03/22/15 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, March 22, 2015.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, y'all.
Welcome to Show It Is, Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
You'll find my full interview archive, more than 3,500 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
Introducing the great Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent in Britain.
That's independent.co.uk.
And his brand new book is The Rise of Islamic State, ISIS, and the New Sunni Revolution.
And he's got a new five-part series about life under the Islamic State.
And he had a five-part series just like this a year ago, warning you that this is what was going to happen.
And this is exactly what's happened.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you?
Fine, thank you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
So, one of the major points that you make in this series is that there really is no doubt that the Islamic State is a state.
It's not just a militia that controls some territory.
They really have established a real nation here with the power to tax and conscript.
And I think in one of these articles you say that they really are more powerful compared to the people in their territory than some of the other states even in the region.
Is that right?
That's right, unfortunately.
You know, I'm not in the business of advertising the Islamic State.
It seems to me, you know, it's a monstrosity.
But unfortunately, it's also pretty powerful.
I've talked to a lot of people in the last few weeks who have just left Islamic State or talked to some of them who are still there on the telephone.
Islamic State's been destroying mobile masts because they think phones will be used to give information about them.
But a few phones are still operating.
And, for instance, take conscription.
You know, it's very difficult for the government of Baghdad or Syria to conscript.
They're not that well organized.
But the Islamic State has been calling for a son from every family.
And it's very difficult to avoid.
They started last October.
Then about a month or so ago, they said that everybody was obligatory.
You couldn't previously pay a large fine and get out of it.
Now it's obligatory.
Some families are moving out because they don't want their sons to be conscripted.
But this means they're raising a pretty big army.
The CIA said it was 31,500 last September.
But I think it's three or four times that now.
There are about six million people in Islamic State.
But they're calling up one son from every family.
They're getting a lot of recruits.
Yeah.
You told me recently that I believe the Kurdish president had estimated that they had as many as 100,000 fighters.
And you said that sounded pretty much right to you.
Yeah.
I mean, actually, one senior Kurdish official told me that he thought it was about 200,000.
And he said the evidence for this is that they're attacking on multiple fronts all over the place.
They couldn't be doing this unless they had an awful lot of people in their ranks.
So, you know, there's that aspect of the state, that taxing people, taxing salaries, taxing shops.
Savings of living has gone down.
But, you know, they're employing a lot of people going after money that way.
And, again, governments in the region are none too good at taxing people.
So, you know, it's pretty well organized.
It's not just a bunch of government who have taken over a large area and are ruling the roost.
And it's going to take a lot to knock this place down.
And now, so I'm interested in their economy, though.
I remember a guy from the Rand Corporation estimated that they might make as much as $2 billion a year, which, of course, the U.S. Army spends before 5 a.m.
$2 billion doesn't sound like very much.
And they are completely landlocked.
And they don't have any, you know, official recognition from any other state or trading relationship with any other state.
Right.
So how bad does that hurt them?
They kind of got the worst part of Iraq, don't they?
Yeah.
I mean, they were making money previously from the oil fields in eastern Syria.
They control most of those and some of the oil fields in Iraq.
U.S. airstrikes have been hitting these and refineries, so they make less money from that.
Of course, the price of oil is also down.
So there are limits to what they can make from oil.
Then they tax people and they tax traffic on the road.
They still seem to have a lot of money, actually more money than they should have, given their internal resources, because they're paying these fighters whom they conscript.
Not a lot of money, $350, $400 a month.
But they're also – it's a good job for people in that area because they're also feeding them and giving them free fuel and other services free.
So that must be costing them a lot of money.
Now, there's speculation, particularly among senior Kurdish officials, that this money is coming from the Gulf, from private donors in the Gulf.
And they say – they think that Islamic State is going to senior people there in the Gulf and saying – looking for protection money, not for individuals but for states, but probably paid by individuals, saying, you know, if you don't want things – bombs going off in your emirate or wherever it is, you better cough up.
We better have a couple hundred million dollars.
And that sort of seems likely.
I haven't seen hard evidence for that.
But that's believed by a lot of senior people in Iraq.
And now – I mean, I guess we all know, and as I said, you warned us about America and its allies supporting the rebellion in Syria and how this is exactly the kind of crisis that it could lead to.
But now that it's been three-quarters of a year or so since the declaration of the caliphate, has there been much of a change in the Gulf in terms of money?
Have the Americans asked the Saudis, the Qataris, the Kuwaitis that, listen, you really have to clamp down on financing these guys now that the whole thing has blown up in their face like this?
Yeah, I think that they are doing that.
But I think it's a bit late in the day.
It's also just pretty difficult to do, you know.
I mean, somebody can transfer money with a telephone call.
There are a lot of rich people in the Gulf, and some of these people sympathize with the Islamic State.
I mean, this is kind of speculation, but it's well-informed speculation.
And now, as far as the borders of the Islamic State, they share a pretty long frontier with Kurdistan, with Iraqi Shiastan.
And, of course, they have their problems in the West in dealing with what's left of Assad's Syria there.
But I wonder if you think those lines are likely to move very much, or they're pretty much settled where they are now.
They haven't been moving that amount since last October.
The time the Islamic State was expanding rapidly was really from June to October, and it took over a vast area bigger than Great Britain and Iraq and Syria, probably more than it really had the men to defend.
Now there are some areas that have been recaptured by the Kurds west of Mosul and Sinjar.
There's this offensive at Tikrit going on at the moment, although it's stalled.
They've lost some territory, but at the end of the day, not that much.
I mean, what is important, what is interesting, I think, is this assault on Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, that started on the 1st of March, is still going on, and it seems to have stalled.
It's not a very big city.
It's a city of about 200,000 people.
Now, if they can't capture that, then ideas of capturing Mosul or anywhere else are out the window.
So this is really a pretty significant failure.
Also, at Tikrit, the U.S. is not providing, using its air power, so it's Iranian-backed.
The U.S. is operating in other parts of Iraq.
So, you know, the Islamic State's got a lot of enemies, but these enemies are very divided.
And now, speaking of that battle of Tikrit there, it seems like they didn't have too much trouble taking the surrounding towns, and reports are, and I think you report this as well, that they sent as many as 30,000 Shiite militiamen and, say, 5,000 or 10,000 of what's left of the Iraqi army after it fell apart last year.
How many ISIS fighters do you think that they're up against in Tikrit?
I guess the expectation was that ISIS would turn and run and live to fight another day.
Yeah, I mean, you know, you normally, often you expect guerrilla army.
ISIS is kind of a bit like a guerrilla army.
You expect them, you know, not to fight it out toe-to-toe with more heavily equipped opponents using heavy artillery and aircraft and so forth.
So, the U.S. was saying, the chief of staff was saying that they only had a few hundred, maybe it's only a thousand people in Tikrit.
I don't think it's that number, but even so, the Shia militias, the Iraqi army don't seem to be making headway.
So, maybe they're getting, you know, different orders from the top, from the government, from the Iranians, from the Americans, from everybody else.
Maybe it's a lack of decisiveness at the top that is responsible for this.
But it's a very important moment, because hitherto the Iraqi government has not recaptured with its own army a single town or city that it's lost since the beginning of last year.
You know, this is a failure of a high order, and it's still going on.
The idea was that Tikrit would show a turning of the tide.
They'd be capturing a well-known Sunni city held by Islamic State.
But it's turning out to be a symbol in another way, a symbol of failure at the moment.
Maybe they will one day take it, but it hasn't happened yet.
Well, it sounds like it's a real failure of Qassam Soleimani from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, who's assumed command of these militias, correct?
It would be, yeah.
I mean, you know, they put it up in lights that they're going to take this place, and they haven't.
You know, that's a mistake.
So, you know, it shows divisions.
It shows Islamic State is outnumbered.
It's got a lot of people opposing it in Iraq and Syria.
But these, as I was saying earlier, these divisions are so great that I think it's probably going to hold out, unfortunately.
If all its enemies came together, then I don't think it would, but that's not happening.
Right.
All right.
Now, so again, I'm talking with the great Patrick Coburn from The Independent, independent.co.uk, about his new five-part series on the Islamic State, Life Under ISIS.
So let's talk a little bit more about that from your interviews with the various Sunnis who have fled to Kurdistan and from the interviews that you've gotten.
Can you tell us a little bit about the totalitarianism of the Islamic State?
I mean, it sounds like, you know, like previously when you were talking about the conscription and how they are able to do this, it sounds like it could be really counterproductive, too, because that's the kind of thing that people really resent when somebody comes and kidnaps their son, that kind of thing.
So you make it sound like – the people you interview make it sound like life under ISIS is no fun whatsoever and that they're really undermining their own support.
It's not too good.
It's not too good.
I mean, what people – the purpose of this series I was doing was to talk to a lot of people recently coming out of the Islamic State, to talk to them not about high policy but what their lives were like, what was happening in the local school, what was happening to their children, what was the water like, what was electricity like.
And I think I talked to enough people in lots of different towns after they'd left to get a pretty clear picture.
Life is pretty tough.
Electricity, not a lot of it.
People rely on small generators in their towns.
But you need to put fuel in those small generators and people generally don't have jobs, so they don't have the money to buy that fuel.
Same thing with food.
There's food available in the market.
Sometimes the prices have gone down.
But again, people have no jobs, so often they can't afford to buy it.
On the other hand, this is a pretty poor area in eastern Syria.
People – about half their diet is bread, they live on bread and tea basically.
So – but things are not too good.
Then what people object to often is the way that Islamic State intrudes into every aspect of personal life.
You know, women's clothing, they have to wear the niqab covering the entire face.
If a woman doesn't or they don't think she has, they take her – ask her to take them to her home.
They call out the husband and they give him between 40 and 80 lashes for allowing his wife to go out alone or without a male relative or without her face being properly covered.
In schools, for instance, they've abolished things like art and music, even geography for some reason.
Poetry, they say they don't want any pagan poems.
Things they don't like are called pagan.
No pagan poems.
They've – you know, going down top of every street and every market, there are members of ISIS selling for about the equivalent of about $12 black sort of cloaks for women if they don't think they're properly covered.
So every aspect of life is changing under ISIS and people resent this a lot.
This isn't local custom.
This is – you know, isn't even Sharia law.
It's very outlandish demands.
And there are other aspects of it.
You know, one guy talking to that suddenly – you know, he's a conservative farmer and some foreign fighter at a checkpoint, an ISIS checkpoint, followed his daughter home, turned up the house, said he wants to marry the daughter.
Now, these farmers told him, you know, well, in our tribe, you know, we don't let our daughters marry strangers.
And so the guy was really upset, you know, and began to hassle his family and so forth.
This is why this guy left.
So there are all these sort of social pressures on people there.
We've – even very sort of conservative farmers and people who are very religious just can't take this.
We were talking to one guy who had been a fighter in Islamic State and, you know, originally he joined but he was very religious and he thought it was kind of going to be a kind of utopia.
But he eventually fled after he'd spent about six months as a trainee and as a fighter because he said the executions, he couldn't take that.
And there were executions of people he knew, people who were Sunni, who had worked for the government.
He said he hadn't actually done much but he couldn't take that.
And secondly, at one point, his commander turned up with 13 Yazidi girls from the Yazidi community, which ISIS regards as pagans, and sort of turned them over to be raped by the ISIS fighters.
He said he couldn't take that either.
So this is why this guy fled.
So anyway, I've been trying to build up a picture of day-to-day life of what it's like in the Islamic State.
And it's not great, you know, but in fact it's pretty bad.
But one important point before I finish, I'd like to make, which is almost everybody said, yeah, it's pretty bad here, but what's the alternative for us?
The Iraqi government comes in.
If the Shia militias come in, they'll kill us.
They'll regard us as members of ISIS.
So we don't have much alternative.
You know, it's a sort of situation between very bad and getting, you know, being murdered.
So a lot of them will stick with ISIS because they don't feel they've got any choice.
Right.
Okay, now I want to get back to that in just one second, the alternative there.
But as far as how they're living now, the population now, it seems really important, right, that the Iraqis are not Saudis.
They're not used to this.
They wear blue jeans.
Their women do show their faces.
Back before America invaded, women used to teach at the university, that kind of thing.
And so I wonder whether you think that the Islamic State is going to end up having to back off a little bit from some of this totalitarianism, or the Iraqi Sunnis, they're just going to have to learn to love it or lump it.
Well, to love it or go along with it or get your head chopped off or be shot, you know.
So, you know, a lot of them don't like it.
But, you know, what do they do about it?
Well, they can try and flee.
It's not easy.
It's not easy to get out of the Islamic State.
It's not easy to go somewhere else.
So, you know, I think what a lot of people are hoping that the implementation of these, you know, as I said, outlandish practices would lead to popular revulsion and the Islamic State would back off or eventually there'd be an uprising against it.
Many people are very, very angry.
But what can they do about it against, you know, a well-organized, very violent group of people who will react ferociously if you oppose them?
You know, one of these people who was interviewed for this series was the Sheikh, the leader of a tribe called the Albu Nimr.
This opposed over the last year the Islamic State in Western Iraq.
Eventually they were defeated.
They ran out of opposition.
And the Sheikh, the leader, said they've had 864 members of their tribe massacred, killed by Islamic State.
So there's a terrible price to be paid if you oppose these guys.
And now as far as the alternative goes, there's a new Human Rights Watch report about some of the small towns that have been taken, quote unquote, back, I guess, by the Iraqi army and the Shiite militias.
And they say that the Shia militias have immediately engaged in war crimes.
And almost as though they're trying to convince the Sunni population that you're better off with ISIS than us.
Yeah, I mean, the people come in.
I mean, the problem with Iraq is that sectarian ethnic differences are now so great that so much blood has been spilled that any Iraqi community, Sunni, Kurd, Shia, is just plain frightened of the others.
But keep in mind one thing, Scott, that ISIS has sort of deliberately created a lot of this situation.
That since 2003, when they were called Al-Qaeda in Iraq, they've been letting off bombs in Shia areas, civilian areas, in marketplaces, outside mosques.
They've stepped this up in recent years.
And one of the reasons they do this, apart from just bloodlust and wanting to kill Shias, is they know that this provokes the Shia to counterattack the Sunni.
And the Sunni have nowhere to run to but ISIS.
So ISIS knows the more atrocities they commit against the Shia, that it is to their advantage because the Sunni become the targets of Shia retaliation.
And they've got nowhere to go but the Islamic State.
Right.
Yeah, the action is in the reaction.
The action is reaction.
It's a pretty demonic policy, but it kind of works.
Absolutely.
Well, just like September 11th, try to provoke that overreaction in order to serve the interests of the weaker power there.
But now, so if I remember it right, in 2003, when America invaded, the Kurds actually took Mosul.
And they're a different ethnicity, obviously, but they are Sunnis.
And they weren't welcome to stay for long, but they did help drive the Iraqi army out then.
And I wonder whether you think it's possible that the population of Mosul might tolerate a Kurdish invasion with American air power to drive the Islamic State out, as long as they could somehow be convinced that the Kurds don't mean to stay and take their city from them.
Good question, but what the Kurds say is they don't want to fight in a Sunni city.
They also think that ISIS would fight pretty hard to hold Mosul because Mosul was their great breakthrough.
That's what made them a great power in the region.
They don't want to suffer a lot of casualties.
In 2003, I was there that first day they broke in.
And, you know, very soon the Sunnis started shooting at them.
They started looting the place.
So it's, you know, probably from their point of view, it's not a great idea.
Maybe some people would welcome them.
And, you know, what we've seen in Tikrit is that, you know, if these ISIS fights very hard, you know, it sort of has its cocktail of methods of, you know, military methods of suicide bombers in large numbers, of IEDs, improvised explosive devices in houses and roads, booby traps everywhere, snipers all over the place, you know, mortar teams.
You know, the Iraqi Kurds haven't been fighting that hard, but they've suffered about over a thousand dead in the last few months.
And they don't want to suffer more.
So I think it'd be difficult to do it that way.
So, you know, it's at the same time what Kurds and others say, that they're never going to get rid of Islamic State unless they can retake Mosul.
That's, you know, that was the big victory for Islamic State.
They need to reverse that.
But how are they going to do it?
You know, American air power, maybe Kurds, maybe Iraqi government ought to be an Iraqi army.
But where's the Iraqi army?
You know, theoretically it has about 12 brigades.
I think three of them are Kurdish.
So let's say nine Arab brigades.
And they need to have Sunni who go into Mosul.
But, you know, they don't have enough men.
That army is not coming back together again.
We were talking earlier, saying the Islamic State is, unfortunately, for many of the aspects of a state, not recognized internationally, but a military power and has control of its population.
That's not really true of the Baghdad government.
You know, they can't raise their own army.
They once had an army that was meant to be 350,000 strong.
You know, I doubt if it's even a tenth of that, maybe around that.
All right.
Now, if I could ask you one more question here, Patrick, before I let you go.
The American policy, at least stated policy still, at least as far as Iraq goes, is to reintegrate Sunnistan under the control of Baghdad.
And now that Maliki's gone, this guy Abadi, he's going to be a bigger man about it.
And he's going to compromise and work with, you know, the new government of Sunnistan, whatever replaces the Islamic State, if that day could ever come.
And I wonder whether you think that that makes any sense at all, considering that the Dawa Party and the Supreme Islamic Council and the Shiite militias that are backed by the Iranians, they've made it pretty clear for ten years straight that they don't want to rule Sunnistan.
They just wanted to take, use the Americans to help them take Baghdad and then run off with Shiistan and let the Sunnis burn in the sun.
So I wonder whether you think that's even...
Well, I'm not so sure they thought that way.
I think that the problem is that, you know, it's very sectarian that this, you know, I was talking to one guy.
He didn't want to call himself a photographer, but he didn't want to keep it.
He comes from Ramadi.
He's Sunni.
Now, Ramadi is a town that about 80 percent is held by Islamic State, about 20 percent by the government.
This guy was saying to me, look, you'd think that the Shia government, after all they'd said, would be trying to cultivate our Sunnis.
But he said, actually, on the ground, they treat us even worse than before.
He said, even in this one government enclave in Ramadi, the police are still grabbing Sunni off the street.
They beat them up.
They torture them.
And the family will have to pay to get them back.
You know, it's straight criminality.
He said he knew one family had to pay $5,000.
So he says they're really not trying very hard to cultivate guys on the ground.
You know, you may have Abadi, the prime minister, and others go to Washington or they appear on TV in Baghdad and say, you know, softly, softly, we've got to be nice to the Sunni.
But if you're a Sunni sort of in the street or in a police cell, you don't feel that.
Things are just as bad as they ever were.
That's what makes it so difficult for even Sunni, and there are many of them who really hate the Islamic State, consider them a sort of murderous fascist, to team up with the government because the government, you know, treats them so badly.
So that's one of the great problems.
All right, everybody, that is the great Patrick Cockburn.
He's author of The Rise of Islamic State, ISIS, and the New Sunni Revolution, and this new five-part series for the independent.co.uk, Life Under ISIS.
Thanks so much for your time again, Patrick.
Thank you.
All right, Sean, that's Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Thank you very much for listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm here every Sunday from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
My full interview archive can be found at scotthorton.org.
More than 3,500 of them now, going back to 2003.
Thanks very much for listening, everybody.
See you next week.
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