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All right, you guys, introducing our friend Jason Ditz.
He is the managing news editor of antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jason.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
Thanks for having me.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
So listen, well, there's so much going on, but one of the things is the war in Syria.
And my problem is I'm way behind.
So I was wondering if, you know, we could more or less break it into east or west Syria and the war against Islamic State in the east.
And then, of course, there's the YPG, SDF, Kurdish faction backed by the Americans.
And then over in the west, you have Iran and Hezbollah and the Syrian army and the Russians fighting against the al-Qaeda guys over there in the Idlib province and all these things.
And I was just wondering if you could tell us everything you know about basically who's who and where are they and how many Marines and what the hell is going on over there now, please, sir.
Well, the how many for as far as U.S. troops go, we unfortunately don't know because President Trump's been very clear about keeping that sort of thing secret these days.
And the Pentagon got so tired of being challenged when they flat out lied to us about troop levels that they just announced they're not going to make troop levels public anymore.
So we don't know how many U.S. troops are involved at this point.
What we do know is the big things going on right now, the Kurds are still attacking Raqqa, which has been ISIS's capital city.
The U.S. has been bombing the city to try to help the Kurds, which has been killing a huge number of civilians according to reports from everybody except the Pentagon because the Pentagon's official metrics are that almost nobody's getting killed.
But in the last few days, the Kurds made a gain into another residential neighborhood, which allowed some of the surviving civilians to flee.
And they've told stories of their apartment complexes being brought down on their heads by U.S. airstrikes and losing their entire family to an airstrike or trying to dig out relatives that are buried underneath a building that got hit.
So it's pretty clear that there's a huge civilian cost to the U.S. air war.
Now, further to the west in Idlib, Al-Qaeda's...
Hang on one second, I'm sorry, but let's stick with the east for a second here.
Now, how much of Raqqa is occupied now by the SDF?
Or is it still just encircled and pummeled with artillery?
Or what do you know about the situation there?
They haven't given a percentage lately.
It sounds like it's about three quarters from what I gather.
Okay, so the Islamic State, that's...
And is Raqqa city itself the last territory they hold or they hold more of the countryside still?
Oh, they still...
ISIS still holds substantial territory further to the east in Deir ez-Zor province.
They've got a lot of cities and the U.S.
Between Raqqa and the border with Iraq, you mean?
Right, and the U.S. has talked about Al-Mayadeen's probably going to be the next ISIS capital.
And there are so many cities in Deir ez-Zor that it's probably just going to be a case of going from...
This is ISIS's capital today to this is ISIS's capital.
And it's probably going to take quite a while before they get all these different towns and cities around...
Mostly along the Euphrates River.
And which all different powers are fighting against the Islamic State there at this time?
I guess, if you could, maybe starting with the American-backed Kurdish troops there.
Right, you have the American-backed Kurdish troops.
They're mostly fighting in Raqqa.
Some of them are in northern Deir ez-Zor and kind of along the border between Deir ez-Zor and Hasakeh, which is where the Kurdish territory is.
You've also got the Shiite militias coming out of Iraq trying to get into Syria across the border.
You've got the Syrian military backed by Hezbollah, backed by Shiite militias that are in Syria, and backed by Russia coming into southern Deir ez-Zor and trying to take the main highway into the provincial capital.
And you've also got, to a lesser extent, some U.S.-backed rebels that are a little farther to the south that, although the U.S. told them they want them all to go into Jordan for the time being, it doesn't sound like they've all done that.
And there's still some rebels kicking around down there in the area near the Jordan border.
And then, so, now where all exactly are the lines then?
I mean, I know it's difficult on the radio, but more or less, so, in the east of the country, what's the presence of the Syrian Arab Army and or their allies, the Iranians or Hezbollah or anybody else?
There is no hard and fast rule for where anyone's territory stops.
The Kurds have tried to establish the Euphrates River as the future boundary.
They're saying, well, we're going to take all the ISIS territory north of the river, and the Syrian army can have everything south of the river.
But in practice, the Kurdish forces are nowhere near the river in Deir Ezzor.
So, there have been a lot of cases of Syrian forces fighting along the river and trying to take both sides of the river.
And, of course, this being the middle of the Syrian desert, that's where all the towns and cities are, is they're just, you know, everything's on the river.
And there's, you know, if you look at it in a satellite, it's really an interesting place because the shores of the river are all green and lush and there's farms and everything.
And then you go about 10, 15 miles out and it's just desert.
All right, now, so, well, geez, man, I'm not sure.
I got too many different follow-up questions.
I'm not sure which to ask in which order.
I guess, you know, I'm really curious about the strength of the SDF, which I gather is almost entirely the Kurdish YPG forces there.
And I guess what you think, you know, your best estimation of what their goals are compared to American goals in using them.
In other words, sometimes it seems like the Americans really don't want them to have too much autonomy and create too much problem with the Turks.
And even later, I don't know if they care with the Syrian government in Damascus.
But at the same time, it's also sort of seemed like the Americans want them to really expand and do all the grunt work in rousting the Islamic State out of all the territory that they hold there.
But then, so that could come with the consequence of further backlash.
And I know there have been at least some claims, I don't know how credible they are, that the Kurds were actually cleansing villages of civilians, of Arab civilians, and expanding the size of Syrian Kurdistan there.
It always seemed to me like they didn't really have those ambitions.
And it was more like the Americans were getting them into trouble in a way and helping them expand their influence too far.
Like, they'd be crazy to try to occupy Raqqa and stay there.
And try to, I mean, I guess if they cleanse the city, technically they could.
But otherwise, if they don't, if the population of Raqqa is staying, then the Peshmerga, pardon me, not the Peshmerga, but these YPG forces are not going to be their new police.
So, I just wonder, you know, they're basically caught between a lot of rocks and hard places here.
And it seems like maybe they're being used beyond their capacity, or to an end state that won't be sustainable, something like that.
I don't know.
What do you think of all that?
Yeah, definitely.
They're being pushed a lot farther than what they can practically hold.
And I think the U.S. is promising them a lot of military support, air support, ever-growing amounts of aid that has some of the YPG commanders thinking, oh yeah, we can take all this territory.
We can take Raqqa.
We can take everything this side of the Euphrates River.
Which, in Dire Azur, is mostly empty territory.
So technically they could probably take most of it if they really wanted to.
But there's also nothing really there.
So there's not really a benefit to doing it.
Interestingly though, Turkey's been very clear they don't like the idea of the Kurds expanding their territory at all.
They've also said in the past that they consider the red line to be the river.
And they say they don't want the Kurds on the other side of the river.
Which has been more of an issue in places like Manbij, where earlier in the war, the U.S. helped the Kurds take over ISIS-held Arab cities that were on the opposite shore of the river.
And the U.S. assured Turkey, oh, the Kurds aren't staying.
But eventually the Kurds decided that they were staying.
And that's been the case everywhere else that the YPG has gone.
They come in, they take over.
There are some very minor Arab groups, especially in Raqqa.
There are a few very trivially small groups that are supposedly part of the SDF.
Which I think the Kurds are envisioning are going to be kind of their puppet government for Raqqa.
To give the appearance that it's not a Kurdish-occupied territory.
But there's no way this is sustainable.
And we've seen in the past with the U.S. and rebels, especially in Syria, that the U.S. has huge ambitions for them taking over massive amounts of territory.
But at the first sign of inconvenience, they're just going to cut them loose.
And at that point, there's no way the Kurds are going to be able to hold all of this.
So, yeah, I mean, that's what makes the most sense, right?
Is that these Kurds are just getting ready to be stabbed in the back by the Americans as soon as they're done being useful.
We're going to choose the Turks over them again as soon as they're done with the Islamic State.
Because it doesn't really make sense, does it?
They don't need the Kurds to block their Shiite crescent land bridge or whatever.
Because even if they just leave the Sunni Arab population and, well, I don't know.
I guess maybe that is their only option.
Because otherwise it would be the SAA that takes over Raqqa, huh?
Yeah, but, I mean, the southern part of Deir ez-Zor province and the route through the south is already Syrian Arab army controlled anyway.
So, realistically, there already is a bridge.
All the way to Iraq?
Pardon?
All the way to Iraq it is?
Yeah.
Oh, by the way, I meant to ask you before.
Are Iraqi army and Shiite militia forces and Iranian Kurd forces and so forth there in Iraq?
And are the Americans?
Are they already crossing the border into Syria as well?
Or they're still busy in Tal Afar and other places there in the west of Iraq?
For the most part, they're still busy.
Although some of the Shiite militias in Iraq have crossed over.
And the U.S. has a very odd stance on that.
Because they've been close allies to those Shiite militias so long as they're in Iraqi territory fighting ISIS and killing Sunnis.
But, basically, the minute they cross that border, then they become the enemy and they become Iranian-backed Shiite terrorist groups.
I swear to God, we had this exact conversation.
You and me had this exact conversation four years ago about how America was helping the Iraqi Shiite government use drones against Al-Qaeda forces there to chase them into Syria where they're the good guys.
And we're using the jihadists there against the Syrian army.
This is in the lead up to the creation of the actual Islamic State.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
It really did.
And they still haven't learned their lesson.
It's still this, oh, these are two separate countries, even though it's just, realistically, that border is gone.
That's just desert.
Alright, so now tell me all about Jolani's men in Idlib province.
That is Ayman al-Zawahiri's men, the Al-Nusra Front, or whatever they call themselves this week there.
Yeah, I think it's Tarar al-Sham or something like that is their official name now.
Of course, they're still the Nusra Front and they're still Al-Qaeda.
Zawahiri came up with this idea that the Nusra Front's having a hard time finding allies because they're technically Al-Qaeda and the U.S. doesn't like that.
So they just said, well, you guys go ahead and change your name and pretend you're not part of Al-Qaeda.
And he was very public about it, that you should make a public but not a real split, like this fake little thing just to trick the Americans.
And even though he basically announced that as his official plan, it worked.
And the U.S. very much was tricked.
So when Nusra started taking heavy losses in Aleppo, all of a sudden the U.S. was like, oh, these poor Nusra fighters, these brave rebels, are victims of the Russians and the Syrian government.
Well, I don't know how tricked they were.
They sure wanted to use that narrative that these are moderate guys and they changed their name.
They didn't renounce their ties to Ayman al-Zawahiri, but they did change their name and that's good enough for us guys.
It was pretty cynical, though, I think.
It was very cynical.
And they have territory in Idlib, but it's a shrinking territory.
They've lost a lot of ground to rival rebels.
They tried to launch a major offensive right after the most recent Astana peace talks in Kazakhstan.
They're very against the peace talks, and they've publicly said any of the rebel groups that participate in the peace talks or agree to any ceasefires, they consider them traitors to the cause and they consider them collaborators.
So they launched a major offensive out of Idlib into Hama province against government territory, sustained just huge losses.
The Russian government claimed something in the realm of 450 Nusra fighters were killed in a couple of days span.
And there was a lot of questioning of whether that number was accurate, but since then we've seen Nusra very much on the defensive everywhere else.
So it seems like they did sustain some pretty heavy losses and don't exactly have a wealth of fighters to draw from anymore.
We've even seen ISIS in Hama province, which is barely existent anymore, taking some Nusra villages just because Nusra can't defend them anymore.
And now we have Turkey having sent troops this week into Idlib as part of the Astana deal to try to create this de-escalation zone to keep the rebels and the government from fighting, with the hopes that it'll eventually lead to some sort of peace talks.
Hey, I thought you were going to say to outright take the side of Al-Qaeda on the ground there, so that's pretty good I guess.
Right, and a few weeks ago it would have seemed preposterous for Turkey to send troops in there because of how powerful Al-Qaeda was.
And Turkey's had kind of an on-again-off-again relationship with Nusra, but more recently it's been not great.
And now they're going in, they took the border crossing when they came in, announced that it's under the control of a Syrian opposition faction that's basically, I mean they're based in Istanbul, they're basically funded by the Turkish government.
Turkey's backing the other rebel factions and trying to get the ones that are still allied with Nusra to switch sides, just because Nusra's a losing battle at this point.
So I think a lot of people are saying Nusra is just, as far as a faction that holds a lot of territory or is a serious part of the rebellion, is kind of on the way out.
And I'm sure there'll still be an insurgency and they'll still be conducting suicide attacks and the like, but they probably aren't going to be a major player for much longer.
All right, hang on just one second.
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Well, I know I'm a broken record about this, but it seems like really bad news, Jason, and that is that this policy, never even mind Bush's insane policy in Iraq War II.
I mean, what was then called the Islamic State in Iraq, or Al-Qaeda in Iraq, they were just almost a completely decimated force by 2009, 10, etc.
And then Obama came in and just gave them this whole new giant battlefield.
I mean, after all, the war would have been over in no time if Obama had simply told all the allies, we are not doing this, and we means you.
Forget it.
Then Assad would have just won, and that would have just been it by the end of 2011 or something.
And that would have been that.
And yet they prolonged this thing, and they expanded this war, and created this giant crisis.
And it ended up leading to this, you know, really a power split, but in a way a loyalty and a doctrinal split, in effect, where Jelani sided with the boss, Zawahiri, and said just keep fighting and keep winning and keep spreading chaos, basically.
Whereas Baghdadi said, nope, I don't want to take orders from you anymore.
I want to go ahead and create my caliphate now, which gets right to the exact heart of the whole debate in Al-Qaeda in the 1990s about attacking the United States.
That you have to get rid of the far enemy first, because if you try to do a local revolution now, the Americans will come and bomb it off the face of the earth.
And back then, there were only 400 of these guys, and there were dictators that ruled everything in all directions, and so there was no danger really of revolution anywhere by these guys anyway.
Then Bush gives them, you know, lawlessness in western Iraq, then Obama gives them the lawless territory in not just eastern, but so much of the land of Syria, that led to then the rise of the actual place, not just the group, the actual place, the Islamic State.
Wait, I'm going somewhere with this, everybody.
And then, in 2014, oops, our policy blew back in our face so bad with the creation of the Islamic State.
Now we got to again take Iran's side, as we talked about, Iran and their Shiite allies in Iraq to fight Iraq War III, now to rouse the Islamic State out of western Iraq, and as we're talking about here, eastern Syria.
And then they've done what?
They've proven Zawahiri right, that you can't create a caliphate now.
Even if George W. Bush and Barack Obama give you the space to create your caliphate, that same Obama will turn right around and bomb your caliphate off the face of the earth again.
And so, what's the lesson then, if you're one of these terrorists?
Other than, they've got to keep attacking us, till we either finally back off, or create such a crisis, I don't know, say overthrowing the Shiite Ayatollah Mullah dictatorship in Iran for them, something like that.
Make matters so much worse that it finally completely destroys our empire, and leaves the field that much more fertile for their revolution, when we're finally done, and no longer a threat to bomb them.
So, here we are again with our government continuing, Bush, Obama, and now into Trump still, basically reading from our enemy's script, and doing what they want.
We're talking about this an hour after Trump just finished announcing he wouldn't recertify the Iran deal, and is ratcheting up tensions with Zawahiri's enemy, the Ayatollah.
And so, man, ain't that a hell of a thing, you know, to see that, and I guess, and as you just said, oh, now I'm getting back to my point that I was really trying to make, as you just said, well jeez, Islamic State, and now Al-Qaeda too, in Syria, they don't really control any territory anymore, so what does that mean?
It means they go home to wherever they're from.
This is the problem where we got Al-Qaeda the last time, was they came home from the war in the 80s in Afghanistan, and this is where we got our problems in Libya and Syria, where these were guys who came home from Iraq War II, and spread the revolutions to Libya and Syria, where then Obama took their side.
So now what's going to happen is, Obama seems like, just on the face of it, that he's given them that much more reason to forget their local jihads, and again refocus on attacking Americans in America.
Oh, absolutely, and President Trump is playing into their hands so completely that it's almost ridiculous.
I mean, the Trump administration, of course, their answer to the terrorists going home thing has been, from the start, that their expectation is there won't be any survivors to go home, that they're just going to literally kill every single ISIS fighter in Iraq and Syria.
And that'll be the end of it, because they'll all be dead.
Which, of course, doesn't work, and besides not working, also sounds really, really ghoulish, the idea that you're going to win a war through just complete massacre of the other side.
Which, I don't think that's worked as a war strategy since caveman days, the idea that you can literally kill everybody else and then you win.
But the Trump administration seems to just, you know, they come up with these little ideas that obviously aren't going to work, and then they just stick with them until the end.
And, you know, once the blowback happens, then they're going to obviously have to come up with some other narrative for why it happened and react with more military action.
But I think you're right, they're just going to keep making this a more fertile ground for Al Qaeda, for ISIS, for what other factions end up coming along in the wake of these wars.
And we are just an hour or so out of the Iran speech, where it's incredible.
I mean, Trump basically tried to blame Iran for 9-11.
And he accused Iran of backing Al Qaeda.
Wait, wait, I heard him accuse them of doing the Khobar attack and then even the embassies, but he accused them of doing 9-11 too?
Well, he accused them of supporting the 9-11 attackers in the lead up to 9-11.
And when he listed Islamist groups that Iran is supporting, Al Qaeda came first.
And then it was like Hezbollah, Hamas, but Al Qaeda was number one on the list.
Who even wrote that speech?
I mean, did McMaster and the National Security Council approve that?
I mean, I know they hate Iran, but are they that sloppy?
I mean, this is Scooter Libby level nonsense here now.
Yeah, I mean, the restaurant plot was dumb enough.
I mean, there was sort of something there.
It probably wasn't the Iranian government.
I think everyone's pretty much set on the fact that that was just some mentally ill guy who thought he was going to get killed.
He was on the phone with somebody in Iran, but it seemed more likely they were talking about drugs than any assassination at some restaurant.
I'm a guy who wasn't even a prince.
An attack that made no sense whatsoever, even on the face of it.
Right.
Or maybe he was actually arrested and prosecuted before he left to go and fight.
And his defense was, but he was recruited by the CIA to go fight.
It's not fair to the FBI.
I remember that.
No, I met the guy.
You know, this is not cool.
And I don't know if that was actually true or not, but it sure seemed plausible enough at the time.
And so, but then, yeah, that one story was that the FBI, there was no manila folder that was, you know, their best estimate of which all Americans had ever gone over there who at least are going to need a good talking to when they come home.
Right.
After going over there to fight with Al Nusra, the mythical moderates or whichever group, the cannibals or the child beheaders or whichever, you know.
Right.
They're they started talking about how closely they were keeping tabs on them very late in Obama's last term in office when it started to be clear that this was going to be a problem someday.
But realistically, there were so many people that had already gone.
They didn't really have a good number of how many had left, who they were fighting with, any of that stuff.
So they were starting way too late.
They're never going to have reliable information.
And, you know, realistically, the FBI and the CIA do so much recruitment on behalf of ISIS on the idea that, oh, we're going to, you know, create a fictional ISIS plot and then have an excuse to arrest this guy.
It's hard to tell when they're really recruiting for somebody and when they're just trying to entrap somebody.
Right.
Yeah, boy, what an unfair entrapment.
Right.
Your FBI informant tells you he works for the CIA.
Obama's supporting the moderate rebels.
You're going to go join the moderate rebels.
They're called the Al-Nusra Front.
And then.
Right.
What an entrapment, man.
That's so unfair.
I don't know.
I presume the innocence of the accused in that case.
I don't know exactly.
Right.
And you had John McCain going over there and meeting with all these people.
But, yeah, there's going to be dangerous guys coming back.
I mean, we've seen this beginning in 2013.
There was a guy who was a veteran of the Syrian jihad who came and shot up a Holocaust museum in Brussels.
Right.
That was the first.
And there's been, I don't know, two dozen something relatively minor, but still actually pretty damn horrible terrorist attacks in Europe by people who are connected one way or the other with the Syrian jihadists.
ISIS or the Al-Nusra Front.
It's going to be much worse in Western Europe because countries like France were very clear that there's like, oh, well, we have several thousand people that left to go to Syria.
And we're really concerned about what's going to happen when they come back.
But realistically, what is going to happen when they come back is they're going to have a lot more connections to international terrorism and they're all going to have a bunch of training that they got in Syria on how to carry out these attacks.
Man, I mean, that was the thing as we saw this all along, where the guys trained the Southern force and, you know, in the train in Turkey and whatever different groups trained by the American military and CIA would then go off and join the Al-Nusra Front or ISIS.
So it wasn't direct support for ISIS, but might as well have been.
In fact, just as Hillary Clinton said, the famous clip that in essence, she says correctly that to support the so-called revolution, the rebel side, the Al-Qaeda side in the Civil War is to in effect back Al-Qaeda.
She told that to CBS News in 2012 that Zawahiri has endorsed the revolution in Syria.
Are we backing Al-Qaeda in Syria?
So, yeah, you know, sorry, but when we look at good moderate forces to put in power, we don't really have anybody to use to do it.
We're kind of out of options here.
And she was actually spent the rest of that year hawking it up, trying to make it worse.
But at least in that case, defending the president's position from the CBS reporter, she said the plain truth that this ultimately is a war for the Al-Nusra Front.
Right.
And it took a while for Obama to start admitting as much, but he eventually started conceding that there never really was a moderate force, that this idea that you were going to create an army out of doctors and lawyers and bakers, and then suddenly they're going to conquer Syria for us, that was never realistic.
So all these weapons that the CIA spent many years funneling into Syria, I mean, some of them ended up in the hands of small factions, but most of them ended up with ISIS or Nusra.
Yeah.
All right, man.
Well, listen, I won't keep you any longer, but I really appreciate you coming on the show.
It's always bad news.
It sounds like the war is almost over, but not yet.
But it's been too long since we've spoken.
Very happy to have you back.
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you for having me.
I'm Scott Horton.
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Okay, thank you guys very much.
Appreciate it.
Bye.
