Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Okay, guys, on the line, I've got the great Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent and author of a great many books, especially recently.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, sir?
I'm doing good.
Good to talk to you.
Yeah, you too.
Now, sorry, it's been a little while since we've talked.
I really want to catch up with you about the end, question mark, of the Islamic State in, certainly in western Iraq and in eastern Syria.
The last few villages, I guess they say, have been liberated from their control.
So I guess I'll just start with sort of a general thing about what's your take about where we are now in terms of, I guess, Iraq war three, the ISIS war here.
Well, you know, at one point, Islamic State, the caliphate, which they declared in 2014 after taking Mosul, was pretty big.
It extended from the outskirts of Baghdad almost to the Mediterranean.
It's about the size of Great Britain.
And finally, it was reduced to a village on the town on the east bank of the Euphrates.
So as a territorial entity, the caliphate ended.
But, you know, it certainly can continue guerrilla war, and that is happening.
Guerrilla attacks have been picking up in Iraq and Syria.
Thirty-six Syrian soldiers were killed in April near Palmyra, the ancient city of Palmyra.
There have been attacks in Mosul and around Baghdad, which we haven't seen for a long time.
Well, you know, one should keep a sense of proportion, but ISIS, you know, really came out of war.
It's a child of war.
It's a militarized cult, religious cult.
And they really do know their business when it comes to making war.
So they'll certainly have seen that they were bound to lose out in a positional battle in Mosul, Raqqa, and finally their final stronghold on the Euphrates.
So it looks as though they've kept, you know, resources, men, weapons, supplies to stay in business by reverting to be a guerrilla organization, which is what they were before 2014.
Yeah.
Now, I read a couple of reports.
Let's see, the New York Review of Books had one.
I couldn't get the guy on the show for some reason, but there was another one, and I forget.
Anyway, about, I guess, essentially, Iraq War 3½ in Western Iraq, which is sort of the ongoing counterinsurgency campaign against whatever's left of al-Qaeda in Iraq or ISIS there.
And it seemed like a real bad situation.
He talked about the refugee camps full of—well, I guess the main thing of this one article or a couple articles I was reading, the main thrust of it was that the Shiite militias and the Iraqi army are having their revenge.
And they think that they're perfectly justified in treating all these people in exactly the same manner the Islamic State treated them, and that kind of thing, and that it's just revenge and retribution and a real horror show in Western Iraq right now.
Yeah, I mean, that's been going on quite a long time.
You know, because one of the—first of all, Iraq's a very sectarian place, so is Syria.
It really matters whether you're Shia or Sunni.
It matters what ethnic group you come to, whether you're a Kurd or an Arab or a Turkoman.
There isn't much love lost between them.
Secondly, as you just said, recall that the Islamic State—I remember in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, when they were advancing in 2014, they captured about 1,700 young Air Force cadets and said, I will send you home.
But actually, they took them to the banks of the Tigris River and murdered them all.
They massacred them, put them in mass graves.
So this was really along the lines of what the SS divisions were doing in Poland and Russia in the Second World War.
So you'd expect that to happen to a degree.
You've got these militias, and in the past that's been pretty corrupt, sort of checkpoints on the roads.
I always talk to truck drivers because they really know what these checkpoints are like.
Sometimes the shakedown.
Sometimes, you know, if you're the wrong type of Sunni Arab, you might get taken out and shot in the head, you know.
So you have that, and it may be in some ways inevitable.
Will this turn into ISIS making a comeback?
A bit too early to say.
I think difficult for them to do.
The last time around, they had the advantage of surprise.
Nobody expected them to go and take Mosul, a big city, 2 million people, defended by several army divisions, and they captured it.
I don't think they'll be able to do that again.
But I think we're looking forward to a fair amount of guerrilla warfare.
Maybe they'll start trying to bomb Baghdad again.
You can see they want to show that they're still in business.
So we have the bombing in Sri Lanka, in Colombo, that killed 253 people.
They say that's the biggest bombing that's been on biggest civilian casualties.
That's because they don't really count similar bombings in Iraq.
The last big bomb in Iraq in 2016 killed 340 people.
So we may get back to that.
So, you know, the war isn't quite over, but what the new war is going to look like, you can't really tell yet.
I guess some versions of the story have it kind of that the Saudis sort of switched gears, in a sense, from Syria to Yemen, and that they kind of had, at least to a degree, backed off of their determination to overthrow Assad and have a war in Yemen instead.
But assuming anybody could ever call that war to a halt, I wonder if you think that means that the Saudis, they've got to find a bin Laden insurgency to back somewhere, and so are they going to start backing the Sunni insurgency in Iraq again?
Or I guess there's still another question of the al-Nusra Front in the Idlib province as well.
Yeah, you know, this is sort of multiple crises, you know, one on top of another.
The Saudis have backed off a bit.
Now, why have they done that?
Well, it's partly because they're in rivalry with Turkey.
They don't want Turkey to get too powerful in that area.
It's another Sunni power.
So they were making advances to Assad, who previously they were trying to get rid of, but the U.S. has been opposing them.
They were sort of diplomatic advances they have sort of met recently.
But the U.S. is trying to prevent that happening, because obviously that's a plus for Assad.
And, you know, so yeah, the Saudis, I'm not sure the Saudis are that enthused by Yemen either.
You know, in 2015 they thought they'd start bombing, and the opposition there, the Houthis, which are from the northern part of Yemen, you know, would surrender or be defeated pretty fast.
So that's just not happening.
It isn't likely to happen.
It's the UAE, the United Arab Emirates is also sort of leading the attack there.
You know, it's all very complicated, but, you know, if one was to try to generalize and link this up with ISIS, you know, you have about seven wars going on in Middle East, North Africa.
You go from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Northeast Nigeria.
And that sort of creates the conditions that ISIS really likes, which is chaos, and when there's a well-organized military movement like ISIS can be really powerful.
So I don't think you'll get rid of ISIS while these wars are going on.
And they're all sort of proxy wars, you know.
You know, in Libya we have a lot of fighting recently.
We have General Haftar, Khalifa Haftar, who's approaching Tripoli.
Now, who is he backed by?
He's backed by Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, France, Russia.
I'm leaving somebody out.
You take the other side, and it's backed by Qatar and Turkey and a few others.
So you have these very complicated proxy wars with their local proxies who they're supplying with weapons and money.
And this is why these wars never end.
You know, these wars have been going on there.
There's no sign of them ending.
That's because the outside powers are always pumping in more supplies when their own guys look like they might be losing.
Sorry, hang on just one second.
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Right.
Now, so, I'm sorry.
We're limiting our time.
Can we talk about the Idlib province for a minute?
Because this is, I think you wrote in one of these recent pieces that, hey, you want to talk about the Islamic State.
This is the last real place where al-Qaeda has some land.
They control a whole province in northwestern Syria still.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing that there's this tremendous medium political focus purely on the Islamic State.
Well, the guys in Idlib, which is essentially al-Nusra, which was actually created by ISIS and is linked to al-Qaeda, is much more powerful there.
They've probably got about 30,000 fighters there, the population of a couple of million.
But that's completely ignored because the Islamic State is the group that grabs the headlines.
Yeah.
Now, so, do you have any kind of ballpark estimate of how many guys are—is it really Jolani and the al-Qaeda group that still control whatever they call themselves now, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham?
Yeah, it's essentially al-Nusra.
Yeah, they sort of have been expanding there.
You know, the thing about these Islamic al-Qaeda-type groups, whether it's ISIS or al-Nusra, as it used to be, or HTS, as it's called, that, you know, they're militarily better organized.
Their guys are more fanatical, more committed.
So when it comes to fighting with other rival Syrian groups in Idlib, these guys have come out ahead.
And, you know, they're linked to Turkey.
The Assad and the Russians don't dare to attack at the moment because of Turkish support.
But it's one more complication in Syria, one thing that makes it more difficult to end the war there.
All right.
And now I'm sorry to cut back to Western Iraq, but this has always been the real puzzle.
I like to point out all the time how you were on this show and writing in The Independent one year before the fall of Mosul that the Shiite army—essentially, they're in a foreign country.
They're out in Fort Apache in Mosul where they got no real support out there in supply lines.
And so they were AWOL, and they were going back safe behind Shiite lines.
And how Western Iraqi Sunnistan essentially at that point was wide open for the Islamic State, that al-Qaeda and its break-off group after—right around that time, 2013, spring 2013 is when ISIS broke off from al-Qaeda, Zawahiri and all of that.
And then—and you were explaining at the time that the Shiite government in Baghdad was warning that, hey, we're fighting against al-Qaeda types here still with the drone wars and whatever, the very end of Iraq War II still going on kind of there.
While at the same time, support for the insurgency in Syria was re-energizing the Sunni insurgency.
So this, we talked about, led to the rise of the Islamic State and all of that in the first place.
But now that it's over, the Iraqi Sunnis are still—I guess I kind of missed my own point about the troops being AWOL from Mosul.
It just went to show that the real point there was that Iraqi Sunnistan is kind of a foreign country compared to Iraqi Shiistan, which includes virtually all of Baghdad now.
And so when they declared independence, they declared independence in the name of Baghdadi and the caliphate.
And so, blam, that did not work out so well for them at all.
That's been completely smashed.
And yet, what's their future?
They're just stuck in no man's land with this Shiite government that doesn't represent them at all and no solution, no even autonomy or independence or any kind of thing in the offering as far as any kind of solution.
And then, of course, we have the Saudis in their deep pockets who can finance a full-blown 2006-level insurgency at any time if they feel like it, right?
But is anyone even trying to solve this, or what?
Well, you know, not really.
The U.S. at the moment is trying to get – Trump and the administration are trying to get the Iraqis to sign on to imposing sanctions on Iran.
Now, you know, they're both Shia states.
They're very unlikely to do this.
They're also pretty dependent on Iran for gas and things like that.
So, you know, once again, this is what kind of lets ISIS off the – Islamic State off the hook, that the U.S. is concentrating – the Trump administration is concentrating on trying to sort of squeeze Iran through more and more sanctions.
But if they try that too hard in Baghdad, that's one of the reasons the prime minister of Iraq fell last year.
They've got a new prime minister.
The same thing may happen if he goes along with the U.S.
So, you know, the situation is still pretty hot there.
It's difficult for – the Sunni come back, but 20 percent of the population, you know, that main city, Mosul, is partly in ruins.
In Iraq, same thing, Raqqa and Syria.
So they've been badly defeated.
On the other hand, you know, if they've got no alternative, I guess some of them would fight again.
So this is kind of a crucial period, I think, because we'll see how far ISIS can really make a comeback.
These guys knew they were going to be defeated in a sort of ground war with the Kurds and the others backed by the U.S. Air Force.
A lot of our people would have been hiding out.
They would have prepositioned supplies, staging ambushes all over the place.
Are they going to really be able to make a comeback as a guerrilla force?
We still don't know that.
But the next few months are going to show us.
And I think there are going to be more spectacular attacks inside Iraq and Syria and outside like we saw in Sri Lanka.
Yeah, you know, going back to the quote from Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, recounting a conversation with Prince Bandar from Saudi Arabia, who I guess is out now, but still same difference.
He's speaking on behalf of a lot of his peers in the royal family there, saying, we are so sick and tired of the Shia and their days have had it and this and that.
That was justifying backing the rise of the Sunni insurgency in Syria at that point, but really going to show that they just cannot abide the results of Iraq War II, that Baghdad is now a Shiite city.
And yet it took the entire U.S. Army and Marine Corps to make it that way.
And so there's nothing they can do about it, right?
But it's like an irresistible force and an unmovable object.
The results that they cannot change, but they can keep flinging suicide bombers at it from now on.
Well, yeah, I mean, Saudi Arabia, particularly under the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is more viscerally anti-Shia than it was before.
Just this week they executed 36 people.
34 of them are Saudi Shia from eastern province who had just been arrested when they were demonstrating in the street.
One of them was even crucified.
They said they beheaded him first and then crucified him.
Well, yeah, what a humane bunch of fellas, you know.
But, you know, they aren't getting anywhere.
In 2015, when Mohammed bin Salman, when the Crown Prince came in, he upped support for the opposition to Assad in Syria.
But the result of that was the Russians came in on Assad's side, which was pretty decisive there.
He started the war in Yemen.
That didn't get him very far.
They got 80,000 people killed.
You know, all these things that he's tried to do, Saudi Arabia's tried to do, haven't worked too well.
And will this confrontation with Iran get anywhere?
You know, it's sort of too late.
You know, Iran is kind of...
If you go north of Saudi Arabia, you know, you get to an area where countries around like Iran or Iraq or Lebanon either have a majority or plurality of Shia, Syria is controlled by Shia.
And the Saudis basically have lost out there.
And I don't think they can really reverse that.
But, you know, we still have in the Arab world, we have people contending for the leadership of the Sunni Muslims, you know, a big chunk of the world's population.
Saudi Arabia is contending, Qatar is contending, Turkey is contending.
So that's one strand, one part of the confrontation, which has made the Middle East so violent and makes these wars so difficult to end.
Yeah, just like when you're talking about when you're listing who's on whose side in Libya, it just goes to show what a mess it all is.
Because something we talked about in Yemen was about how, for some reason there, the Saudis prefer Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood, whereas the Qataris prefer al-Qaeda, whereas usually it's the other way around.
Yeah, you know, it's sort of...
These oil states, they all have a sort of element of sort of, you know, of Inspector Clouseau about them.
You know, they're always making pratfalls, you know.
They have a lot of money, but somehow they're definitely turning it into political strength.
And that's been true in all these wars that Saudi Arabia's got involved with, and Qatar as well.
In Iraq, the...
Yeah, I mean, well, this was sectarian relations are going to get worse, but for the moment the Shia are the winners there.
They've been kind of worried the last two years of how far is Trump going to turn Iraq into a sort of arena in which to confront Iraq, because that will split Iraq.
I won't say, you know, will they try and get the Iraqis to enforce sanctions on Iraq.
I think they're very capable to do that, I think, but that doesn't mean they won't try.
Well, I mean, it seems from here, from what I've read, that they're afraid to try, because they know that if they try to make the Baghdad government choose, they'll choose Iran, which just goes to show the position that W. Bush put them in, right?
Yeah.
I mean, that's always, you know, at the end of the day, the Shia in Iraq, you know, they're kind of rivals.
They have differences with the Shia of Iran, but they don't want to see Iran go down.
I mean, the present government would go down in a confrontation with the U.S.
So, yeah, I think that's definitely the case.
But it's, you know, what I find strange about this whole thing, you know, because much in the interest of the U.S. and the Europeans and the others to try and sort of cool down these conflicts in Iraq and Syria a few years ago, you know, because it's pretty obvious that Assad had won Syria.
But they thought, now, you know, we'll kind of start things and keep Assad on the defensive and so forth.
And as a consequence, you know, ISIS was able to take advantage of this, you know, the fact the central government was weak, that authority was fragmented.
And, you know, they'll look to do that again.
So, it's, you know, there's very little sign of Washington or the Europeans or the Saudis, for that matter, or the U.A. have really learned something from the wars over the last eight years.
Man, isn't that about the worst thing you could say after all of this, too?
They've learned nothing.
And this is almost halfway through 2019 now and just more to come.
But I'm sorry I'm late.
I got to leave it there.
But thank you so much for coming back on the show, Patrick.
It's great to talk to you.
Thank you.
All right, you guys, that's Patrick Coburn.
He's the best war reporter we got in the Western Hemisphere, man.
Simple as that.
That's it.
Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
They reprint all this stuff at UNZ.com.
And he wrote the book, The Age of Jihad, and Chaos and Caliphate, and quite a few before that, too.
Check them out there on the book sites.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
