03/29/13 – David Enders – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is The Scott Horton Show.
And David Enders is special correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers.
He's been in Syria, but is now back safe in Lebanon.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, David?
I'm good.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
I sure appreciate you joining us.
I guess before we get into your recent journalism, can you give us a word on McClatchy's captive reporter in Syria, Austin Tice?
Still no news on Austin.
We're still hoping for good news soon.
Man, that's really too bad.
And he was arrested or, well, abducted at least by government forces last August.
Is that correct?
That seems to be the case.
All right.
Well, I'll try to pay important attention to that.
We favor journalists and journalism here on the show.
And so, you know, we care about stuff like that.
Freedom in general is kind of a nice thing.
Yes, I also think that.
All right.
Well, listen, OK, let's get to your journalism here.
Syrian opposition names U.S. citizen Ghassan Hitto to prime minister post.
Who is he and how important is that?
What does that mean?
He is a Syrian-American businessman who's lived in the U.S. for pretty much the last 30 years.
He's a naturalized American citizen.
And he's a CEO at a tech company and an executive at a tech company, rather.
And he's taken a leave of absence to do aid work.
He's been active in Muslim-American affairs with the Council on American Islamic Affairs, actually.
And so he's sort of a known activist.
But as far as I know, this is his first foray into politics.
And it's possible that he was selected because of his sort of effectiveness in, I guess, getting aid in Syria from Turkey.
But on a more practical level, we still see the machinations of the government in exile, such as it is, having very little bearing on what's taking place inside the country.
Is it too obvious to make the parallel to Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress with these exiles being parachuted in by the U.S. like this?
Well, the situation is different.
There's definitely, yes.
A comparison that can be drawn.
I think this is a little less nefarious and more just, I think, a matter of, you know, saying that the selection of Chalabi was basically to help prosecute a war based on lies and a war of aggression.
Whereas I think now what we see is a real reluctance to get involved.
And a very ham-fisted policy where the U.S. doesn't really have a lot of traction with the actual people on the ground.
So what you're seeing is these are the people they have access to.
These are their intermediaries.
You know, people who speak English, who are willing to work with people in the U.S.
And there is some effectiveness in getting aid.
The aid it's getting is not nearly enough.
But I did see some examples of it getting and, you know, aid that was not tagged explicitly as foreign aid, but actually is getting through.
Again, it's not close to enough.
But I think, you know, the Chalabi comparison sort of ends at the point at which, okay, here's somebody who's been an exile for a long time and probably doesn't have a great traction on the ground.
Yeah, I mean, and I'm sorry, because I should have been more specific, because that was the part of Chalabi, of his story that I was thinking of, where the Iraqi people said, who?
This guy?
No.
And that was the end of that.
Not so much the lioness in the world.
I was in the country this week with guys, you know, I sort of half-jokingly was asking people and some of them didn't know.
I mean, you know, a lot of them don't know the people who run the military council that's associated with the national coalition.
So you just find very little traction for these guys on the ground.
Okay.
And now this may or may not be sort of part of the same question.
Can you tell us about the Farouk battalions and or, I guess, any other armed groups that are fighting in the rebellion against the government that are not the Al-Nusra Front?
Well, Farouk is a nationwide battalion that operates sort of independently of the military councils and espouses elections after the fall of the government.
What I found on my last trip inside was that you've got a situation where it seems like rebel groups are increasingly ready to fight each other over turf, over infrastructure.
And mentioning Al-Nusra, we saw them in eastern Syria actually swearing off with Farouk for control of a border crossing on the eastern side of the Turkish-Syrian border.
So I guess that's kind of a broad question, but maybe one way of answering that is saying what we see now increasingly is there are a lot of rebel groups.
There are probably like five to ten that stand out as large nationwide networks that have any cohesiveness, but still the fight is very, very local.
And you don't have a lot of coordination from one place to another.
And as I said, that's creating a situation where you have groups fighting each other, battling for control.
You have different ideologies in addition to simple clashes over turf and resources.
So I found that very worrying on my last reporting trip there.
All right.
Now, who knows how I phrased the question or whether it was right or not, but I believe you told me before that unlike during the Iraq insurgency that what we would call al-Qaeda in Syria really is the predominant force here instead of just two or three percent and yet very flashy like it was in Iraq.
Do you still think that?
Do I even have that right?
And has that changed?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, so Debit al-Nusra, which has been declared by the State Department as a front for al-Qaeda in Iraq, self-identifies as such and is now fielding very large numbers of fighters and are on the front lines across the country.
They're taking hold of large parts of, you know, eastern Syria, including infrastructure.
I was in the city of Raqqa last week, which is the largest city that's under rebel control now.
And Nusra has, for instance, taken over a hydroelectric dam there and are supplying Raqqa with 24 hours of power, making it the only place in Syria that it's actually getting 24 hours of power.
And so, so in addition to fielding large groups of fighters, they're also providing aid to the population, to a very much stricken population.
The movement of refugees that I saw last week was kind of astounding.
People being displaced a second time.
Eastern Syria is this, you know, it's an agricultural area and it's the center of the oil industry.
And yet it's very impoverished.
And over the last decade, there was a massive drought, especially 2006 to 2010.
And the UN statistics are that more than a million people migrated from eastern Syria to other parts of the country and out of the country looking for work.
And what we found on this last trip was that these villages that six months ago were still essentially, in some cases, dead villages, entirely abandoned by people fleeing other parts of the country, the violence in other parts of the country.
And so you just have kind of massive numbers of, you know, people who are displaced and in a very desperate situation in some places.
And then in addition, you have, you know, these groups are the only people offering anything.
So, yes, we've seen an incredible growth of Nusra's, you know, operating capabilities and just their, you know, contribution to the fighting against the government.
And in some cases, they're being challenged by other groups.
They've put down a few demonstrations against them by firing in the air.
The group espouses an Islamic state as opposed to elections if the government falls.
And a lot of Syrians are not down with that, if you will.
Well, yeah, I mean, in part of one of your articles anyway, it almost sounds like parallels to Iraq in 2006 and 2007, where the local Iraqis got sick and tired of the suicide bomber types bossing them around, where we're letting you help us, not you own us now, kind of attitude.
Yeah, that's very much.
I mean, people actually use the word Sahwa, which is the word that it means awakening, essentially.
That was the word that the Iraqis in Anbar, who decided to fight some of these militant groups, particularly the Islamic State of Iraq, used during that time and still to some extent use the dynamics in Iraq are changing.
But yes, that's I mean, people are not thrilled to be detained by people.
In one way, they phrase it is that they didn't give up one dictatorship for another.
And, you know, I'll give you an example.
There are a lot of non Syrian fighters in Nusra's ranks.
And recently, some colleagues of mine, Syrians were detained by some of these guys and they were let go.
But I mean, just just from a very basic standpoint, being detained by a bunch of non Syrians in the place where you live does not sit particularly well for a lot of people.
And so, I mean, you do have a worsening dynamic with the split between rebel groups.
All right.
Well, I know you got to go, so I'll go ahead and let you go here.
Thank you very much for your time, David.
I appreciate it.
Anytime.
Thank you.
All right, everybody.
That is David Enders, reporter for McClatchy Newspapers.
That's McClatchy DC dot com.
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