where somebody like Jelani, who probably was the most likely to take over Damascus if the government had fallen, and what his new regime would have meted out to the ethnic and religious minorities there.
You said at the beginning, they just murdered Druze who refused to convert.
Oh, you refused to convert?
Off with your head, right?
I said that he attacked Alawite villages in Latakia.
I could have sworn that you mentioned Druze.
I apologize if I'm putting words in your mouth.
They certainly did persecute Druze.
They were intolerant of groups that were not of their Salafi beliefs.
But Jelani now says he is in favor of protecting the rights of Christians, Druze, and other groups and minorities, and that for hundreds and hundreds of years, Christians and Muslims and others have lived in peace together.
And he thinks that that's his vision for the future.
You don't have to believe it, but that's what he's saying.
And did you ask him if he's had any actual PR agents from Madison Avenue come to coach him on this stuff?
I don't think that he has.
I didn't ask him that specific question, but he does have people around, including the Turks, who do enough work on trying to help him, as you would say, rebrand his image.
So I don't think he needs Madison Avenue.
I don't think there's anybody on Madison Avenue that understands or even knows where Idlib is.
Yeah, well, somebody is getting work done there.
It sounds like they're doing a pretty good job.
I think the Turks.
And as I said, there are people in the U.S. government who think that he is the least bad option.
All right.
Well, listen, I can't wait to take a look at this thing.
So hurry up.
We should get it chopped up for us.
We should talk after that.
Yeah, I look forward to it.
Thank you, Martin.
Appreciate your time.
Okay.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, you guys.
That is Martin Smith from Frontline.
All right, y'all.
And that has been Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Again, I'm your host, Scott Horton, editorial director of Antiwar.com and author of Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism.
You'll find my full interview archive at scotthorton.org and at youtube.com slash Scott Horton Show.
And I'm here every Sunday from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
See you next week.
