03/04/15 – Mitchell Prothero – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
It's our friend Mitch Prothero, reporter for McClatchy Newspapers, reporting out of Erbil in Kurdistan.
Welcome back to the show.
Mitch, how are you doing?
I'm doing okay.
How are you?
I'm doing okay, except I just pronounced Kurdistan very strangely.
It's kind of a put an E sound in there where it didn't belong.
I don't know.
Hey, so there's a giant war going on.
Tell me all about it.
The battle for Tikrit?
Yeah, it's a pretty big operation.
This is the third or fourth one, depending on your counting, where they've either tried to keep or retake Tikrit from the Islamic State.
But this one is obviously a little bit more serious and organized than the previous at least two or three that were complete debacles.
A combination of Iraqi army troops, mostly special forces, and Shia militias led by an Iranian general, who's being pretty open about his involvement in the whole thing, have surrounded Tikrit on three or four sides and are basically pushing in on Saddam Hussein's old town.
All right, now, in the previous attempts, I guess I only know the one where they went and occupied part of the university for a little while in the center of town, something like that, but never really could hold it.
Is that basically what happened the first few times, little incursions like that, and this is altogether different?
No, there was a major one back in the fall where they tried to push up.
There was a few.
Well, right after it fell, they dropped off guys via helicopter into the university, and it was just a massacre.
Everything went.
It was a complete debacle.
I think this was before the Iraqi government got it in their brains that maybe their guys were a little outmatched by the Islamic State.
Then I think it was in November, might have been a month earlier, might have been September, October.
They tried to do a major push-up from Samarra where they pushed up the highway in an effort to retake it and basically got stopped on the outskirts of the city and then quietly withdrew.
I hate to be so vague as a journalist covering these things, but the simple fact is the Iraqis will announce a lot of operations, they'll go on for a couple of days, and then we'll just never hear about anything again.
Sometimes that just means they lost and quit, and they don't exactly announce it.
This one seems a little bit more organized and a lot more serious, particularly because there's an involvement of between 15,000 and 20,000 Shia militias that are very well equipped, have fairly professional leadership, and are definitely coming for this town.
I don't think there's any confusion that these dudes want to take down Saddam's hometown.
They're trying to send a message to the Islamic State.
If you remember back in June, this was the scene of the execution on video of between 1,000 and about 1,500 unarmed Shia Air Force cadets and volunteers that had been captured by the Islamic State who were just systematically executed, mostly on video.
None of that's been forgotten, and so this one's turning into a pretty nasty little fight they got going on.
You said 15,000 to 20,000 Shiite militiamen are the ones doing the fighting?
Well, there's also, I mean, the Iraqi Army is involved.
The problem, and we learned this in the past few weeks, as America first tried to float the notion that maybe they could try to retake Mosul in the next two months, and then sort of everybody pointed out they really don't have the troops.
But what they do have is actually some quite good special forces units.
The Iraqi Special Forces, they've got a unit called the SWAT Team, and another called the Golden Dawn Brigade.
Those are very well-trained and somewhat combat-efficient by Iraqi Army standards, but what they don't have is large numbers of conventional troops organized with logistics and ammo and things.
The Shia militias are sort of the ones capable of doing that right now, because both they're better organized and because of the Iranian leadership and equipping.
All right, now, so I guess the Islamic State, they failed to take Kobani after a long fight there in Syria, but have they ever had a real challenge, one as big as this, to a city that they already have taken, that they're trying to defend and hold on to?
Not on this scale.
There's been a couple instances.
There was a town south of Baghdad, somewhat close to Karbala, that the Iraqis and mainly the militias did retake from the Islamic State, Jerusalem, and pretty much just cleared out all of the Sunnis from that area, because it was threatening the Shia heartland.
That was pretty nasty, but much, much smaller.
In general, a serious retaking, so to speak, of Tikrit would be the first major step that we've seen from the Iraqi government to bring back a primarily, if not 100 percent Sunni area controlled by Daesh, the Islamic State, under their control.
This would be kind of their first major victory, if they were to succeed.
The problem, of course, is that what we're looking at is, chances are, a wholesale destruction of the city of Tikrit, which has been mostly abandoned by its population now for months, and chances are a lot of war-crimey behavior by both sides.
These are not nice people, and they really, really hate each other.
Everybody's very nervous about what this is going to look like when it's over with.
My personal suspicion is they're just going to completely flatten the place.
What's the size of Tikrit compared to Mosul or compared to Fallujah?
Fallujah and Mosul are much bigger.
You've got to understand these are clusters of villages.
I've heard 200,000 people live in Tikrit normally.
That might or might not include the villages that surround it, which are also being held by the Islamic State, but most of those people are not there.
In fact, I'd say at least half of them are in Erbil and fled here in June to get away from the Islamic State.
People had seen this coming for some months.
The Islamic State's actually been forced to start preventing people from leaving because everybody sort of gets that there's going to be a series of very nasty land battles, so they've tried to flee.
At this stage, Mosul used to be able to go in and out of even cross Kurdish lines to go to Kirkuk or Erbil, not easily, but it could be done.
Both the Kurds and the Islamic State have really cracked down on that.
The Kurds have cracked down on it because they were trying to break up oil smuggling rings that were financing the Islamic State, and the IS guys had cracked down on it because they realized that basically everybody who could get out of Mosul was leaving.
But Tikrit was one of those places that emptied out fairly early on.
Having said that, there's already widespread reports of civilian casualties.
Not everybody goes.
The poor people usually stay.
Farmers usually stay.
Older people have a tendency to stick around.
So there's definitely a lot of civilians in place who are under quite a big threat.
On one side, you've got the crazy people from the Islamic State, and on the other hand, you've got extremely sectarian and somewhat vicious Shia militias coming for revenge.
So it's not a good place to be if you're stuck between those two.
Yeah, I think people might remember the Bata Brigade from Donald Rumsfeld's El Salvador option and round them up and power drill them to death and all of that going on back then.
These are the same guys again, right?
The Bata Brigade, led by, what's his name, Amiri, or how do you say it?
Amiri, yeah.
Bata Brigade, except, I'm sorry, they changed it.
It's the Bata Organization.
Oh, like the MKO, huh?
Yeah, they changed their name to Organization in 2003.
You know, yeah, it's them, but it's also some other groups people haven't heard of, like Hezbollah, which is not the Lebanese Hezbollah, but rather an Iraqi version of it, and there's a slew of them.
They're basically called Popular Movement Committees, and they're under an umbrella organization that's just straight run by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, al-Quds Force.
So these guys are actually pretty networked and equipped, trained and led, and the head of the Quds Force's external wing, General Qasem Soleimani, has been repeatedly seen at basically in Tikrit directing operations, and he's a ruthless operator, but an extremely competent tactician and organizer, and his personal attention is not something I would want if I was in the Islamic State's position.
All right, hold it right there, y'all.
It's Mitch Prothero from McClatchy Newspapers, McClatchyDC.com.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, talking with Mitch Prothero, reporter for McClatchy Newspapers out of Erbil, Kurdistan, and reporting on the Iraq War there, Iraq War III now.
Well, three and a half, if you count the Clinton years.
That's at least half a war, I guess, depending on whose side you're on.
Anyway- It's not when the Iranians in it, it's four.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan- No, no, no.
I meant the Iranians fought their own war here before as well, so- Oh, yeah.
I mean, Iraq is where everybody comes together.
Yeah, yeah.
There you go.
Well, it was Carter that helped Hussein start it, and then Ronald Reagan backed both sides, so that's kind of- It's the Middle East.
You got to keep your options open.
I guess so.
But, yeah, right now, the one thing that we're finding a little unusual about this is that the Shia and the Iranians really, I mean, I hate to say it like the Iranians are in charge, but they're being kind of blatant about it.
At least on this operation, there's been no U.S. assistance.
Well, and they've even, at least the news reports were that they declined American air cover.
Thank you.
We'll handle it.
Right.
Well, it wasn't as much of a decline as much as they just didn't tell anybody they were doing it and have yet to ask for any strikes, so it's a very interesting change.
Partially, I think it's that they don't want any U.S. advisers looking over their shoulder reminding them about the Geneva Conventions while this goes on, because American troops won't really allow them to go for some of the stuff that I think that they're going to go for.
Right.
Well, before, when America fought an eight-year war on behalf of these guys, they never admitted it, and so they were able to continue to do so, and it made sense, I guess, for the Iranians to let the Americans help take Baghdad for the Shia and then don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
But then now, if they can make it an overt reality, and it's hilarious watching the Republicans say, oh, my God, there's Iranian influence in Iraq right now?
We have no idea how it got that way.
But for them, it's such a controversy that they don't want to provide air cover for the Quds Force because Israel says that Iran is as bad as the Islamic State or whatever their narrative is.
So maybe it'll help keep us out somewhat?
To a certain extent.
I mean, you know, nobody, none of the Iraqi groups, with the exception of the Peshmerga here in Kurdistan, want American troops actually in combat.
You know, they want to do it themselves with their own way, with their own goals in mind.
They certainly, they even resented, you know, an announcement from the Pentagon saying that, you know, they were hoping to go into Mosul by the spring.
The response was, this is Baghdad, this is Iraq, we'll decide when we go into Mosul, the Americans won't.
So this could be a little bit of pushback to that.
The Kurds, I mean, they would love some special forces on the ground helping them out.
And frankly, they probably earned it.
But as far as the rest of them, no, this is a regional problem that will have regional solutions to a large extent.
And you know, in response to, you know, people who are concerned about Iranian influence in Iraq, I would just say, on what planet aren't they going to have influence here?
It's their next door neighbor.
They've got millions of co-religionists, very close economic ties at this stage.
The governments have very close ties.
And this country invaded Iran, you know, Iran, led to maybe, what, a million total deaths over the course of a decade of fighting.
The Iranians are simply not going to allow this place to get out of hand again.
It'd be crazy for them to allow it.
So, you know, my response is just, what planet do you live on where a nation of 77 million people with a very competent leadership and military like we see from the Iranians, as ruthless as they might be, of course, they're going to be involved in Iraq.
Of course, this is their sphere of influence.
It'd be insanity for it not to be.
Hey, let me ask you about this.
We've got a NATO ally called Turkey that doesn't seem to be acting like much of an ally, but maybe I don't understand the real politics of who's agreeing with who about doing what.
But Pat Buchanan was on the show yesterday and pointed out that the Turks could smash the Islamic State in a fortnight, man.
They got 300,000 men and however many thousand tanks and helicopters and planes, and they could go in there and they could take Mosul.
They could find Caliph Ibrahim and this problem right here and now, but they sure don't want to do that.
And in fact, they don't seem to have even the slightest motive to clamp down on people coming to Turkey and then traveling from Turkey into Syria and, you know, to go and fight with the Islamic State or with al-Nusra.
Why do you think that is?
Well, because they're on their side.
I mean, these guys are doing their dirty work for them.
They want the Kurds weakened and they want the Assad regime replaced with a friendly Islamist regime, much like the one that the Turkish government's trying to implement.
So yeah, I don't think that they're terribly in love with the Islamic State right now.
And I think they probably regret letting it grow to the extent that it did.
But at this stage, it's very hard to see Turkey as an ally in the fight against extremism in Syria and Iraq.
I don't see a lot of behavior on their part that would lead to that.
They're much more concerned with their own Kurdish minority, much more concerned with the rise of Kurdish groups that are fighting the Islamic State.
To them, they don't see a difference between the PKK and IS.
If anything, they think the PKK is worse.
So you know, they've been playing, I think, a very cynical and dirty game.
And it's going to be hard to really reconcile that.
The direction that Turkey's been going for some time has been, you know, not very NATO-like.
Civil liberties are being curtailed on a near monthly basis by the current government, which I'll remind you is democratically elected, but hasn't been behaving very democratically over the last couple of years.
So you know, right now it looks like Turkey's in a stage of transition.
And they certainly enabled, at least, the jihadist influence in Syria that has also spilled into northern Iraq, or spilled back and forth, I guess, over the last decade.
They had a little bit to do with that.
I don't know how much they regret it and how much they plan on going to handle it.
But I've yet to see them confront the Islamic State on any front at all.
And they're extremely worried about the Kurds who are fighting the Islamic State.
So I don't know what to say.
You don't hear much rhetoric from the Americans about, God dang, we wish the Turks would clamp down and they just won't.
Privately, you do.
I mean, you've got to be hard.
I mean, if you call them out and, you know, this is diplomacy.
I mean, if Obama were to come out and, you know, threaten Turkey with sanctions, knowing the Turks, I don't think that would go well.
They're very proud and very nationalistic.
But behind the scenes, I think that they also require cooperation from Turkey.
So you can't really light that bridge completely on fire.
You know, when you're trying to track guys, the Turks have been somewhat helpful, although not to the extent I think a lot of the security services would like to see.
But if you completely alienate them, then they're not going to help you at all.
All right.
Now, here's the thing, though.
Do you think that they've really switched all the way back to Assad at this point?
Because it's just in The Wall Street Journal last week that one, Obama says there is no solution until there's a stable government in Syria.
And that means Assad must go.
It must be an Assad free government to be a stable one for the future, said the president.
And then I guess the next day or two days later, or maybe it was two days before, we're going to start giving the GPS and laser designators to the rebels to start picking targets for our B-1 bombers over there.
So it sort of sounds like we're back in 2012 and we're pretending this whole rise of the caliphate never happened.
And Assad is the bad guy.
We've got to take care of him.
I think that that's I mean, you're not going to back off of saying Assad has to go.
But if you follow the news, there are no more pro U.S. rebels.
The last the last group was destroyed over the weekend by Nusra and all of the equipment that they were given was captured.
So at this stage, America has very few, if any, allies on the ground in Syria.
And from what I can tell, has very little interest in involving itself in Syria at all beyond maybe doing a little bit of bombing of the Islamic State and making sure the Kurdish areas don't get overrun or helping make sure.
But beyond that, you know, I think that, you know, the president seems to have made a decision that there's no good can come from intervening on any level at this point.
And you know, whether it's to protect Assad, to remove Assad, to back a rebel group, not back a rebel group, I don't think they're going to do any of it.
None of the options look good.
And so why bother?
You don't know what you might make worse.
But they are intent on degrading the Islamic State through airstrikes.
And I'm coming around to the opinion that they've been fairly effective in doing that.
I think that this group is hurting a lot worse than people realize.
I think, you know, the calculations that I've seen, if any of them can be believed, if any of the data can be believed, they've lost close to a division worth of men and material just from the bombings alone.
Kobani was particularly painful for them.
And I just put out a story yesterday that basically says that their finances are organized like a pyramid scheme that really only is sustainable if they expand and loot new banks and natural resources to go with what they have.
And from what I can tell, I don't think they're running out of money, but they are certainly hurting a lot worse for money than they were six months ago.
And a lot of that does have to do with both cracking down on the oil smuggling, which to their credit, the Turks have done, as well the Kurds, to try to cut off that money flow.
Again, the U.S. has been blowing up a lot of their equipment and blowing up a lot of their makeshift oil refineries.
So this has, I think, had a noticeable effect on the group.
But yeah, regional solutions are what's going to solve this.
America is not going to solve it.
Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, these are the people who have to live with this problem for now.
These are the people who are going to end up having to come together and, you know, fix it somehow.
Well, you know, unless you want to invade.
If you want to invade, then you can take out the Islamic State.
But America does not seem inclined to send the 82nd Airborne into Mosul.
Yeah.
Hallelujah.
Now, so tell me this, obviously, you know, blowing up a lot of equipment, much of it's stolen from America and what our army left behind there and what our, you know, pet Iraqi army left behind in Sunnistan for them to grab.
That obviously is pretty hard to replace a bunch of blown up trucks and tanks and artillery pieces and that kind of thing.
But, you know, we hear a lot and we have heard for months that the American air campaign has been great PR for the Islamic State and has helped to draw recruits from all over the world and that kind of thing.
Although I can see how the recruits are basically, you know, the for the the worldwide recruits are probably not that useful in battle most of the time.
No, they're good for driving a suicide truck or something like that.
But anyway, I wonder whether you score how you score the benefit PR wise from being at war with the Americans, because they have said that there was an increase of thousands and thousands more people came flooding as soon as the American bombs started falling to.
I think that flood started around the time that the that the that the caliphate itself was declared.
I have not seen numbers that support a bump just because the Americans were bombing, although it's possible maybe I just haven't seen them.
Remember a lot of the information we get about the Islamic State's anecdotal, you know, you know, not proven by hard stats.
But the simple fact is this group militarily is built around a core of battle hardened Iraqi to a certain extent, Syrian and surprisingly Chechen and sort of, you know, the the outskirts of the Soviet or former Soviet Union use back Tajiks, Chechens, guys with significant military experience before they got to Syria and Iraq.
And this is the this is the core of the group.
The more of those guys you kill, you cannot replace them with school shooter jerk offs from London.
Right.
And, you know, that's what they're there.
I think that they're finding the guys that I talked to on the front lines say they haven't seen a degradation in the ability of the guys that they're fighting.
But most of them turn out to either be foreigners from previous jihad areas, you know, like they say Afghans.
I think they mean Uzbeks and Tajiks and things like that.
You know, groups like that, not not actual Afghan Afghans, but, you know, they have seen a drop off in their ability to organize some drop off in their quality of the equipment.
It's not as easy for them to put 50 or 100 pickup trucks to swarm one outpost like they used to be able to, because, you know, the B1 is going to come get you if you do that.
And also the Kurds have a lot better anti-tank and anti-armor weaponry than they did a few months ago.
So, you know, we're seeing it as far as, you know, the overall takeaway.
Is this inflaming things?
I don't really know.
I think that leaving it there to prosper is just as good an advertisement to, you know, a nutball in Belgium who's looking to join a worldwide caliphate.
If he sees it as a successful organization, he's going to want to join.
So if it's being bombed, maybe he also wants to join.
But I don't know.
I just couldn't.
You know what I mean?
I can't quite distinguish.
Like, if you have it successful and they're rolling and everything's going great, that's a great recruiting tool.
If the Americans are bombing you, that's also a great recruiting tool.
Well, I don't think I don't think that even if they were left to their own devices, I don't think that Sunnistan would profit would prosper under their rule because they're just not very talented.
It just doesn't work.
You know.
No, but it certainly looked like it in June.
This is when we saw the flood was when they took Mosul so easily and pushed to the gates of Baghdad.
Kids sitting in Belgium and London all of a sudden were like, oh, my God, it's off.
You know, this is what we've all been waiting for.
We thought we were all waiting for, you know, and started flooding in.
I don't know that by bombing you make it worse.
And I mean, there have been reports of civilian casualties, but most of the airstrikes we've seen are fairly precise and in somewhat rural areas against military positions.
I mean, I'm sure they've killed civilians.
I've seen some numbers bandied around that.
I don't take that seriously because I don't think anybody quite knows.
But with the exception of some of the bombing in Raqqa, you know, I get the daily reports and it's always like a machine gun emplacement 10 kilometers outside of some town.
So I don't think they're really whapping me the population like you would have seen in, let's say, a World War Two style bombing campaign.
So I just I don't know, I guess would be my big answer.
But letting them win would definitely also be a boon to recruiting.
Well, now, it seems like one real danger would be that they would kind of mellow out.
Yeah.
Maybe if there was no fighting, maybe they would quit with, you know, back off some of the totalitarianism and actually be able to entrench themselves into the society a little deeper.
Whereas now, you know, they're so busy bossing everybody around and taxing them, you know, all the way down to their shoes and whatever, that they're really they're an alien force trying to to a great degree, trying to I mean, I know you said that the leadership, a lot of them are Iraqi, but this isn't typically traditionally the way Sunni stand has been ruled by self-described zealots like this guy and is now and they're deeply unpopular in the areas they control.
I mean, this is an indisputable fact.
Your average Syrian or average Mosul resident, as much as they might hate their own central government, are not particularly impressed with these guys and I talked to dozens of these people.
I'd be the first to say if I thought the Islamic State was rising in popularity in the areas that it occupies and it's not there.
But you know, if you're stuck between the barter brigade and its high speed drill bits and crazy dash guys cutting everybody's head off for smoking, which actually they don't do to be fair, but they do cut off a lot of heads, you know, you're you're you're screwed, you know, and these people are just going to keep their mouth shut, keep their heads down, try to eke out a living and really hope that the coalition doesn't blow up their house or that they end up in the middle of a house to house, you know, gun battle between Iraqi security forces and these, you know, militants.
So you know, that's what we're seeing from a lot of these groups.
A lot of the civilians is just trying to stay out of the way.
All right, everybody.
That's Mitch Prothero, writing for McClatchy Newspapers, McClatchyDC.com.
Thanks very much, Mitch.
No problem.
Always my pleasure.
Bye.
All right, y'all.
So as airstrikes damage Islamic State, it seeks money, money, money, massive Iraqi assault begins to retake Tikrit from Islamic State and outside Sultan Abdullah, Iraq at Kurdish frontline outposts, skepticism abounds about assault on Mosul.
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