05/15/15 – Mitchell Prothero – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
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I got Mitch Prothero back on the line here.
He's reporting for McClatchy DC out of Erbil in Kurdistan.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Mitch?
I'm doing okay.
It's been sort of a crazy day here in Iraq.
I can imagine all the news says that Ramadi is being taken over completely now by the Islamic State today.
Is that correct?
There.
Yeah.
Basically, most of Ramadi has been overrun.
It started late last night with a sort of devilishly brilliant operation involving a giant armored bulldozers and suicide bombers.
And at this stage, there's a thing called the Anbar Operations Center, which is basically the provincial headquarters for the military.
That appears to be holding out, but is deeply besieged.
And I can no longer get through to anybody on the phone who's inside it.
Other than that, it looks like more or less a government route in the provincial capital of Al Anbar.
Wow.
And now, so if I understood it right, I'm sure there's probably at least a real good chance you saw David Ender's video report for Vice Magazine out of Ramadi a couple of few weeks ago.
And my impression from that was that basically, am I right, the city's divided in half by the river and half was still under the control of the government at that point.
And so now they've come across the bridge and taken the rest of the city.
Is that basically it?
Yeah.
Essentially, they didn't come via the river, but they basically last night, several armored bulldozers suddenly pulled up to the front lines and started moving blast walls out of the way and clearing roadblocks.
And they were doing this basically in order to allow in six suicide car bombers who then smashed into the defenses of the town of the provincial council headquarters buildings.
In a place like Ramadi, there's a large area in the center of the city that would be considered the government compound where the different ministries would be based.
And that had been holding out.
And those suicide bombers basically decimated their defenses.
And there's been nonstop fighting ever since.
And what I've been last last I've heard, and I haven't been able to get a report out of Ramadi now for a couple hours, was that the elite unit that had been holding out, it's called the Golden Brigade, had withdrawn to a stadium where they were hoping to be evacuated.
But for the most part, Ramadi looks like it's rapidly collapsing if it hasn't completely already.
And now this Golden Brigade, are these the same guys that you wrote about a couple of weeks ago who are basically the special forces rangers, the only competent part of the official Iraqi army?
There's there's there's three competent units and they are one of them in the Iraqi army.
The article you're referencing, you know, I basically concluded that they've got about 10,000 guys at any given moment who are, you know, operational and functional in combat and everybody else will just sort of run away or isn't properly trained or equipped.
And we don't even have hard numbers on how many other guys they've got.
But, you know, the Iraqi army is basically at any given time at the most able to deploy about 10,000 competent guys that officially work for the government.
That, of course, doesn't include the Shia militias.
And now, oh, man, I don't have a map in front of me, but isn't Ramadi much further from Baghdad than Fallujah is?
Why did it take the Islamic State all this time to be able to grab it?
Well, partially that is true.
Basically, just there's a straight line between Amman, Jordan and Baghdad.
If you're coming from Amman, Ramadi is the first major city that you hit.
And then shortly after that, Fallujah.
And then you hit Abu Ghraib and then Baghdad itself.
One of the reasons is because it's the provincial capital.
And also there are pro-government tribes because of government, you know, sort of subsidies and patronage and just history, you know, in Ramadi itself.
Was Fallujah's kind of always been at least insurgent prone, if not, you know, quite a bit of outright sympathy for the Islamic State.
So the fact that even though it's closer to Baghdad, that it would fall sooner isn't a terribly big surprise.
What's a big surprise is that for, you know, well over a year now, keep in mind, Anbar was pretty much taken over by pissed off tribesmen and the Islamic State back in January of 2014.
Well, before Mosul is that they've known that this is going to happen.
The Iraqi government, they've had, you know, more than a year to prepare billions in international aid, hundreds of U.S. airstrikes, and they just got overrun in a day.
Yeah, well, so, you know, it's a funny way to start this part of the conversation, but I saw Oliver North on TV this morning trying to watch only Fox News now.
And and he was, you know, basically making the same complaint, only elaborating, saying, look, there's no one if this is the state of things in Ramadi, then it's a fantasy that even with American air power that the Iraqi government and its allies could ever take Mosul.
I mean, just forget about it.
And I guess he didn't say the same thing for Fallujah, but same thing for Fallujah, same thing for the rest of the Anbar province, same thing for the rest of the Islamic State is the point.
Right.
They can't take Mosul if they can't hold Ramadi, then they can't do a damn thing.
But then again, I guess counter to that would be the recent recapture of Tikrit by the Iraqi army.
So I don't know.
What do you think?
Well, first off, I mean, just thank you for putting me in the terribly uncomfortable position of agreeing with anything Oliver North says.
But the fact is, he's right.
And, you know, yes, there was a victory in Tikrit.
But if you look on a map and you look at the size of Tikrit, it's relatively close to Baghdad.
They had the Iraqi government had held things north along that highway before.
So they were sort of able to using the Kurds and Shia militias even coming in from the east.
They were able to isolate a town of about 150 to 200,000 people to create Ramadi is about like 800,000 people, maybe nine.
Mosul is 200,000.
I mean, two million.
Sorry, Mosul is the second biggest city in Iraq.
It's well over two million people.
Fallujah goes about half a million.
These are big places and they take a long time to take down.
So I'd even argue the fact that the Iraqi government can't properly protect the oil refinery that's been under siege for a year in Baishi in an area that they actually have a little bit better command and control and maneuverability than they do, let's say, in Ramadi.
They haven't been able to secure that properly.
If you can't do that, you can't even start thinking about Mosul.
And obviously this is in the developments today in Anbar, which could conceivably get worse.
Ramadi might not be the end of this.
There's a town called Al Baghdadi that essentially is about to fall as well.
And if it does, then the entire garrison at the Haditha Dam, which has held out for this entire time, they are now cut off completely.
Haditha Dam can supply a tremendous amount of electricity.
It can also flood half of Iraq.
It's not something you want in the hands of the Islamic State, much like the Mosul Dam.
So if Baghdadi falls, that's a really big tactical problem for resupply and for continued government control over one of the biggest infrastructure projects in Iraq.
And then on top of it, you're talking about losing some other towns to the point that then you start wondering how secure are those U.S. trainers sitting on Al Asad Air Base, which is in Anbar.
And that would be at that stage one of the last points of control for the U.S. government.
I mean not for the U.S. government, for the Iraqi government with U.S. support in all of Western Iraq.
So at this stage right now, there's got to be a meeting at the Pentagon going, OK, if these dominoes fall, which is looking increasingly likely, are we going to end up in a situation where we have to pull these trainers out of Asad Air Base?
Because they're not there for a combat mission, so they'd have to either redefine the mission as a combat-oriented one or pull them out for somewhere safer because Asad Air Base will be up next.
Yeah, well, my bet is always on escalation.
But then again, I've been wrong.
I thought they would have had 10,000 marines there by now or more really escalating this thing, and they seem very hesitant to do that, thank goodness.
But on the question of the dam, man, I really should have a map here in front of me while we're talking about this.
But is there a chance for it to just be basically resupplied and protected by the Kurds?
Because isn't it closer to Kurdistan and Baghdad anyway?
No, no.
This is – imagine basically there's the river that comes down through all of Syria and Turkey and then straight down into the Euphrates River Valley.
It's up in that.
And so essentially it connects let's say Ramadi to Deir ez-Zor in the Syrian desert, which is mostly under the control of the Islamic State.
I think there's still one or two small Syrian bases, regime bases that are holding out inside Deir ez-Zor, but they can't leave their base.
And they'll be overrun and probably massacred in short order as well.
So no, that's the connection is essentially it draws a straight line between Ramadi and then if you want to, all the way up to Raqqa.
So this is a major supply line for the Islamic State, but it's also one they've had pretty good control over in the past.
The guys that are in the Haditha Dam are able to control it, but they're not going on patrols and disrupting operations around them.
They're dug in for dear life, hoping for resupply.
All right.
So now this is almost ridiculous, I guess, but we've got to talk about it.
It's a very well done piece that you have here about the new sons of Iraq, supposedly, right?
The new Concerned Local Citizens movement from when America did the – cooperated with the Sunni tribes on the awakening.
Am I right here to oversimplify it more or less and say that you have the tribal factions, the Baathists and the Bin Ladenites?
And that basically it's a question of which two can be allied together against the third, like the Sith, that kind of thing?
Well, it's more like this.
I mean first off, it is a comparable analogy between what the Americans very successfully did, particularly in Anbar and Saladin from 2007 and 2008.
But really what this is supposed to symbolize is everyone knows this is not going away unless the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad reconciles with an extremely angry and paranoid Sunni population that has – even if it doesn't embrace the Islamic State, is very unhappy at the government.
So a lot of people will either join the Islamic State hoping to get a better angle for their tribe and then maybe change sides down the road or they're going to sit things out.
This was a move by the Iraqi government to sort of encourage the Sunnis to come into the fold.
I cannot imagine that getting overrun in Ramadi and right now guys that have joined that movement and tribes that are known to be sympathetic are willing to talk to the government.
I have reports at least 50 have been summarily executed today alone in Ramadi.
So that's not exactly going to be a great recruiting poster.
But it is an acknowledgment that the Shia government is never going to get anywhere dealing with the Islamic State until they bring in large numbers of the Sunni tribes back into the fold, start paying them off, giving them jobs, which is how everything here in Iraq works, is money, jobs, patronage, political power, just like anywhere else.
Until they start doing that, these tribes are either going to quietly align with the Islamic State or they're going to just stay out of it and try not to get killed by either side.
So what we have seen is a very weak early effort.
My article was fairly harsh on it, but it is a step in the right direction.
It just has to be done in a serious manner and heavily resourced.
And a lot of these guys think the Americans are going to show up and do it.
And everybody needs to come to grips with the fact that they're not coming.
Well, now, but the thing of it is, though, you know, under the premise that they were back back then when it supposedly worked, they got enough of a victory out of it to go ahead and call it one anyway.
With the cooperation between the Americans and and the tribes back then against Al Qaeda, the premise was that they would be incorporated into the government then.
But at the same time, it was kind of obvious that you're creating a whole new separate army, more or less, not maybe quite as professional as the actual Iraqi army, although we saw how professional it was.
But the idea that, you know, it was a big bet that they would somehow be integrated into, you know, the Shia dominated government and military.
And instead, what they did was they just created a parallel Sunni army and armed it up.
And it's, you know, partly now the Islamic State itself.
So, I mean, for all the mistrust and all the all the history there from the civil war and the rest of it, is that even possible in a million years now that they're going to actually achieve Petraeus's failed benchmarks of 2007 and integrate the sons of Iraq into the army?
I mean, when you say jobs, you mean in the army and even someone in the officer corps.
Right.
Or nothing.
Well, I mean, look, you know, everybody's got to get out of this paradigm of considering this to be 2007 because it's not.
I mean, this is, you know, 2015 and the entire dynamic here has changed from that from that period.
You know, I'm not the world's biggest fan of General Petraeus, but he was successful in that particular area.
And, you know, when the Americans left, there had been an agreement on the table that these guys would get integrated into security forces.
You have to understand in a society like Iraq, which can be very tribal, very sectarian, and people have a tendency not to trust outsiders.
I mean, I guess that's common the world around.
But, you know, having a cop from Nasiriyah in Fallujah is a recipe for disaster.
So understanding that you will always have to incorporate local guys into, you know, the security forces that patrol local areas, it's absolutely critical, if only because they'll fight to protect their own neighborhoods.
They know who the bad guys are and they know how normal life looks.
If you don't do it that way, you end up with things like Mosul, where the Iraqi army ran away because, well, the heck, if I was going to get killed for a government I don't even like in a city I don't even live in.
So, you know, this is what the ultimate failure for this was on Maliki, who, upon the Americans departure with all these promises, looked at these guys and said, wait a minute, you're a bunch of Sunni terrorists.
We're not going to help you.
And then, in fact, started arresting a lot of them, you know, the very guys that had helped take out al-Qaeda to a certain extent in 2007, 2008, 2009.
So if you're a Sunni tribesman, you have absolutely no reason to trust, you know, Nouri al-Maliki.
You're hoping that they will eventually find a way to trust the new government.
But, you know, it's going to be a long, tough slog ahead, particularly because the new government is starting to find itself chafing against a group of Shia militias that are extremely sectarian, hate the Sunnis and answer only really to Iran, not to the prime minister of Iraq.
So once you factor that in, it's – I mean I hate to be pessimistic, but it's very difficult for me to see how they will eventually integrate Sunnis into a proper organizational structure, even if it's with some autonomy.
You know, but they're going to have to if they're ever going to solve this.
There's just no other way around it.
Yeah, it sounds to me like you're saying they're not going to solve it.
Hey, tell me, when they invaded Tikrit and drove the Islamic State out of Tikrit, what was the proportion of Abadi's Iraqi army versus the Shia militias?
Well, it's not like – the Shia militias don't exactly send their data to Jane's Defense, so it can be hard for us to judge sometimes.
But the general impression that we got in that situation was that the militias had pushed up from Diyala province on one side and really ended up closing the net sort of on a lot of farmland.
When you say something like Tikrit, you're talking about a city of maybe about 100,000 people, but then it's surrounded by like miles and miles of farmland with let's say another 50,000 to 100,000 farmers living in villages and those areas like that.
They were able to successfully coordinate off at extremely high casualties.
At a couple of points – we don't have good numbers on this, but one of my colleagues, Love Day Morris, in the Washington Post, did a great story where she went down to the Shia cemetery in Najaf and just counted how many bodies had come in that day to be buried there from Tikrit, and it was something like 100.
So if you extrapolated, they'd lost like 3,000 guys at least dead in the course of a month-long siege.
But at the very end when it turned into house-to-house fighting, this weird little kabuki theater went on where the U.S. said, we're not going to help you if you have these Iranian-backed Shia militias going into a Sunni area.
The government basically agreed with that assessment and sort of froze the militias as a cordon surrounding the city, and at that stage, guys like the Golden Division, the SWAT, a couple of other – like I said, there's about three useful units that are pretty well trained to be fair.
And those guys were the ones that went in and did the last final push into the center of Tikrit.
So it was a group effort, but it's a group effort that geographically will be very hard for them to replicate in other places because the Sunni – the Shia militias had access to that area from Diyala province.
It's not so far afield from where they generate from.
Yeah.
Well, and it sounds like the Iraqi army really needs them.
Well, yeah.
I mean it really needs them.
It's one of these things where it's like chemotherapy for cancer.
I mean at one point, yes, in a weird way it's keeping you alive, but it's also poisoning your body.
So at this stage, I don't think anybody thinks it's a brilliant idea that more guys with guns who are not under the direct control of the central government are running around Iraq.
But having said that, if they didn't have those guys, things would probably look a lot worse right now, particularly for the Shia in the south who have gotten out of this relatively unscathed.
There's been some attacks in Baghdad.
There's been fighting in Samarra and Diyala.
But when you look at Basra, Nasiriyah, Najaf, Karbala, these places haven't even really suffered from car bombs or any of the things that we saw during the American occupation.
So in a sense, the Shia militias are protecting their community, which is what they claim to be doing.
But it's not a great idea to have 50,000 guys running around with heavy weapons who don't exactly recognize the prime minister's authority.
Well, it's kind of funny, too, that it was the chemo that actually helped create the cancer in the first place.
It was in remission for a little while, and now it's back.
But 10 years ago, the El Salvador option of backing the Bata Brigade and using them to help pick Sunni targets was kind of what led to the Civil War and a big part of what led to the Civil War and all those killed back then.
Sure, but they were going to anyway.
And driving the Sunnis into the arms of Zarqawi and his guys.
Right, but they were going to anyway.
I mean, this is one thing, again.
I tend to downplay the influence at this stage, even back then, that the Americans had over guys like this.
The simple fact was when the Bata organization arrived from their exile into Baghdad, they were going to hunt down and kill a lot of guys.
It was just – they'd been at war with these people for 30 years.
Every Bata Brigade member – I'm sorry, Bata organization now, not Bata Brigade.
Every official I've ever met has lost like a dozen of their immediate family members to torture from the Saddam regime or in car bombs that came later during the American occupation.
These are deep-seated rivalries and very tough people.
And so it was stupid to work with them on some level, but they were going to go do it anyway.
It's just the way it is.
That's how this town runs.
And Sistani, in January of 2004, the Supreme Ayatollah said, hey, we want one man, one vote.
Don't we, everybody?
And all of the Shia 60 percent majority of the population said, yep, that's right, we sure do.
And they were the side we were already on at that point.
Well, this is the whole thing, though.
I mean I was there for that.
And as hypocritical as everybody is when it comes to world affairs, allowing some system in when you've ostensibly gone in to find WMD that doesn't exist.
But then you're like we're going to drain the swamp of the Middle East and establish a wonderful democracy.
You cannot roll in and then make sectarian quotas like you have in Lebanon.
You've got to say one man, one vote or else you're not America.
The biggest mistake that had come out of all of that, I mean besides invading Iraq in the first place, was actually on the part of the Sunnis who then refused to participate at all in that election.
And as a result got cut out of the ministries.
And by the time they realized that they had given up any sense of political power, in a sense they still have not recovered from that.
The ministries at that point were stacked with Sadr guys, Badr guys, pro-Iranian guys, Dawa, all of these different Shia groups got to divvy everything up with absolutely no input from a Sunni parliamentarian guys.
So as a result they've almost never rebounded from that.
They've been cut out ever since.
Well, and it just goes to show democracy and liberty ain't the same thing.
Well, you know, it's just – I mean to put it mildly, there's a million conundrums here.
But the one thing – and I've got to go here in a second because I've got to see if I can get anybody on the phone in Ramadi right now to find out what's happening.
But you know, I mean you just have to look at it this way.
This is an intractable problem until the regional actors decide that they're going to do something about it.
That's Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, the Sunnis of Anbar, the Jordanians, even to a certain extent whatever is left over there in Syria at this stage.
I'm not sure there's a functioning anything.
This is a problem everybody is going to have to work out and address.
And you can really look at the Islamic State as just a symptomatic example of what happens when you run a completely screwed political system for 50 or 60 years.
Yeah.
Well, you know, again about how intractable it is though.
I mean the battle of the five armies that you're talking about is just not going to happen.
Saudi and Iran and Turkey all working together to get rid of the Islamic State.
I mean it's amazing, of course.
It's almost unreal that it's gotten this far, that you have this guy Baghdadi calling himself the caliph over all of this territory, the size of Great Britain as Patrick Coburn always emphasizes.
But who's going to undo it?
The Turks aren't going to invade.
They probably could invade.
They have a 300,000 man army, right?
And high tech.
But they're not going to.
Now that's the whole thing is.
But neither is America.
So right now America is in a let's contain it to see what we can do to keep this from getting worse while the regional actors get their act together.
You're right.
I mean I have a hard time seeing any of these basically venal incompetent morons ever getting their act together.
But they're really going to have to if they don't want this place to burn.
Hey, can I ask you one more thing before we go?
Sure.
Can you talk about what's going on?
I know you're basically in eastern Islamic State territory, but I'm interested in what's going on in the West and ISIS and Nusra gains in Syria.
Can you talk about that at all and Idlib province and all that?
A little bit.
But what we're seeing is, you know, essentially I am working on something involving this right now.
The big thing at the end of the day for the Syrian regime is a numbers game.
They're starting to run out of men.
If you look at the real numbers of people killed, everybody talks about the civilians.
But the biggest number of people killed in the Syrian civil war have been pro-regime fighters.
As a result, they do not have a huge population of guys that are still loyal.
And they're starting to suffer a little bit.
So you've seen Nusra and Ahrar get their act together, be very pragmatic and work with a lot of coalitions.
It's clear that Turkey and Saudi are dumping a lot more money a lot more effectively into that.
And as a result, those guys are taking over a lot of stuff.
So you're starting to see the Islamic State trying to remind everybody that they're relevant in Syria as well.
But the one thing I've taken away for the last year is the Islamic State is happy to control Raqqa.
But they're run by Iraqis.
Their primary interest appears to be Iraq.
They're not going to commit huge amounts of men and material to a fight for Aleppo when they can be taking over Ramadi where half of them are from in the first place.
Well, what about Nusra?
They're going to keep going and focusing on Aleppo and then even Damascus?
Of course.
I mean, Nusra is the most effective fighting force among the rebels that are genuinely trying to overthrow the regime.
They work well with even fairly secular groups for the most part.
They might be Qaeda guys, but they're at least for now a sort of new version of Qaeda guy who knows how to work with and play well with others, which is something that we have not seen before.
So it's sort of hard to predict where Nusra might go with it.
I mean, chances are it won't turn out well if a bunch of jihadis take over Damascus.
But I will say they have proven themselves to be much more pragmatic and flexible than Salafist jihadist groups that we've seen in conflicts all over the region in the past.
What do you think is the real danger that Damascus will fall in the next year or something?
I don't know.
It's really hard.
We do not have great optics.
I would just say if it's a war of attrition, eventually the rebels are going to win.
There's just they've got more men.
And Iran is backing the Syrian regime.
They kept them afloat this long, more or less.
They would have fallen long ago if it wasn't for Iran and Hezbollah.
But Iran has real problems right now in Iraq as well.
And that's closer to their border.
And everybody's got an oil crunch.
Prices are not high right now.
The Iranian government is not flush with cash like it would have been a few years ago.
The Saudi government can kind of afford to ride this out.
But they're dumping money into their news for guys.
Syria, I wouldn't say imminent fall of Damascus like some pundits are starting to come out with, which I think is either they don't know or it's nonsense.
But definitely if this is a war of attrition, bet on the $20 million, not on the $4 million.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks again for your time, Mitch.
Appreciate it.
No problem.
Thanks a lot.
It's always a pleasure.
Bye-bye.
All right.
So that's Mitch Prothero writing for McClatchy Newspapers at McClatchyDC.com.
We'll be right back.
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