08/01/14 – Mitchell Prothero – The Scott Horton Show

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Islamic State's brutal videos send message to friend and foe alike.
Welcome back to the show, Mitchell.
How are you doing?
Oh, I'm doing all right.
How are you today?
I'm doing great, man.
I really appreciate you joining us here.
And I went and found the whole video after reading your article last night on LiveLeak and watched it.
Unfortunately, I don't speak any Arabic, so I didn't understand much of what they were saying, but I'm pretty sure I did understand what I was looking at there.
Sure is a brutal message, no doubt about that.
Before I ask you to tell us that story, let me just start with the big headline here from antiwar.com this morning.
Margaret Griffiths has been keeping track of Iraqi casualties for about a decade straight now, and her brand new report is out.
Over 5,000 killed across Iraq in July.
And I happen to know that that is her conservative lowball estimate.
When she's compiling all these things, she tries to be very, very careful about what gets credited and counted or not.
If she credited everybody's claims of how many people they killed or how many people theirs were killed, in every case, it would be a much, much higher number.
But anyway, it's apparently at least 5,000 killed just in the last month there.
And so, well, I guess so.
My first question should be, does that sound about right to you or more or less?
What do you think?
Well, it's incredibly hard to tell.
I'd call it a reasonable number.
Part of the problem with the situation in Iraq for all of us is that neither side really wants us on the battlefield or to have access to the civilians, to the areas that are contested.
The Iraqi government has done nothing but lie, at least since I've been here.
I think it's each day they've liberated Tikrit, which still remains firmly in ISIS hands.
And again, the Islamic State has shown a profound unfriendliness to Western journalists over the last year or so, we've been dealing with them, that I'm not really inclined to deal with them one-on-one.
So we just really can't get to large swaths of the country.
But yeah, I wouldn't call that number outrageous at all.
I'd probably have to go through a methodology, but alone on soldiers, I'd have to say, and from what I can tell, it's most of the killing has been limited to combatants or what we're seeing a rise of right now are what we call Shia sort of death squads, going after people in the Sunni community in Baghdad and some of the surrounding areas and just summarily executing them.
They might be insurgents or supporters of ISIS, or they might not be.
There's no real clear process on how those guys ended up dead.
Now, is that Baader and Sadr or that's others too?
Yeah, it's going to be a whole mix of those guys.
Sadr's people have been relatively quiet compared to some of the other groups.
But yeah, I mean, just there's been nonstop reports.
I think Human Rights Watch just came out with a pretty interesting one in which they tracked hundreds of just people in the last six months who've gone missing in majority Sunni areas as part of the crackdown that we'd say against the Islamic State.
And knowing what I know about Maliki, the Iraqi security services, and just the way things roll in Iraq in general, a large number of those people are going to be sort of caught in the crossfire, have the wrong ID cards at the wrong checkpoint at the wrong time, or even have a house, somebody in the neighborhood covet it, for all I know.
I mean, there's a lot of ways to die in this country.
Yeah, you know, Dar Jamal's talking with some of his contacts in Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad, and they said they're as terrified or more than 2006, 2007, the very worst days of the Civil War.
They know that, you know, their days are numbered.
They've been warned.
Some of their people have already been killed.
Well, yeah, I mean, this is one thing that we noticed with great irony during that time, and I, to a certain extent, covered it back then, was, you know, in the earliest days of the American occupation here, it was the Sunnis who first sort of rejected the Americans' presence.
They started fighting them out in the Al Anbar, Fallujah, you know, up through the areas we're hearing now, like Samarra, Tikrit, and even in parts of Baghdad.
And the whole time you were thinking, you guys don't kind of get that 60% of the country wants to kill you.
You're going to really be happy about those American soldiers, you know, at some point.
And by about 2007, it had dawned on the Sunni community that the Americans were the only reasons why they weren't being genocided.
And it actually broke down.
I remember knowing that Iraq had completely inverted itself when the most hardcore Sunni militant neighborhood in Baghdad, a place called Al-Amiya, which today is what we'd call pretty restive as well, at one point rejected Iraqi police from entering into the neighborhood at all, unless they were accompanied by U.S. troops.
And at that point, you thought, well, you know, down is up, up is down, cats are very dogs.
I mean, you know, the Sunnis aren't going to, you know, they're not going to let Iraqis in unless American troops are with them.
Well, the bad news with this situation is there aren't any American troops.
There aren't going to be any.
And, you know, so right now I'd be absolutely terrified if I was a normal law-abiding Sunni living in one of those areas.
Yeah.
Well, we could spend the whole rest of the show talking about American politics about this if you let me, Mitchell, but so I won't.
Tell me about this video and tell me what you learned from this new 36-minute video.
People can find it at LiveLeak.com.
Let me see, the quote here is, Islamic State in Action.
Yeah, well, first off, I, you know, I don't want to be seen as encouraging people to go watch it because it's really just, you know, some horrible, horrible stuff.
And, you know, there's a joke in journalism, we watch this stuff so you don't have to.
But I guess you've taken a look at it.
It's the stuff nightmares are made of.
It's ugly, man.
Yeah, it really is.
And, you know, I'm getting a little old for having to, I've been watching videos like this off and on for 10 years now.
After a while, it starts to bore you a little bit.
It's just awful the way that, you know, you become numb to this sort of violence.
But what we're seeing is, unlike back in the day in the founding group, you know, this is the Islamic State derives from what we call Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Abu Musab Zarkawi group that, you know, started off in various incarnations and, you know, the early in the American occupation.
They sort of were one of the first proponents of these sort of, you know, videotape yourself sawing off somebody's head style things in order to shock and outrage people.
But they were just kind of a bunch of, at the time, at least, at least the foreigners were just sort of a bunch of psychopaths and school shooters.
And so they didn't really have an overarching ethos behind what they were attempting to do, other than just chop dudes heads off and videotape and terrify everybody.
What I'm seeing now with the Islamic State is, and they're certainly, you know, absolutely brutal people.
But there's a little bit more thought going in behind it now.
And what I concluded in watching this latest video and talking to a lot of analysts that I respect on this stuff, is we all sort of came to the same conclusion, which is that they're carefully targeting this violence.
When they're killing people in these spectacular, disgusting, even almost factory farming style ways, like, you know, if you watched part of it, you felt like you were watching industrial killing.
They're targeting people that aren't going, that are automatically going to be hated by the people they're trying to reach, which is the mainstream Sunni community.
These people, whether they're in Syria or Iraq, already hate the regime soldiers.
So there's not going to be much disgust or, you know, sympathy for these guys as they're getting smoked.
So there's very little political cost to the Islamic State to do this.
The upside for them is, you know, a multitude of things, one of which is just people are psychologically terrified of them.
If you get caught by these guys, you're going to suffer some of the worst deaths imaginable.
Or, you know, there's very little chance of you getting let go.
At best, you're going to get shot in the head.
And, you know, it's just, it's absolutely terrifying.
If you're an Iraqi policeman or an Iraqi soldier, they've been setting you up psychologically now for a couple of years, to the point that if you hear these guys are coming, you might decide to run for it.
And that'd be a very reasonable, you know, point of view.
That's one.
The other thing that we're getting from this is it's a bit of a warning to people.
Like, look at what we can get away with.
We can, we can kill 1,200 soldiers.
We are the power now.
Right.
All right.
Well, we'll have to pick that up on the other side of this break.
Sorry about that.
It's Mitchell Prothero from McClatchy Newspapers reporting from Erbil, Kurdistan.
Islamic State's brutal videos send message to friend and foe alike is the headline at McClatchyDC.com and MiamiHerald.com.
We'll be right back.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Mitchell Prothero from McClatchy Newspapers.
He's reporting from Erbil in Kurdistan.
And his latest piece is about the latest Islamic State propaganda video on the path of the prophets.
And when we were interrupted by the commercials there, the point you're making Mitchell, I think was there's really two goals here.
One to tell the choir, look at how tough we are.
We're not going anywhere.
No one can defeat us.
And to tell their enemies, you better run because you don't want to get caught by us, which is really, it's a force multiplier, right?
The terror that they instill even in the armed soldiers of the Iraqi government.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, you know, it just, it starts giving you the hinks a little bit when you've seen enough of this.
The third thing though that I found really interesting was, and analysts had argued this, is there was an original thing that Zarqawi had wanted to do way back in 2003, 4, 5, when he would do these spectacular car bombings directed at the Shia, was he thought it would be an okay, it would be a good idea.
It was his plan to basically goad the Shia until starting a sectarian civil war that then would like launch Iraq into anarchy.
He succeeded in doing that.
He just didn't realize he couldn't win that.
Even with the U.S. sort of trying to keep the bloodshed down to a minimum or whatever.
I mean, that's a long time.
I mean, the Americans had already thrown in with the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa party by then.
To a certain extent, but they certainly didn't let them run as a muck as those guys would have liked to.
You know, I mean, they're just, but anyway, that's, that's a whole show, you know, that's, that's a whole nother area, you know, but anyway, what he didn't realize was that there was, there was no way for him to actually win that.
The Islamic State's doing the same thing right now, but in this, in essence, they're goading the Shia militias into committing atrocities against the Sunni public.
Like we were talking about it, how terrified one might be to be a Sunni right now.
And in particularly Baghdad, Shia death squads do appear to be operating, grabbing military aged males and other type of, you know, just about anybody off the street disappearing them.
And then, you know, as a response to that, the Islamic State can turn around and say to the Sunni community, we are your protector.
Unlike Zarqawi, they can be.
And so that's a powerful motivation as well.
It's a very cynical one in which they're intentionally goading their enemy into killing, you know, civilians that are their own people, Sunnis, in order to make the point that they're necessary.
So it's, it's, it's just some really sophisticated messaging that they're doing here.
And it's something that Zarqawi was never really able to do, which was protect the Sunni community from the Shia.
And that's one of the things that, uh, ended up making the Sunni tribes that are now on the side of ISIS, you know, flip on him at the time and start the Sawa and the awakening councils and, you know, help the, you know, basically the thing that the surge took credit for the, the turning of most of the insurgents against the insurgency because, you know, America bought them off.
Uh, well, there's no America to buy them off this time.
These guys have their own space and are able to protect their own populations.
So what the Islamic state's doing is sort of repeating a failed strategy in a situation in which it might very well win.
Um, at this stage, it's very difficult to see Maliki turning the Sunnis against the Islamic state because his own militias are out there killing them and there's no one to protect these people.
Of course, you're going to end up going with the power.
I think, uh, Charles Lister from the Brookings Institute said this in my story.
Uh, you know, I quoted him saying, you know, at this point people are looking around going, all right, fine, I'll go with the winner.
Who's going to provide me with security.
Right.
Well, and you know, back then they were fighting for Baghdad and they lost Baghdad was a big part of what led to the awakening was the Sunni tribe said, thanks a lot for provoking the civil war and losing us the capital city jerk to Zarqawi.
Right.
But now it's a whole different question about provoking the Shia into leaving Shia territory and to come in and fighting them in Sunni territory.
Right.
They can provoke as much as they want there and they don't really have anything much to lose.
Well, just every time like we saw this last week, you know, in a response, which you could tie directly to some of these videos, some, uh, Shia militias have done a couple of actually crazy things.
But one of the things that we saw last week was, you know, they killed 15 guys, no idea who these guys are.
They probably were with the Islamic state or at least one of the other militant groups that are fighting against the government, you know, caught them, executed them and hung them from, from lampposts, essentially from electricity posts all throughout town square, like decorated with 15 dead bodies sitting there as a warning to the community.
Well, those pictures didn't exactly make the shield look any better than the, than the ISIS guys.
You know, this is the type of response that the Islamic state wants to provoke from the Shia militias who, you know, I know some of them personally, they're, they're, they're extremely hard, ruthless men and are more than willing to, uh, you know, match you atrocity with atrocity, right?
Well, that's how terrorism works.
This is what a couple of good analysts I knew right after September 11th tried to say at the top of their lungs, the action is in the reaction.
They're trying to get us to overdo it.
So what we're supposed to do is not overdo it.
We're supposed to act really smart and surgical, not go and get away with as much as we can.
They're trying to get us to get away with as much as we can.
But anyway, so now 13 years of not listening to will Greg, here we are.
Um, well, and now, so you talk about in your article too, how they really learned the lesson.
Another lesson that they learned from Zarqawi is to not let there be a bunch of rivals waiting to turn on them.
If the time comes and they're going around and arresting and eliminating tribal leaders that could end up doing another awakening style betrayal.
Well, they, to a certain extent, I mean, that, that stuff I think is being a little overhyped right now in the sense that it's something, you know, most people, and I'd say reasonably anticipated happening, uh, as opposed to it actually having happened so far, we have seen some clashes between the tribes and ISIS, uh, or the Islamic state.
We, we've seen a few instances of this stuff, but it's all been pretty small.
When you consider, you know, this is a pretty huge area they control and it's full of a lot of restive opinionated tribal shakes.
Uh, there hasn't been a lot.
People have been, for the most part, uh, as one analyst said to me the other day, uh, you know, to a certain extent, this did restore Sunni honor, restored a certain sense of Sunni dignity and control over their own destiny.
And so for the most part, even people uncomfortable with the Islamic state have been willing to go along with it to see how it plays out.
Uh, the only question is once they decide it doesn't work, and I do think a lot of people will eventually get to that, uh, you know, how are they going to be able to be in a position to stop it?
Will the momentum of already taken on and it's, it's its own power.
And, and, and can you at that point turn on them?
And what I would argue is, and this is something that I'm working on for next week, it's going to be very difficult for Sunni tribes with each week or month as this goes on, or these other groups to change their mind and decide to oppose ISIS.
A lot of the factors that were on the ground in 2006, 2007, that allowed them to make that decision and eventually kick these guys out.
They're not there now.
Namely, you know, suitcases of cash from the CIA are not coming.
And the other one that I think people underrated as an important part of the surge, uh, was that the tribal shakes themselves had American military bases in the neighborhoods to go to, to work out of on cell phone where they were safe and couldn't be assassinated while they rallied their guys and cleared out the neighborhoods.
Well, there are no basis for them to hide on right now.
If they want to oppose ISIS, they've got to do it from their house.
And eventually somebody is just going to, you know, throw a suicide bomber in their front yard and kill them.
It's just, you know, it's just an incredibly different situation.
And I think that some of these Sunni tribal leaders, some of which I've talked to are playing a very cynical and very dangerous game where like everyone else, they're underestimating the longterm determination that we're seeing from the Islamic state to be around a year or two from now.
You know, I'm not saying they definitely will be, I'm just saying you can't underestimate how much thought by serious men has gone into this.
When you, you know, see these videos, you think they're just savages.
Well, they might be savages, but they're very thoughtful, very smart savages, and they've got a plan.
Yeah.
Well, that's always the biggest mistake you can make is to assume that your enemies are stupid just because you can't understand what language they're speaking or something like that, which seems to be a big part of American policymakers problem.
Well, actually, to a certain extent, I've seen from the Americans are starting to treat it with some sophistication.
I mean, Bush was notorious for basically doing everything bin Laden ever wanted him to do.
I'd say, you know, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel is a perfect example of a tough leader who seems just absolutely intent on doing exactly what his enemy wants him to do.
You know, I've studied a little bit of warfare and strategy in my day.
And, you know, one aspect of war is you try to do things your enemy doesn't want you to do, like, you know, like it just, you know, I will, I will give the Obama administration some credit.
It doesn't always seem like they've got a coherent policy.
But one thing that is clear to me is that at least these guys have been around the block long enough that they're not easily drawn in to stupid situations.
And one of them is, I think they're just watching Iraq right now, the rest of the world, and certainly the Iraqis are incredibly frustrated with how long they're taking.
Because I don't know that they can see where they'd make a difference.
I've had a US intelligence official tell me on background in the last month, we're not going to help Iraq, because it wouldn't matter if we did.
Like the Iraqi government as it stands now, can't be saved.
We can't come in and fix it.
So we're not going to bother.
We've got to wait for something else to change before we can start adding the influence that we can add with money and equipment and, you know, whatever, you know, support drones, you know, these are all cards that the US government can play.
Right now, they do not seem inclined to play any of them, because they don't think in the current environment will make a difference one way or another.
And, you know, after eight years of George Bush, I'm not the world's biggest fan of the Obama administration's foreign policies.
But I will say at least some ruthless thoughtfulness is a welcome change over, you know, what we would have seen probably from the Bush administration by now.
Yeah.
Hey, even if they're just afraid to do it, I'll take that, too.
You know, whatever kind of reluctance, whatever could slow them down.
But now so the opposite of that, though, is the pile of successes since the fall of Mosul.
And, you know, since before, obviously, but they've moved.
The Islamic State has moved its forces in some number back into Syria and they're consolidating their gains.
They're put a bunch of beheaded skulls up on pikes and all that, just like Crete over there in what's now, I guess, the Western Islamic State province.
Yeah, Raqqa.
Raqqa is the capital.
Raqqa has been the capital since last year.
This is the capital of the Islamic Emirate.
And so have they had as the Islamic State have a major setback since the fall of Mosul at all?
No, no.
Some people would argue that they they they took over the shore gas field in in Western Syria, in Hama province, and killed.
I think the reports were really high, like like 300 Syrian soldiers in one day took over a natural gas field.
And then the next day or two, you know, day or two later, the regime came back out and said, OK, we've we retook it from them in heavy fighting.
I don't know the exact details, but my impression had been that they went in, they killed everybody.
They knew they couldn't hold it.
They blew it up and then they left.
And that's about the closest thing to a major setback I've seen them have since since Mosul fell.
One thing I would say is that they've also been very careful to not overreach.
They had an initial string of success, and some of us wondered if they were going to go too far and push their luck.
And what I've got to tell you right now is what they're planning, something else.
And I don't know what it is yet, but it's my guess.
If I just had to pick something off of a map, I would say look for them to expand as far as they can into Sunni majority areas of Syria, like the city of Aleppo, which right now is under held by rebels under siege by the regime.
I would not be surprised to see the Islamic State roll in and attack both in an effort to take over that city, because on paper at least that city is something they could hold.
They don't seem interested in going after places they can't hold, namely further into the south of Iraq, where then you're dealing with millions of Shiite tribe members, who even if they don't have very much training, all have guns and are willing to die to keep you out.
They haven't shown much appetite for storming into those areas.
They're being very careful not to overextend themselves and to consolidate what they've taken.
So right now we're in a lull where we're waiting to see what the next move is.
Another coherent move would be maybe not to take Baghdad, but to simply gut the center of it and absolutely terrify everybody and prove once and for all there is no central Iraqi government.
That would also be something that could be on deck.
I forgot who I was reading who was emphasizing how many howitzers that ISIS has now, that they could just shell Baghdad for months.
Well that's me.
And the main thing is, those howitzers, those cannons are basically from 20 kilometers out, 12 to 15 miles at least away, even if you don't aim them particularly well, you can shut down airports.
Yeah, that was you.
Yeah, so the question is, what do they want now?
I mean this was a question back a month ago where you're talking about, are they going to try to take Baghdad or not?
And I think, you know, like you're saying, that's answered that they are too smart.
We were wondering whether they were going to be smart or stupid, and it sounds like you keep reporting that they keep proving that they're choosing smart.
But let me ask you about Mao Zedong then, because when I interviewed your friend, I forget her name, who wrote that great thing at Politico magazine about Nusra and ISIS and the whole history there in Syria.
What's her name again?
Rania Abouzaid.
Yes, exactly, Rania Abouzaid.
And she was talking about how Nusra learned the lesson from Zarqawi's failures much better, that don't go cutting everybody's heads off, and don't go suicide bombing children, which I think they really did do some of that anyway.
But she was saying, I guess, relatively speaking, at least Nusra, they let David Enders go, right?
They kidnapped him and let him go.
They're nicer to the locals than old Zarqawi's group ever was.
But she also says that ISIS had kind of refused to learn this lesson, and they were still much more comparable to Zarqawi than to the Nusra guys in Syria.
Only I wonder how true that still holds now, post fall of Mosul and all that.
Well, this is what we're waiting to see how well that it holds.
I was talking about Nusra the other day, and I agreed with Rania, and I think her article was amazing.
But there was something funny.
I think we were all waiting to see, well, maybe if the Al-Qaeda type guys moderate themselves a little bit, they'll become more influential, more powerful.
And one thing that reminded me of while I was watching Nusra fall apart and ISIS take over is that old American cliche about what's in the center of the road.
It was lane change signs and road kill.
And basically, it was like they tried to split the difference between being a jihadi and being mainstream, and they didn't satisfy either side, and thus got made irrelevant.
And somehow, by adhering to this hard line and sticking to their principles, in some ways, ISIS has made itself more powerful.
And that's probably a whole other show on how you could explain that.
But one of them would be just the appeal to foreign fighters, discipline within their own ranks, and, I just say, at the top end, leadership with a long-term plan.
If the same guys who ran ISIS ran Nusra, we would probably be seeing Nusra being successful right now.
You can't replace high-end competence when it comes to tactical and strategic thinking, and that's clearly something these guys are winning at right now.
And I think the Syrian regime, who just lost, I believe, 1,200 soldiers to them in the last week, after thinking for the longest time, these guys won't bother us.
They're too busy fighting Iraq.
They're too busy fighting the other rebel groups.
We've gotten away with this.
Well, they're learning right now, you just can't play around with these guys.
When they draw their focus on you, you lose lots of guys and a lot of land quick.
It's not good.
It's very hard to see anybody in the region with the military capability to take them on right now.
Well, maybe Iran, but they would have to really commit to it.
Even so, I mean, Iran's had a military that's, like, it's big, I guess, but it's been under sanctions for 30 years.
The Iranians have a lot of very well-trained, what we call special forces types guys, light infantry type guys.
You know, they work well with Hezbollah.
They're certainly tough operators, but in terms of being the type of army that can bring 35,000 guys as an armored division, you know, and move them and have the logistics, Iran's never had to do that, maybe in its history, for all I know, or at least since the Iran-Iraq war.
And in that, they weren't particularly successful.
And then you draw on the fact that if Iran does that and enters into Sunni areas of Iraq with that type of force that openly, you could light the whole Middle East on fire because then it brings everybody's claim of a sectarian Sunni-Shia war and all of the Persian domination and colonialism of the Arab stuff back to light.
You probably see even more jihadis flooded from all around the world, and even half the Arab countries might end up declaring war on behalf of ISIS at this stage because you simply couldn't allow the Persians to come in and conquer Arab land.
It's really, it's a mess.
All right.
Thanks, Mitchell.
I sure appreciate it.
No problem.
I'm glad to just always be so cheerful whenever you have me on the show.
It's good stuff, man.
It's important journalism that you're doing here.
I really do appreciate a lot.
All right.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Bye-bye.
All right, y'all.
That's Mitchell Prothero from McClatchy Newspapers.
You can find him also at the Miami Herald.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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In The War State, Michael Swanson does a great job telling the sordid history of the rise of this national security state, relying on important firsthand source material, but writing for you and me.
Find out how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy all alternately empowered and fought to control this imperial beast, and how the USA has gotten to where it is today, corrupt, bankrupt, soaked in blood, despised by the world.
The War State by Michael Swanson, available at Amazon.com and at Audible.com, or just click the logo in the right-hand margin at ScottHorton.org.
We should take nothing for granted.you