03/22/17 – Patrick Cockburn on the ending of Syria’s civil war, with Assad still in power – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, Scott Horton Show, scotthorton.org, libertarianinstitute.org, and twitter.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, introducing the great Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent in the UK, and he's the author of a great many books.
The last two are The Age of Jihad and Rise of the Islamic State, and Age of Jihad is actually a compendium of articles from the entire terror war long, since the start of the war in Afghanistan.
And then The Rise of the Islamic State, of course, is about the rise of the Islamic State.
Both of those are worth more than their weight in gold, for sure.
And of course, he has an archive at independent.co.uk.
And well, I guess we'll have to start with this one.
The Battle for Manbij shows Syria's civil war is almost over, and it looks like Bashar al-Assad has won.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you?
Thank you.
Appreciate you joining us again on the show.
So boy, what a war in Syria.
You say it looks like it's wrapping up here.
And so I guess, at least, first of all, we'll focus on the eastern part of Syria and the future Battle of Raqqa.
It looks like they're surrounded and the different forces are getting ready to attack there.
But then there's this kind of sideshow going on in the town of Manbij.
Could you explain that?
Well, it's really complicated, but it's kind of symbolic of the mess that Syria is in.
And this is the messiest part.
Yep, the Raqqa is pretty well surrounded.
It's on the Euphrates River.
The bit of Syria, or at least the most heavily populated and fertile bit of Syria that Islamic State ISIS still holds, is in the Euphrates Valley, which includes Raqqa.
And they're surrounded, but they're surrounded by the Syrian Democratic Forces, but these are primarily Kurdish, or at least the best fighters are Kurdish, backed by U.S. airpower.
But they probably could take Raqqa at almost any moment, although they'd probably suffer losses.
But Turkey is also in on the game, and so is the Syrian government and the Syrian army.
Now, the Turks, although they supposedly are in Syria to fight ISIS, in fact, they don't make much effort to conceal the fact that they want to fight the Kurds, the Syrian Kurds.
They don't want the Syrian Kurds to be a powerful military political entity, and therefore influence the Kurds in rebellion in Turkey.
So they're saying if Raqqa falls to the Kurds, then they'll do something, maybe intervene or something like that.
The U.S. is sort of waiting.
And really, Trump's policy here doesn't differ that much from Obama's, to see what happens.
They don't want to bet their money on either the Syrian Kurds or the Turks.
They don't want to offend either.
Probably at the end of the day, they'll go with the Kurds.
Now, you go further up north from Raqqa, you get to a town called Manbij.
It's a bit south of the Turkish border.
And here is an unbelievably complicated situation, which I'm not sure I could even summarize by briefly.
Defense held by ISIS, captured by the Kurds, the Turks object.
The Kurds say they've pulled out, probably they just took off their uniforms.
Now the Turks and Turkish-backed militia are threatening to attack it.
The U.S. doesn't want that.
So they rather publicly sent in some armored vehicles into the town.
The Syrian army came up from the south.
You following me?
And then with the agreement, with the Turks coming from the north, with the agreement of the people, the Kurds inside, they took over various villages.
So if the Turks were to advance further, they wouldn't be fighting the Kurds, they'd be fighting the Syrian army.
Meanwhile, a little bit north of that, the Russians have turned up.
So it's a really, really messy situation.
The Russians, meaning Russian ground forces?
Well, some Russian troops, I mean, it was said the Russians were setting up a base there.
This isn't a separate Kurdish enclave.
The Russians said, no, no, no, we're not setting up a base.
But there was some hazy photographs, some military vehicles and some Russian troops.
It's probably not a base, it's a sort of, but it's probably a tripwire to make, give the Turks second thoughts rather than intervening with the army, because they wouldn't just be facing Kurds, they'd be facing Russians.
So if I understand you right, the Russians, the Americans and the Syrian Arab army are now standing together to create this buffer zone between our NATO allies, the Turks, and our temporary allies, the Syrian Kurdish YPG that we're using against the Islamic State in Raqqa.
Yeah.
No, it's quite funny and it's very complicated in a way.
But standing together, they don't necessarily coordinate their moves, but they all have they have similar motives and similar aims.
Amazing.
So now, I guess I'm not sure what to make of this.
You said that you mentioned the American soldiers that are there in the middle of town that rolled through in their in their armored vehicles and that kind of thing.
So in other words, they're sort of wearing baby blue UN helmets right now, figuratively speaking, serving as kind of peacekeepers standing in this role.
But I mean, does that sound like a very...
You know that the Turks quite, first of all, you know, the Turkish Turks have some sort of proxy militias, but they they can't they don't do too well when fighting the Kurds or ISIS.
They'd have to use their own troops.
So they probably I think the guess is the calculation is they won't dare use them against a town that's got American troops in it.
They probably couldn't have a great deal of taking it from the Kurds anyway.
And of course, a few American troops are backed by, you know, our power overhead.
So it's quite a significant, more significant military force in terms of firepower than you'd imagine.
Sure.
Well, so then in Erdogan's office, I mean, I know he's got a problem with these Kurds.
Don't get me wrong.
But I mean, where is NATO ally with the U.S. Empire is the superpower and his state is the satellite.
I mean, do we really think we really have to put our troops between his troops and the Kurds to keep him from attacking them?
If we if our government makes its wishes to him known that we really want him to leave them alone, at least for now, he can betray them in a couple of years after we're done with the ISIS guys or something.
Yeah, well, you know, proxies aren't what they were, you know, Erdogan is making he's got a referendum on the 16th of next month, 16th of April, which will give him sort of supreme executive power, basically all power over everything in Turkey, which in many ways he already has.
But this would make it sort of the new constitution.
And they're not quite sure what he would do.
You know, there's a big American airbase at Incirlik.
You know, he might try to close that or something like that.
Or maybe he'll just, you know, accept it off, but after the referendum, because he wants to look sort of big and tough and he's he's into having rather sort of carefully manipulated quarrels with people like the Netherlands.
You may have seen, you know, the Turkish ministers were going to address meetings, their electoral meetings.
They've been told not to.
It was a Dutch election coming up.
And they did that all to create sort of to be seen standing tall before the election.
And since they control all the Turkish, the government controls all the Turkish media.
Of course, this is all reported as, you know, Erdogan and his people standing tall for Turkey.
You know, they actually they're in a pretty bad position in Syria.
They haven't got anything that they wanted, but that's not reported back home.
So so as I said, it's a tremendously messy situation.
But sort of winners and losers are emerging.
You know, you used to be a few years ago, but people were talking about Assad being forced from power.
I never believed this for a moment, but a lot of people did.
Nobody's talking about that anymore.
You know, ISIS is on the retreat.
It's fighting pretty hard, but it's on the retreat.
Al Qaeda, the other parts of the armed opposition are, you know, sort of under attack.
And similarly in Iraq, probably, you know, sometime in the coming months, West Mosul will fall to the Iraqi army.
So the Iraqi government, you know, has stayed in business.
That wasn't inevitable a couple of years ago when ISIS was coming down the road from Mosul that they just captured towards Baghdad.
Well, now, of course, well, man, there's so many different angles to to follow up on here.
First of all, can you comment on the reports about that the American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dunford, has been meeting with the Russians and the Turks in Turkey in these kind of low profile meetings?
And that's where they're working all this stuff out instead of in high profile conferences in D.C.
And that would, you know, I'm sorry if that's really right.
Wouldn't that kind of imply that we're a lot closer to the on the same page with the Turks and the Russians now at this point?
And they're on the same page with us, then maybe it looks more on the surface.
Well, it could end up that way, I think, don't think it's got that way at this stage.
That's probably what we don't know.
But, you know, at the end of the day, the Turkish position isn't that strong.
You know, they're really going to fight the Syrian army or the Syrian Kurds when they've got backing from the U.S. and Russia, you know.
So is there a way from getting out from under?
So they don't it doesn't look as though they've been completely frustrated in Syria.
You know, you know, there might be various ways you could do this.
They're probably talking about that.
But on the other hand, you know, we don't know if they've agreed anything or would they agree anything?
You see, the big problem also for the Trump administration is that let's suppose ISIS basically begins to go out of business.
Who occupies the territory in eastern Syria?
You know, it can't be.
The Syrian rest of the Syrian armed opposition is really al Qaeda, so they're not going to.
There isn't anybody from the opposition to take it over.
It can't really be the Kurds, because this is Arab and they're Kurds and they don't particularly want to do that.
So who are you left with?
Turkey that creates a whole series of other problems.
So will they probably the most likely thing is that they'll allow Assad to return, but under some sort of agreement.
So they or, you know, the alternative is that Trump, the isolationist, puts a lot of American troops into Syria, eastern Syria.
Well, it just doesn't sound too likely for me.
And, you know, obviously be very unpopular in the US when casualties started coming home.
So in a way, we're getting towards the to my mind to the endgame in Syria and Iraq.
But it might be quite a bloody endgame.
I mean, it could be what if the Turks finally think we're going to settle with these Kurds in Syria and launches a big cross-the-border invasion?
You know, this would be a very tough fight because the Syrian Kurds have got at least 50,000 very experienced troops.
The probably the Syrian Kurds would look to Damascus.
So, you know, it's kind of it's like a chess game with lots of pieces, but probably by getting towards the end of this particular game.
Well, it seems like even if the foreign powers agree that, OK, Assad, go ahead and occupy Raqqa again under whichever agreement, that may be a very tall order at this point.
And they may there may really not be an answer to who rules Raqqa after ISIS.
Well, yeah, I'm probably, you know, you know, could be like, you know, a mini Berlin, you know, in 1945 that lots of people do.
Yeah.
Also depends how much is left of Raqqa.
It isn't that big a place, you know, used to be about 300,000 people.
It's not like Mosul, which is really pretty big city.
The so, you know, it might be mostly destroyed.
But, yeah, it's difficult to know what exactly is going to happen there or what.
And what ISIS itself will do.
You know, one thing that happens in Syria, people don't quite take on board sometimes that leaders don't necessarily change.
But a lot of the guys on the ground do the fighters on the ground.
You might suddenly find a lot of ISIS guys have suddenly turning up in some other organization, which has, you know, is supposedly more moderate.
You know, people move backwards and forwards.
The fighters move backwards and forwards, partly depending on who's paying them.
But it's much more fluid below.
The leaders don't generally change that much.
But below that rank, things are pretty, you know, can can shift around.
But if they permanently want ISIS to stay out of business, then they may have no alternative but to look to Assad.
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All right.
Now, there were some reports in The Washington Post that came out last fall, right after the election, that said that Obama's now ordered JSOC, the top tier special operations guys, to target the Al-Nusra Front, Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, they call themselves now, Syrian al-Qaeda guys.
But they didn't really comment on, yeah, but wither the CIA program to back at least their friends, the FSA guys, the people that they fight with, Arar al-Sham and these other groups, that was kind of unremarked upon.
And I had missed this article.
I'm not sure if you'd seen this.
It was from February 21st in Reuters, where the headline is CIA backed aid for Syrian rebels frozen after Islamist attack.
And so it says it's a kind of between the lines article where it's saying that, well, we're suspending the aid for now, but not because of any other reason other than they lost a skirmish.
And we want to make sure that if we give tow missiles to anybody, they don't get lost directly to Al-Qaeda guys.
But they made sure to kind of emphasize, I think, that this is only temporary and it's only recent and it's we're going to turn the aid on again.
And no one should think that this represents a shift in policy by the new Trump administration.
And that basically the same old game is going to be going on with CIA arming and financing the FSA groups and in effect Al-Sham and Nusra.
You know, there isn't much left of the FSA groups.
I think that that policy, you know, is getting pretty dead.
You know, there are other things that you might, you know, might happen that, you know, let's say Assad takes over eastern Syria.
But at one time people were saying, you know, people in the sort of think tanks who probably had never been to Syria, he was saying, you know, he would just occupy useful Syria was the phrase applying the rest of it was useless.
But the eastern Syria, a lot of desert out there, but there's also a lot of oil.
There's also a lot of cotton out there, you know, so Assad certainly wants to take the lot.
And probably the Russians and the Iranians will back him in doing that.
Now, there could be, you know, you could counter that by saying, you know, somebody would keep low level guerrilla warfare going against Assad so he wouldn't be quite stabilized again.
But, you know, they've learned we've learned from the past when they do that, you know, a lot of the aid that's supposedly going to one group of armed opposition is, in fact, you know, going through to al-Nusra or ISIS or somebody else.
So, you know, it's, you know, remember that, you know, Hillary Clinton, you know, before the presidential election that most of the people were advising her on Syria, you know, had great plans that would set up a moderate opposition that somehow was going to fight not just ISIS, but Assad and al-Qaeda all at the same time.
You know, it was kind of one of these Washington fantasies.
But, you know, it seemed to be flying just before the election.
You know, you still have people think tanks, you know, particularly neocon think tanks, putting out proposals that these new moderate opposition is going to be set up and is going to fight almost everybody.
I mean, as I said, it couldn't happen.
It's kind of a nonsense.
But, you know, it's interesting that these proposals are still flying around.
But in many ways, Trump's attitude to Syria was actually more realistic than Hillary Clinton's ever was.
Well, now, I'm glad you brought up the think tanks there.
It sounds like possibly you're referring to this thing that the Kagan's have put out, the Institute for the Study of War, Robert Kagan and his sister-in-law, Kimberly.
And it's interesting because the way that they frame it is, you know, listen, we can't just hand the whole country back over to Assad.
He's going to have to make a deal with somebody to represent the Sunnis.
And I wonder if you could comment on that, because from what I understand and a lot of from what you've taught me, many of the Sunnis, maybe a plurality or even a majority of Sunnis on the side of the state in this one.
And the army is mostly Sunni, so it's not sectarian like they say.
Yeah, well, it is partly sectarian, but also social class comes out to it quite strongly.
Regionalism comes into it.
Tribalism comes into it.
You know, if you're a Sunni in Damascus, you know, and your daughter goes to university and wears jeans, you know, and you had a job in the education ministry, you aren't a soldier.
You still would have known over recent years that you may not have liked Assad very much.
But the alternative was much worse, that you're probably going to lose your job.
You know that the women in your family would have to wear sort of voluminous cloaks.
You know, you'd probably become a refugee.
You might end up dead.
So there's a whole sort of constituency in Damascus and the cities who might not like the government, but they're even more terrified of the opposition.
So, you know, and also you can't just sort of invent sort of the opposition has sort of had its go, you know, it control parts of the area of Syria at one time, big parts, they still control some big parts.
But the one thing you can say is that, you know, the areas that they control are, you know, have they in any way produced a local form of government which is superior to that of in the asset controlled areas?
And the answer is not, you know, in both those areas, you know, are ruled by authoritarian elites that use torture and violence against anybody who opposes them.
They do not allow dissent.
This is an advertisement for Assad.
It's just that the other side is just as bad.
You could make one place that's not really true is the Syrian Kurdish enclave.
Where there is sort of a higher degree of security and it isn't quite so violent as in opposition held areas.
So I think it's kind of fantasy.
They produced the same thing in Iraq.
But, you know, who is going to represent the Sunni?
Well, they've kind of had that chance, I'm afraid.
I mean, that may be a very good thing if somebody did represent them, but it's just not happening.
You know, I talked to one of the Sunni leaders.
Some time ago, and, you know, he was talking about this should happen, that should happen.
But, you know, I asked him, can you go back to your home village?
This is just north of Baghdad.
He said, well, no, not without being killed.
You know, elites like that don't get you very far because they, you know, they're supposedly meant to share power with the government, but they don't really have any power themselves.
They can't deliver their own community.
Mm hmm.
Yeah, well, and the sectarian divide is, I guess, a lot more stark in Iraq than it is in Syria, at least as of now.
I guess it could get worse in Syria.
It doesn't look like it's going to get any better in Iraq.
So that's my big question about Mosul is, well, really the background to the question about Mosul is in the cities of Tikrit and Fallujah and Ramadi, where the U.S. has helped the Iraqi Shia army, the Baghdad government army, take those cities back on the way to Mosul over these last couple of years.
Patrick, have they allowed the Sunnis to come home and more let the civilian populations of these predominantly Sunni cities, do they let them come home and treat them more or less with respect?
Or are they really expanding the border of Shiastan now?
Well, you know, they've let some come home, you know, at some places, you know, end of last year, Sunni couldn't get to Ramadi, it was about 70 percent destroyed.
But also there were very dangerous checkpoints, Shia checkpoints on the road.
I understand they can get there now, so that's easier.
When you get back to your city, you know, is electricity going to be restored?
Is water, fresh water supplies?
And you can't live in a city without that sort of thing.
Secondly, is it going to be ringed, you know, is it going to be ringed by checkpoints?
So you're worried every time you pass through them.
So there are a whole series of things.
Now, you know, Baghdad government isn't too good at supplying things like water and electricity and services to its own supporters.
So it's not going to be even going to be that good supplying them to people it doesn't like and is frightened of.
So, you know, that's one of the same thing in Mosul, you know, that the army is crawling forward, you know, but East Mosul, lack of water, electricity, a lot of buildings destroyed, a lot of things not being built up again, you know, particular West Mosul, very heavy bomb damage.
You know, it's very hard to move through the streets because the US was bombing all the crossroads, you know, wherever two roads meet to stop ISIS moving around.
But, of course, when you take the area, then the civilian inhabitants can't move either.
You know, so there are more ways to wreck a city than just dropping bombs in it, although they're doing lots of that.
So, you know, so you have a government that's pretty dysfunctional the best of times.
It's also a bit short on money.
You know, it's it used to a few years ago, they had revenues of 100 billion dollars a year.
You know, now the price of oil is down and they're completely dependent on that.
So they don't have the money to do these things.
Even if they were up for it.
So but at the same time, you know, you don't want to I don't want to go overboard on that.
You know, this is a big victory for the Iraqi government that have retaken Mosul.
That was their great defeat in 2014.
They'd have taken that back.
They'd have defeated ISIS.
A lot of guerrilla warfare may go on, but they've they've basically won a big victory.
Well, the question certainly remains how long they can hold it.
I mean, they sure weren't able to hold on to Sunni stand for very long after their last.
But probably they can these days.
Yeah, because they were caught by surprise.
Obviously, probably they can.
But, you know, then what happens with the U.S. and a lot of, you know, people in Iraq will some will want the U.S. troops to stay.
Others will not.
You know, the there'll be a lot of divisions over there.
What happens at the time of the fall of Mosul, when the ISIS took Mosul, the Kurds took advantage, the Iraqi Kurds took advantage of this to take over a lot of territory that was disputed between them and the the the Arabs.
That's their area, about 40 percent of the people, Baghdad government.
The Arabs are going to want that back.
So there's sort of room for confrontation there.
So not quite clear what will come out of this.
But as I said, as in Syria, I think we're getting towards the end of this particular phase of the of the of the chess game.
And ISIS is going backwards, maybe not as fast as the government would like, but it's going backwards and they are sort of restoring their control of control of Mosul or whatever's left of it.
Well, so with the eye to the coming blowback and backdraft from all these policies after Iraq War II, where America had scored this giant own goal for Iranian and Shiite power in Iraq the way that they did, the Saudi response to that, just a couple of quotes was Saud al-Faisal told Kerry that Daesh is our response to your support for the Da'wah in the Da'wah party in Iraq.
And then Prince Bandar famously told of Richard Dearlove, the head of the MI6, that yeah, we're so sick and tired of the Sunnis and we're going to pardon me of the Shiites and and boy, are we going to stick it to them now?
And this kind of thing.
And that was, you know, not like the British and the Americans didn't know that that was the game they were playing, too, or anything.
But so now what are they going to do with these huge Shiite victories over these, you know, again, I guess these four major, predominantly Sunni cities in western Iraq and not to mention Raqqa and eastern Syria and all that, what's going to be the Saudi reaction in their proxy war with Tehran here against, you know, they pushed it too far with this ISIS game.
Now, it completely blew up in their face.
But so now how are they going to react to their failure and loss here?
Yeah, I mean, well, they could on giving sort of support, you know, so those are on running sort of guerrilla guerrilla war in Iraq and Syria.
You know, it probably sort of indirect from private donors in Saudi Arabia.
They could do that.
You know, the major Saudi involvement is in Yemen.
And we've got this tremendous sort of disaster impending their famine and everything else.
The Saudis go on bombing.
It depends also what the Trump administration does.
You know, in this area, despite all the, you know, Trump talking about doing new things, they've really basically just sort of pretty well on every front, maybe not in Yemen, have been continuing Obama's policies.
So the real test will be when something happens to them.
You know, when something usually in the Middle East, there's a new crisis, you know, there'll be some ISIS attack on, you know, U.S. citizens or something.
It's something that will happen and then they'll have to develop their own policy.
Now, when George W.
Bush did that, you know, they respond to 9-11 by with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with disastrous consequences.
That's what we saw what they were really made of.
And, you know, basically what they did was very dumb and very dangerous.
Now, will Trump and his people respond the same way?
We haven't, you know, there hasn't really been a test case yet where we can see what they're really going to do.
Yeah, well, I mean, it seems he kind of after supporting Iraq and Libya, I think he learned the lesson by Syria that we got to stop overthrowing these dictators that shave their chin every morning.
And but then the other side of that is and focus on, as he says, knocking the hell out of ISIS and or al Qaeda, which means he can find groups to fight, claiming bin Laden from Nigeria to the Philippines if he wants for the next eight years.
Just he's just over regime change, but he's he's all for the drone wars and the JSOC wars.
How far they go on that, you know, you can sort of get, you know, you can pretend you're doing things, you know, if you have these are special forces, there are limits to what you can do, but it all makes for stuff in the papers and on television, you're fighting terror and so forth.
You know, most of these drone wars at the end of the day doesn't seem to affect what is happening on the ground.
You know, they've been killing people in al Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula and Yemen for years now, you know, but these guys now control a much larger area of territory than they did a few years ago because of collapse into anarchy.
So.
So a lot of that is kind of PR makes you wonder how many real jihadists we're going to have in another eight years of this.
Yeah, it depends, you know, they've created sort of fertile conditions for these people to grow, you know, and the policy in Yemen is to do more of it and support the Saudis, you know.
So, you know, that that creates fertile ground for al Qaeda and ISIS.
So, you know, it's it's it's like everything to do with this administration.
You don't know.
Maybe that probably they don't know.
And the test will be, you know, if there's when there's some crisis, there's some ship is sunk, some people are killed or something or other.
I mean, involving the U.S. and then they have to respond to that.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time again on the show, Patrick.
I sure appreciate it.
Not at all.
Thank you.
Good talking to you.
All right.
So that's the great Patrick Coburn.
He's at the Independent Middle East Correspondent for the Independent Independent.co.uk and his latest books are The Age of Jihad and that's the whole terror war from 2001 all the way through today.
And then also The Rise of Islamic State, ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution.
And I'm Scott Horton.
Check out all the archives at Scott Horton dot org and at Libertarian Institute dot org slash Scott Horton Show.
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OK, thanks very much, guys.
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Hey, I'll Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say the one should keep at least some of your savings and precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
If this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc.has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum and palladium, and they do it well.
They're fast, reliable and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at one eight hundred eight seven four nine seven six.
So we're stopped by our RBI dot CEO.