06/26/14 – Rania Abouzeid – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
So you made a little bit of money in this horrid economy, only to find that the Fed is more or less outlawed saving.
So into the treacherous waters of the stock market bubble you go.
But how to make a little money without too much risk of losing it all?
Check out wallstreetwindow.com.
Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager who opens a very real window into his main account, updating his subscribers on the facts of and the reasoning behind all his market moves.
Follow along on paper or with real money and see what happens at wallstreetwindow.com.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Coming up, Patrick Coburn and Will Gregg.
But first, Rania Abouzeid.
Welcome to the show, Rania.
How are you?
I'm fine, thank you.
How are you?
I'm good.
I'm sorry.
Can you say the last name for me one more time?
Sure.
Abouzeid.
Okay.
So I got the, yeah, the Zayd sounds like the general, but the ooh, less so.
Okay.
I got it.
Now, maybe I'll get it right on the way out from this segment.
But anyway, I apologize.
That's okay.
I need to take a language course and then I'll be better.
So you've got this great piece of long form journalism here in Politico Magazine.
Thank you.
And it's called The Jihad Next Door, The Syrian Roots of Iraq's Newest Civil War.
And it's quite an impressive piece of original journalism here.
And so we've got two 10-minute segments to let you tell the story.
I guess I'll ask you first, who is Abu Mohammed al-Gholani?
Well, he's the leader of the Jabhat al-Nusra, which is now the official branch of al-Qaeda in Syria.
But just, you know, three years ago, this organization did not exist.
Abu Mohammed al-Gholani is a Syrian and he was fighting in Iraq.
He was one of the Syrian foreign fighters who entered Iraq to fight coalition forces after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
He was at one point detained and held in Camp Bukha, which was the detention center, the Iraqi detention center, U.S.-run detention center down near the Kuwaiti border.
He was released.
I'm not sure where, not sure why, not sure how.
And he, you know, was a member of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
In August 2011, so we're talking about five months after the start of the Syrian uprising, he crossed back into Syria from Iraq with a group of seven other men.
And they had been tasked with establishing a new al-Qaeda affiliate inside Syria, but to keep their ties to al-Qaeda quiet while they set about this new group.
And now, I guess before the official announcement ever came that the al-Nusra front, Jabhat al-Nusra, was the local branch of al-Qaeda, it was already being talked about in the media, right?
The declaration came right at the same time or just before the Obama administration officially listed them as a terrorist group, but they had already been saying, hey, this is basically just al-Qaeda in Iraq has come across the border for, you know, really since, I think right around this time, 2011, right?
Well, the Obama administration listed them as a terrorist organization in December 2012.
And they still weren't saying that they were an affiliate of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
I landed, actually, the first interview with an official from the group, and it happened just about two weeks after the U.S. designation, and he was quite vehemently denying that they were al-Qaeda.
He said, we are not like al-Qaeda in Iraq, so I don't know, maybe he was being very careful with the wording there, because the fact is they weren't like al-Qaeda in Iraq.
They were very different in terms of their approach with both, you know, with the locals, both civilian and other armed groups as well.
They tried to be a little bit more inclusive and work with other armed rebel groups.
And they also tried not to antagonize the local populations in which they were based, which was very different from the way that al-Qaeda in Iraq operated.
And yeah, I remember it being sort of a puzzle.
It needed parsing, sort of like you're just doing there, about how the Nusra guys, on one hand, they were beheading some of their prisoners.
They were doing suicide bombings, and yet, well, for example, our friend David Enders from McClatchy Newspapers was kidnapped by al-Nusra and held for, I think, two weeks, and then they let him go.
He's safe and sound back in the U.S.A. today, so they do have, they are a bit different than Zarqawi's men from Iraq, in a way, even if they're the same people.
They've adopted some new tactics here.
No, exactly.
I mean, first of all, they weren't beheading, because almost as a policy, they're not beheading.
And I've asked senior Islamic scholars in Nusra that question, and they said they're not beheading.
But they were certainly kidnapping journalists.
Many of the journalists who were kidnapped were kidnapped by Jabhat al-Nusra.
And you know, it is still an al-Qaeda affiliate.
But they were adopting some new tactics in terms of ingratiating themselves into the local communities.
But they most certainly shared the same suspicion of foreign journalists, for example.
And it's always been difficult to sort of deal with them, you know, and you have to approach them quite carefully.
All right, and now, so something that is very difficult for a lot of people to pin down seems to be, you know, percentages and numbers and ballpark estimates and things like this.
I know from, I've been talking with David Enders since 2005 about the war in Iraq, which he reported on that whole time, for example.
And he and Coburn and everybody else have always said that al-Qaeda in Iraq, Zarqawi's group, was never really more than a few percentage, even the generals admitted, they were really never more than a small percentage, a few percentage points of the insurgency there, that the local Sunnis tolerated for a time.
And then when they turned on them, they turned on them pretty lickety-split and put them down.
Didn't completely crush them, obviously, but, you know, put them down pretty easily back in 2000, relatively easily back in 2006 and 2007.
Whereas, seemingly differently in Syria, it's really been Nusra and ISIS's fight all along, and where, and many of them seem to be foreigners from all over the place, rather than a broad-based Sunni insurgency, the way it was characterized in Iraq.
And I was just wondering, you know, you could dispute that all you want, whatever you think of that, and if you could give us any kind of ballpark numbers of members or percentages of the amount of the insurgency, or maybe geographically, which groups control which parts of Syria, or however you want to talk about it.
Well, I disagree with the fact that it's been Nusra and ISIS all along, to start with.
This wasn't, this was not the case, and I've been covering it for three years from inside Syria.
You know, when this started, it was initially, you know, at the same time that Jabhat al-Nusra was trying to establish itself very quietly, there were also men who were defecting from the Syrian security forces, there were also local men who were picking up arms in their towns and villages, and, you know, fighting in their areas.
So you know, it was a very broad-based sort of uprising.
And when it militarized, there were, like I said, there were many different elements to that.
You had Islamists who were, you know, we had this thing called the Free Syrian Army, which was this grand umbrella term under which various militias basically tried to, you know, they tried, they used that banner.
And you know, some of them were Islamists, some of them weren't.
Most of them were comprised of local men.
Foreign fighters certainly did come in, some of them, most of them actually joined groups that were not part of the FSA, Islamist units that were outside of that broad umbrella sort of term.
But some of them also joined groups that were part of the FSA.
So it's, you know, I think with respect, it's a little bit more, it's a lot broader than just, you know, the foreigners came and they just joined Nusra and ISIS, and that there wasn't a broad-based sort of predominantly Sunni insurgency.
And when we say predominantly Sunni, we have to remember that Syria is predominantly Sunni.
More than 70% of Syria, the Syrians are Sunni.
So you know, hence, that's why the rebels are predominantly Sunni, for example.
That wasn't, you know, very different demographics in Iraq.
Iraq is majority Shia, and the Sunni are a minority in that country.
So it's a different sort of demographic situation.
And they're also two very different countries as well.
So, you know, I think that we have to consider each country and each situation on its own merits.
Sure.
Yeah.
Well, no, I wasn't trying to conflate, you know, like, say, for example, the various fights with Sadr's group with the insurgency in Iraq.
I was talking about the predominantly Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq.
But now, as far as, but even in Syria, once the war really got going, is it, I mean, what the hell do I know?
You obviously know all about this.
It's such a great article.
But I'm still trying to understand, I guess I don't quite understand the difference between, you know, well, in Iraq, I think it's fair.
I think you would agree with me that there was a broad-based Sunni insurgency there made up of former Baathists, of Sunni tribal and religious leaders, and everybody, the entire Sunni community, basically, was fighting for their lives in the Iraq war.
And I wonder, would you make that comparison to Syria's entire Sunni community in on this insurgency, basically, is what I'm asking.
No, I mean, I don't like generalizations, and I try to avoid them in my work.
I think it's more, you know, it's more nuanced than that.
I don't think you can speak about an entire population, an entire sectarian population.
I think it's a sort of a broad brush, and it's easy for characterization purposes, but I don't think so.
I think, you know, that's a problem.
It's more nuanced than that.
And you know, you speak of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, there was also a Shia insurgency in Iraq at the same time.
So you know, that's why I'm, you know, I try and look at details rather than generalizations, which can be a little bit messy and something which is as complicated as Syria and Iraq.
All right.
Well, okay.
So if during the Iraq war, if Zarqawi's guys had been 80% of the Sunni insurgency as compared to 5% of it, would that be a detail worth getting into?
You understand what I'm saying?
The difference between having a broad based insurgency of the population of, and I already excluded the Shiite militias from what I'm talking about here, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq versus the Al-Qaeda guys who were only a small percentage.
They were tolerated as long as they were helpful.
And as soon as the tribal leaders and the religious leaders in the Ba'athists got sick of them, they turned on Zarqawi, I mean, Zarqawi was already dead, but they turned on Al-Qaeda in Iraq, right?
So I'm just trying to find out the relative strength of Nusra and ISIS compared to, for example, the FSA in Syria.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
Well, strength doesn't necessarily come from numbers.
You know, there are a lot of battalions that identify themselves as Free Syrian Army that are much bigger in terms of certain battles than Nusra, but the Nusra guys are very disciplined and the ISIS guys are very disciplined and they follow orders and, you know, you'll find them often on the right, you know, right on the front lines and, and, you know, like we said, they, they undertake missions like suicide missions, for example, that some other groups don't use.
So but as for, as for numbers, you know, I don't, I don't know about numbers because I can't verify them and, and quite frankly, I think that most of the figures out there are guesstimates and I'm not sure what they're based on because it's a very murky picture.
You know, I've seen estimates of like 5,000 Nusra guys or something like that.
I can't speak to that because I can't verify those numbers.
But, and also because many battalions, for example, will beef up their numbers in order to try and get funding and this has been something that has plagued the Syrian, the militarized element of the Syrian uprising from the beginning.
And you know, I mean, I've talked to, to some of the guys who were tasked with smuggling weapons, you know, from the Saudis to certain rebel battalions and, and, and the Qataris and you know, they, they've often told me that this was a real problem that people were creating like phantom brigades just to get funding or phantom fighters, you know, they'd pad up the numbers of their fighters in their battalion or brigade or something in order to get, you know, more funding and weapons and things like that.
So that's why I think you have to be careful with the numbers because it's, you know, they're very difficult to verify.
Right, right.
Yeah, no, that's a, that's a very good answer.
I can't tell you because I don't know is a, is a great answer.
I appreciate that.
And yeah, that's just how the Iraqi army works with all the phantom brigades and all that too.
That's funny.
So now talk to us a little bit, please, about the coming of ISIS and, and the split last summer between ISIS and Nusra.
Was it last summer or 2012?
Yeah, April, April, 2013, in April, 2013, the leader of the Islamic state of Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who had sent Abu Muhammad al-Jolani across the border into Syria back in August, 2011, declared that he was merging Jabhat al-Nusra with his group, the Islamic state of Iraq, and forming the Islamic state of Iraq and al-Sham.
Now, al-Sham is a, is an Arab word that means Damascus.
It also means Syria, and it also means the Levant.
So it sort of, you know, indicated his, his more transnational sort of ambition.
He declared that this merger was going forth and that it was going to happen under his command.
The Jabhat al-Nusra leader, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, rejected this merger, and he said that he hadn't been informed of it and that, you know, he pledged his allegiance to al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and called for his mediation.
Now, this was the first time that Jabhat al-Nusra had publicly declared that it was, in fact, tied to al-Qaeda in some way, even though there were suspicions, as you rightly said, from the very beginning.
So this created a split within Nusra, as some, you know, I know Nusra guys at the time who started saying, well, okay, what do we do?
Who do we, who do we go with?
Do we stick with Jabhat al-Nusra, or do we follow the, the orders of al-Baghdadi, the ISIS, the emir or commander of ISIS?
So it created quite a split in Nusra, and what happened was that many of the foreign fighters, who tended to be more dogmatic, more conservative, went with ISIS, which left Nusra more Syrian almost by default.
And you know, but they stayed, you know, so what happened was that we'd see ISIS and Nusra in the same areas.
There wasn't sort of an open confrontation between them or anything like that.
There was tension, certainly, in some parts, but, you know, just this, they just continued to coexist, if you like, until February of this year, January, February of this year, when in January of this year, early January, lots of different rebel groups rose up against ISIS because, because it was, you know, rather harsh, it was very conservative, it had killed some prominent members of other battalions.
It was imposing its very, very harsh, ultra-conservative ideas about Islam on local populations in which it was based.
And you know, the final straw came when it killed some, some prominent members of other rebel brigades, other Islamist rebel brigades.
So you know, we saw northern Syria in January of this year, we saw northern Syria sort of erupt in these inter-jihadi clashes that were also, you know, we also had rebel groups as well fighting against ISIS.
And then in February, Zawahiri and Al-Qaeda Central, if you like, weighed in on all this, and they said, okay, that's it, enough, ISIS has nothing to do with us, we were not informed of its creation, and we're not responsible for its actions.
And that basically gave Nusra the green light to actively take ISIS on.
So you know, before they were trying to sort of mediate, it was a very hazy, it was a very hazy policy in some areas, the Nusra guys were trying to mediate and enter the dispute between rebel groups and ISIS, while in other areas, different Nusra groups were actively fighting with the rebels against ISIS.
So when Zawahiri issued his edict, then it became clear that, you know, ISIS was considered, it had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda, and so the guys on the ground who I talked to, because I was in Syria at this time, I went in three times during this period, and the guys who were on the ground viewed it as a green light to take on ISIS.
So I wonder, do you think that pressure from Nusra on ISIS, because they have been fighting quite a bit, I think, in the last couple of months here, is that part of why they went ahead and did what Zawahiri had said in the first place, and went back to Iraq?
No, you know, I think that, I don't know if the pressure on Nusra, I don't think that it affected them, because what we saw was that ISIS regrouped in its stronghold along the northeast of Syria, and it sort of regrouped in these areas, which it never, like it never lost its stronghold of Raqqa city, for example, and it won back other areas that it had lost from Aleppo on down.
It's no longer present in two Syrian areas.
It's not present in the provinces, where they had quite a strong presence before, and that's Latakia province and Idlib province.
However, they have regrouped in quite a large band of Syria, where they continue to hold significant sway.
And, you know, Baghdadi's plan all along was for an Islamic state in Iraq and Dushanbe, so this was the territory where this Islamic state was going to, you know, presumably be formed.
Across both borders.
Is there, what exactly, is there a difference strategically?
We talked about the tactics, you know, the difference in the tactics between Nusra and the old Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and how ISIS is to this day.
But what about in strategy?
Is it more a fight of, you know, personality that Baghdadi and Zawahiri and Gholani, that these guys, you know, have various amounts of respect for each other, and even though they pretty much have the same thing in mind?
Or is there really still a different strategy?
For example, Zawahiri maybe wants to still focus on the United States as the far enemy, rather than build the caliphate now too soon, or something like that.
I'm just, you know, hypothetically.
Right.
No, I mean, you know, I think that personality politics certainly comes into it to a degree.
Nusra, for example, is very much focused on the near enemy at this point, you know, rather than, you know, I've asked this question of Nusra and Emir's, what's your foreign policy, what do you, do you share Al-Qaeda's foreign policy?
And, you know, they've all, all of the ones that I've talked to say that, you know, for now, they're focused on the fight in Syria and establishing the Islamic State in Syria first.
But they caution that should anybody intervene in their activities, in their actions, in their plan, then they will certainly, you know, respond to that intervention.
And, you know, they, I mean, I remember sitting one night with several Nusra, there was a commander, Islamic scholar, and a fighter and some other guys.
And, you know, they were justifying 9-11 to me.
So, I mean, you know, they were proud of 9-11, they were justifying it.
So they certainly share some of those ideas.
But in terms of putting them into practice, it was pretty clear to me that at this point now, they're still focused on the near enemy.
And, you know, I think that al-Baghdadi is still also focused on the near enemy and also the, you know, establishing his or cementing his credentials, if you like, in terms of the jihadi scene.
He's effectively saying that, you know, he supersedes Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda, that his group is, you know, that he is the preeminent jihadi leader.
That's what he's trying to establish himself as.
And that's what he's trying to prove at this point.
He's trying to extend his hold over, you know, parts of Syria and parts of Iraq.
And I think that's going to be the immediate challenge for them, whether they can hold these territories or whether they're going to have a falling out, for example, in Iraq with the broad-based Sunnis that you mentioned earlier on, who are also fighting along ISIS, or whether they're going to be able to keep them on board.
Yeah, there's an article in The Diplomat about ISIS and Mao Zedong and how well, it sounds like you're saying Nusra has learned the lesson much better than ISIS has about not overdoing their totalitarianism in the places, at least when they newly seize them, you know, because of the alienation of the local population.
They need that support.
But, you know, apparently even ISIS is filling potholes and getting the electricity turned back on and this kind of thing.
Absolutely.
No, absolutely not.
ISIS also has a social, you know, it has a soft power element to it as well.
It also has a social services element.
However, that comes with the imposition of its views.
Whereas Nusra, for example, often says that it tries to, it invites people to its ideas, but it does not force them on people yet at this point.
And that's been something that I've, you know, I've seen since, for years now in my dealings with these guys.
When it comes to the locals, you know, I'm not talking about how they feel about foreign journalists and things like that.
You know, they are almost like the Al-Qaeda of old.
They're kidnapping people and stuff like that.
But I'm talking about in terms of them and their interactions with, you know, the people in the Syrians.
Well, you know what?
I've already kept you over time and I really should let you go.
But let me please apologize for the miscommunication earlier.
I actually wasn't trying to get you to generalize.
I was trying to get you to break down my over-generalization as the set up question there.
But I don't speak English very well, even though it's my first language, much less any other ones.
So I apologize for that.
But I thank you so much for your time on the show and for this great piece of journalism that you've done here.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
And no, I mean, it's...
Don't worry about it.
No need to apologize for that at all.
But it's just, you know, something that I try to do.
I try to never generalize and to, you know, consider the countries and the peoples of this region, you know, as different entities.
Because, you know, unfortunately, oftentimes it's sort of, we're sort of all lumped in together as if the Middle East is one sort of monolith.
People are all the same, all different, they think one way.
And so that's something that I just, you know, try to avoid.
So apologies if I sounded a bit militant on it.
Oh, yeah.
No, no, no.
It was actually just my poor construction of the question.
I actually was trying to set you up to parse, but I did it in such a clumsy way that it just wasn't clear.
But anyway, thank you so much.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Take care.
Bye.
Okay.
That's Rania Abuzaid.
And she's written this incredible piece called The Jihad Next Door in Politico magazine.
It's politico.com slash magazine.
And it's, you know, I don't know, what, 5,000 words, something like that.
Really worth your time.
Check it out.
The Jihad Next Door.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here for The Future of Freedom, the monthly journal of the Future Freedom Foundation.
As you may already be aware, Jacob Hornberger, Sheldon Richman, and James Bovard are awesome.
They're also in every issue of The Future of 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 of Freedom at fff.org slash subscribe.
It's just $25 a year for the print edition, $15 to read it online.
That's The Future of Freedom, edited by Sheldon Richman at fff.org slash subscribe.
And tell them you heard it here.
Admit it.
Our public debate has been reduced to reading each other's bumper stickers.
Scott Horton here for libertystickers.com.
I made up most of them, and most of those when I was mad as hell about something.
So if you hate war, empire, central banking, cops, Republicans, Democrats, gun grabbers, and the status of all stripes, go to libertystickers.com, and there's a good chance you'll find just what you need for the back of your truck.
Own a bookstore?
Sell guns at the show?
Get the wholesaler's deal.
Buy any hundred stickers, and they drop down in price to a dollar apiece.
You can spread the contempt and make a little money, too.
That's libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
Don't you want to bust a Murray Rothbard for your desk at work?
A Ludwig von Mises for your bookshelf at home?
A Harry Brown or Ron Paul as a gift for a friend?
Check out these awesome busts of your libertarian heroes at myheroesthink.com.
They come in six or nine-inch sizes, and now in color, too.
Of course, gold, silver, or bronze.
I've got the Harry Brown one on the bookshelf in my office, and I love it.
Just click the banner or add in the right margin at scotthorton.org, and enter promo code SCOTTHORTONSHOW to save $5.
That's myheroesthink.com.you