01/17/14 – Mitchell Prothero – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is the Scott Horton Show, and our first guest on the show today is Mitchel Prothero, uh, covering the Syria war for McClatchy Newspapers.
That's McClatchyDC.com.
Welcome to the show, Mitchel.
How're you doing?
I'm doing okay.
Thanks for having me tonight.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us and I guess you're in Beirut and it's right around dinnertime there So I especially appreciate you taking time out to do the show today.
Oh, no problem It's it's turned into kind of a seven day a week 24 hour a day job covering Lebanon and Syria these days So we're ready for it.
All right.
Well, let's hope nothing newsworthy happens during the interview All right.
In fact, so let's start with that There's there been bombings in Libya and the war in Syria is spreading to Libya Is that right?
Who's bombing who and and what's been the responses so far?
Well I mean, I you know, the country of Lebanon's only existed for about 50 years and Prior to that it had always historically been part of what they call greater Syria, which today is mostly the country of Syria So the ties between these two countries are incredibly close Syria occupied Lebanon for nearly 28 years, I think Maybe 27 only leaving in 2005 did their military go?
So what we've been seeing is a lot of the problems that Lebanon has historically had between religious communities in this case Sunni and Shia Muslims it's spread here from Syria as their civil wars grown increasingly sectarian You've got a country of about 80% Sunni Muslims who've had it with the regime That's backed by Iran and a religious minority there.
That's very close to them.
So it's turning into a difficult situation here and now the one of the recent attacks was By one of the other al-qaeda groups and I guess we'll have to get into that But it was against Hezbollah there in southern Lebanon or in a Hezbollah controlled neighborhood in Beirut.
Is that right?
Well, we've had a number of these situations and and what you're what we're finding is despite Hezbollah's reputation in the United States for being a terrorist organization going back to the 80s and Certainly, they've been responsible for attacks against the United States in Israel for decades Although I will point out they haven't done anything towards the United States since the 80s when u.s.
Troops were here in Lebanon Hezbollah being Shia Muslims Are fundamentally representing a group of people who are deeply oppressed by anybody with sort of a Sunni Muslim What we call al-qaeda mentality the jihadi Salafist They believe that anybody who isn't a Muslim in the exact traditional way like they are is in fact worse than an infidel And needs to be killed So what you face is a community here that fought against the West and Israel for 30 something years Coming under attack by fellow Arabs fellow Muslims who believe that their version of Islam is is literally a posturing so As they've defended the Syrian regime to try to keep these guys out of here They're very Hezbollah in Syria.
The Syrian president are very close allies have been for a long time They've sent troops to help keep him in power.
You're seeing these groups which are also fighting the regime in Damascus Attacking guys here in Lebanon So Hezbollah is in a very similar situation to America or Israel where they have Muslim terrorists trying to set off car bombs in their area Well, and then and I guess Hezbollah has done some operations inside Syria on behalf of the government and then it is this are these bombings you think meant to draw them in further and try to spread this war around or maybe a race that European drawn border there Well here in a way quite the opposite first off the al-qaeda guys in their mentality This is all part of a historic area.
So Fundamentally to them.
They don't recognize the government of Lebanon and they don't recognize the government Syria They'd only recognize an Islamic caliphate So they don't care, you know in terms of ideology where they're going to attack Hezbollah, but Hezbollah Yes, it's not even doing operations for the first time in the organization's 30-plus year history They're openly engaging in a military conflict against fellow Arabs and doing it more or less more openly than I've ever seen them do Anything in the 10 years I've lived in Lebanon They're defending it politically They've got you know Anywhere from hundreds to thousands of troops inside Syria and many of us think that it's been their role of Hezbollah's very experienced Very professional fighters that has probably kept the Assad regime alive So if you're fighting the Assad regime starting trouble in Lebanon might draw some of those guys back home for security and Thus reduce the number of people you're facing on the battlefield in Syria.
I think that's the mentality that we're looking at all right, and now so when we talk about the Nusra Front and the Islamic Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the sham and all of these things Who's who and and how can you tell a different al-qaeda from one from another?
Well, you know, it's funny I had a discussion with my editor about this the other day where he said, you know Ideologically most of these groups are al-qaeda and probably are going to be very friendly to the West And I told him he was absolutely right The problem is they see fundamental differences amongst themselves and in the case of most of the Syrian groups They're currently fighting a predominantly foreign group of what we would call al-qaeda fighters and previously But today we can't even call them that because al-qaeda has said these guys are psychos We don't want anything to do with them, which is something that I reported about today for McClatchy There's actually a letter from a member of al-qaeda who's fighting in Syria where he said, you know, you're not al-qaeda I'm al-qaeda.
I knew bin Laden you people are crazy Your crimes are against Muslims and all this stuff.
Well now looking at as a group called Hold on there.
So the main group that you're looking at in this case is what they call the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq or ISIS Islamic State of Iraq in Syria.
These guys are were formed by veterans fighting against the United States During the occupation of Iraq They're filled with foreign fighters and had come into Iraq or come into Syria to support the rebellion initially But what they started doing was setting up their own Islamic State and most of them are foreign So even if you're a very conservative Syrian like you might see in groups like the news or front Rrl sham the Islamic front and these groups have a lot of ideological basis with al-qaeda They came they saw foreigners coming in and pushing a new version of Islam on them.
And as a result, they're all fighting Right, and so now back in October It was ISIS and no sir We're both declaring loyalty to I'm an al-zawahiri hiding in somebody's mother's basement in Pakistan somewhere I guess still But then they had a fight over who was more loyal to him or who was in the chain command Is is that where this real split took place between the Nusra?
Yeah, it's been it's been actually more local politics I had a new sir commander tell me flat-out what look fundamentally We do agree with these guys It's just this is about politics and politics is just as important in jihadist fighting it That was his explanation, but what you saw was a predominantly Syrian group that you know The Nusra front that was very effective and continues to be on the battlefield has done some suicide attacks But it's also been very careful not to irritate Syrian people when they come in they do anti-corruption measures They're not implementing a difficult version of Islamic law in their areas for the most part They're treating people with respect and fighting very hard against the regime on the other hand You had this group ISIS which were predominantly foreign and we're trying to force sort of an alien version of Islam on the Syrian people as A result al-qaeda actually got involved trying to you know negotiate a settlement between these two groups Both of which agree with them and what they concluded was that Nusra is the proper al-qaeda franchise in Syria Everybody in Isis should join it or leave and they rejected that advice So it's the first time in you know, the ten years I've been covering this stuff that we've seen a dispute between these groups break out into public Well, this is a lot like what happened in Iraq right where the al-qaeda guys we're going around conscripting fighting-age males and and Punishing people in different ways for smoking cigarettes and and vices and these kinds of things were like you're saying They're not even from there and they were out there welcome real quick and that's happening here But then so what's the relative power between?
Isis and Nusra because even though Nusra is from there one of your articles here is about Isis fighting back and executing scores of rivals and and making some pretty severe gains against Nusra recently Well, what it is is it's sort of a way that Syria is laid out and remember Nusra is not alone They've got you know groups that you'd consider more moderate Islamic groups or even secular called the Syrian Revolutionary Front Which are remnants of the Free Syrian Army that the West had backed Members of our sham who are deeply conservative but have said that they do not want anything to do with this jihad stuff They're simply here to fight the regime and then Nusra so Isis is really quite overwhelmed in terms of numbers But what you're seeing them able to do because they They basically have a lot of experience moving around in the desert between Iraq and Syria This is where they were formed.
You can actually see on a map a corridor between Fallujah and the town of Raqqa This is all Isis's turf.
It's very empty and they've come equipped with a lot I know this is going to sound funny But the sheer number of pickup trucks that they have means that they can move around the fighters that they do have Relatively quickly, so they've been able to hold their desert areas But for the most part they're getting kicked out of the rest of rebel-held Syria in the north and in the west All right, and now so where exactly did this Islamic front come from?
How large is that?
Is that just a new name for the FSA or that's something altogether?
That's No, it's quite the opposite actually Well, the FSA had basically collapsed in and on itself for a lot of different reasons The West didn't back them.
They sort of lacked popular support except in the very beginning But they a lot of them had turned to banditry They were robbing people and sort of acting like a mafia or they weren't just fighting very hard So they they sort of collapsed what you saw that if they fell apart were groups that were religiously motivated as the conflict became more Sunni versus Shia and These groups that hadn't been part of new surah Isis They're not al-qaeda by any means, but they are deeply religious guys.
I compare them to American fundamentalist Christians they're deeply religious, you know, they're they get money from outside the country from mosques and collections and You know They're they're farm boys to a large extent and these guys have formed Their units all decided that the rebels needed to be under one command and all agreed to form what we what we're calling now the Islamic front So, you know, there's four main groups the Islamic front which is quite large Probably the largest single fighting force in the country right now the remnants of the free Syrian army and then you sir and what we're calling Isis and Then the Saudis are sending most of their money toward the new Islamic front.
Is that right?
Well, the Saudis the Saudis got we're having a hard time telling exactly what the Saudis are doing There's a lot of internal politics with the Americans over Iraq So and also Saudi a lot of their money comes from unofficial sources The mosque to collect a tremendous amount of money throughout the Persian Gulf.
You see the Kuwait Qatar UAE and NKSA as we call Saudi Arabia So, you know some of it is going to whatever groups they've been funding for a while But yes, of course the Saudis just like the Qataris and UAE all of them with Kuwaitis are going to generally back a pretty austere Fundamentalist group because that's how their countries are run.
So their money has gone to things like the Islamic front.
Arar al-sham and Nusra to a large extent.
All right.
Now, can you hold through this break and do another segment with us here Mitchell?
Sure, I can do one more.
Okay, great Everybody, it's Mitchell Prothero writing for McClatchy DC comm McClatchy newspapers He's in Beirut and we're talking about the civil war in Syria and spreading Iraq and Lebanon and on we'll be right back after this Why is the US support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt because that's what Israel wants Why can't America make peace with Iran because that's not what Israel wants And why do we veto every attempt to shut down illegal settlements on the West Bank?
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show the Scott Horton show I'm on the line with Mitchell Prothero Covering the Syrian war for McClatchy newspapers at McClatchy DC comm and And We're talking about who's who sure is hard to keep track that thing going on over there And now I spend all day on it and it's not easy I'm sorry.
Yeah, I bet I know I can tell by reading all the guys even you know talking with Patrick Coburn and the best experts in the world.
They go.
Well, you know the lines between who's who and who claims what it's pretty hard to tell sometimes but I guess Patrick emphasizes the bloodthirst on the part of these jihadists for killing Shiites Indiscriminately that that's all they just wake up in the morning wanted to kill Shiites apparently without even much thought to strategy or anything else Well, I mean, I don't know that they don't use strategy for it But yeah The a true fundamentalist Sunni has a very serious serious problem with Shia Islam And it's over very small stuff that you know a non X not even not expert somebody outside of the community Could barely tell the difference between the two But again, it's about a fight 1,500 years ago for control of the direction of the religion and you know Certainly both sides haven't quite let it go yet Well, so which of the jihadists are the moderate so we can work with can we get this Islamic front to show up in?
Geneva and negotiate Well, I'll ask yourself if you're the Islamic front, why would you bother I don't know I said that Assad must go right Well, he did but then he didn't do anything to help so in terms of credibility Right now you see Well now come on Saudi operation an American operation there in the CIA coordinating all of that like David Sanger says I Am I believe they they've they've paid some attention to it They've got some horses to see how they might do and those horses didn't do very well I think that one of the things that you need to recognize is that we're in a period now I've been doing this for 10 years starting with the invasion of Afghanistan and then the rock is We started with this period where the u.s Was deeply involved in the Middle East and trying to make changes to governments as they saw fit based on an ideology built around what?
We'd called the neocon idea and that didn't go well Everyone recognizes that at this point, you know, the u.s.
Involvement in the Middle East has been a disaster now for a decade and As a result, they're trying to find a new way and one of them is hands-off The simple fact is yes America would like to see Assad fall But they're not really willing to be the ones that put al-qaeda in power And that's something that they're very afraid of we always joke about how you know Didn't you sort of start the Taliban in Afghanistan?
Well, you know when you back to the Afghans against the Soviets and if you talk to a CIA guy, he'll tell you Yeah, that's what happened.
We're not going to do that again You know So to a certain extent this is the American government learning some lessons about the limit of their power and one of them is if You're looking at al-qaeda trying to overthrow Bashar Assad and you don't like either Why not just see what plays out and deal with it then you don't want to necessarily get involved in a knife fight that ugly with This many ugly guys involved Yeah, well the thing is though.
I mean they've already done enough to help in the first place So it's not quite hands-off, but I understand what you're saying and and believe me I prefer this to doubling down, but in terms of serious stuff in terms of serious stuff It has look they've given some radios, you know, they've given some body armor They gave some humanitarian stuff and they trained like 70 guys and armed of them from Jordan that we know about And these 70 guys went into Syria and probably disappeared they joined other factions or who knows they could be running like falafel shops for All we know, but they just it just never really took when that started happening.
You saw the American government go.
Wait a second You know, who are these people and the problem that everybody faces is we've never seen groups like you sir Uh are all sham and even to a certain extent the Islamic front before These guys definitely subscribe to an ideology that on paper, you know, the West is uncomfortable with but at the same time They've been relatively focused and haven't been nearly as insane as we've seen, you know Former al-qaeda linked groups doing mass kidnapping beheadings and you know, random car bombings Uh, you know most of that stuff in Syria has been done by Isis Although I mean, I'm not saying they haven't done any of it.
They've done some yeah These are the same guys wasting a black flag over Fallujah right now, right?
Well, no, they're not.
That's Isis.
That's not Nusra.
Although I'm sure Nusra guys in a normal situation Perfectly happy to go fight in Fallujah against the Shiite government in Maliki.
They're doing it in in Syria right now I mean, so again, the difference is small, but no you don't see them doing that they're they're fighting against those guys because they want a revolution for the Syrians as A result now, we're seeing a lot of confusion on the ground and new groups are forming.
One of them is the Islamic Front Frankly, I think they're ready to work with the Americans And I think it would be smart to explore if it's possible because they are the largest they've been fairly responsible their guys are reasonably well organized and trained and They have a commanding control that we've never seen before If they tell a unit to do something the unit's going to do it Now that you've established that you go negotiate with the guy who can give the orders whether or not those negotiations would go anywhere I don't know, but I do think for the American government.
It would be smart to have a meeting with those guys Well, it was a piece of foreign policy.
Why would you talk to the Americans?
They haven't helped you yet Why should they get a vote?
That's what all the Syrians tell me is why did Obama get to decide who stays and who goes and what type of rebellion?
We should have he doesn't give us any money doesn't give us any weapons.
He doesn't give us any help If you want to say what's going on in Syria become involved in Syria So there's a disconnect there half of America thinks were too involved in Syria and the Syrians think we don't get an opinion because they Don't see anything from us Well, it's funny though the way Anyone looking critically at this could have told you that you know it was jihadists doing suicide bombings from the very beginning of the uprising in Syria and Reports of of Libyan fighters going there right away and and there were you know Hillary Clinton said at the time that hey, you know, I'm in Al Zawahiri and Hamas are backing this uprising So I'm not so sure even though we don't like Assad.
I'm not so sure we want to back his enemies here And then it was months later according to her and and her friends leaks in the New York Times that she and Petraeus and Panetta tried to get Obama to do Just that and to double down on it and that he refused to go along with their plan But but she seemed to express that they knew good and well that the opposition here are are, you know No, Thomas Jefferson's as Colin Powell would say No, but the thing is you're not you're just simply never going to find any Thomas Jefferson Middle East It's their own country culture and it's their own world I'm gonna come up with the people that they come up with and it's not going to look like what we do So, you know on some level That's what you have to recognize if you want to see Bashar gone and you want to have influence with the rebels that took him Over you might have to back somebody who's not entirely somebody who would normally do business with.
Yeah But these are decisions that are brutal with the president of the United States has to make because I can make a strong argument As a journalist she covers it for either course action Well, I said a straw man about the Jefferson thing You get at least you got to find somebody who hasn't sworn allegiance to I'm in Al Zawahiri, right?
I mean Hold on know that that's exactly part of what we're discovering now and Even so it's something that we're trying to figure out.
What does that mean exactly?
So here you've got a group that says they're all tied in.
It's all I hear.
He says these guys aren't mine And I wish they would stop then you've got a group That's being a reasonably responsible actor on the ground who says words are Cowley's guys and he likes that Then there's another group.
He has people who are definitely supportive of a lot of al-qaeda's agenda who haven't expressed any interest in the international jihad and just say we're conservative farm boys who want to overthrow the regime It's just the problem is we had a way to really easy time early on in this, you know So-called war on terror, they got handed to us back in 2001 You know in terms of determining who were bad guys and who weren't the problem is there's no such thing as complete bad guys and complete good guys or they're very very rare and Determining who is useful and whether what the cost is is what we've done a terrible job of for 10 years right now I see the administration basically abandoning Syria because they can't really tell What will be the good move and I suppose that's better than them doing something stupid Yeah, well, you know Michael Hayden says it's time to go ahead and switch back to Assad The former head of the CIA, you know, there's a big push for that.
There's a big push for that In fact, I'm increasingly convinced a Western PR company is working with Assad Because the way he's gotten on message message in the last nine months or so is astounding like he speaks like George Bush So does Nafas on Nasrallah like when you hear these guys give speeches now, I covered 2001 2002 period I covered the coverage of the passage of the Patriot Act and these guys are using the exact same garbage rhetoric That we saw from lawmakers back then that allowed us to get stuff like the Patriot Act and the invasion of Iraq Without actually thinking about what we were going to do when we got there You guys are making all the same mistakes.
Let me ask you this How many Western Europeans do you think I mean just very vague ballpark numbers Do you think have traveled to Syria to fight with the rebels here?
Tens hundred you're based on I've heard I've heard a range of different figures Western Europeans Give it a thousand at the high end Definitely more than 500.
Mm-hmm.
Maybe I'm a little low When you start getting into Eastern Europeans Bosnians Chechens I guess found stuff like that.
Those guys have come in about the same numbers.
There's got to be at least a thousand of those guys Right, so that's you know, look and you start mixing in various dudes from all over the place You know a dude from America's three guys from Canada.
I think a Canadian guy died today for ISIS You know a handful, but the big bulk has come from the caucuses in Eastern Europe and from Western Europe You know families of second-generation immigrants stuff like that, right?
Well, you know you mentioned Afghanistan and it seems like that could be a terrible present here for the blowback coming in the future from This battleground, which is what a 1500 miles west of Afghanistan after all right right on the Mediterranean American policy good American policy towards this stuff often resembles a bunch of guys who just don't want to be responsible for that in five years Yeah, right, yeah, they'll be gone by then but we won't all right.
Thanks very much I sure appreciate your time on the show Mitchell very much Alright everybody that is Mitchell Prothero reporting from Lebanon for McClatchy newspapers McClatchy DC calm We'll be back with Doug Casey in a minute Hey I'll Scott Horton here for the future freedom the monthly journal of the Future Freedom Foundation as you may already be aware Jacob Hornberger Sheldon Richmond and James Bovard are awesome They're also in every issue of the future freedom and they're joined by others of the best of the Libertarian Movement people like Anthony Gregory Wendy McElroy Lawrence Vance Joe Stromberg and many more even me sign up for the future freedom at FFF.org slash subscribe.
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