07/24/15 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our first guest today is the great Patrick Coburn, author of The Rise of Islamic State.
And of course, he's Middle East correspondent at independent.co.uk, the independent there.
And also, you can find his archives at unz.com, unz.com.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you?
Pretty good.
Thank you.
I'm doing good.
Very good to have you back on the show.
Some very important stuff to talk about.
I guess, if we could, can we start with Fallujah?
If I understand it right, there is a major Shiite militia assault against that city underway right now.
Yeah, I was in Karbala, which is one of the Shia holy cities, which is about 50 or 60 miles south from Fallujah.
And this is a very important battle, because the Baghdad government began to go downhill and the Islamic State began to really come together in January last year, when they took over captured Fallujah, which is 40 miles west of Baghdad, and the Iraqi army couldn't get them out.
That was really a crucial moment.
And it's a very important position, because it's within striking distance of Baghdad.
It's another drive away.
So if the Iraqi government and the Shia militias, they don't like to be called militias, but paramilitaries, can't retake Fallujah, then the Islamic State is in a pretty strong position.
So they're massing around Fallujah, they've surrounded it, but a lot of people have left.
The Islamic State is stopping a lot of civilians leaving.
So it's gearing up for a big battle.
But like a lot of things in Iraq, it's a bit of a sort of stop-go, because the anti-Islamic State side is divided between government officers and Shia paramilitaries and the Americans and others.
All right.
So a lot to go over, even just right there.
First of all, how big is Fallujah compared to, say, for example, to Crete?
It's a bigger city.
It used to have, I think, about 300,000, 400,000 people in it.
I think a lot of them have gone, because it's been bombarded by the government for a long time.
Some say there are 50,000 people in there.
I sort of doubt if anybody really knows, because people, if they're being bombarded, stay in their houses.
So just how many are in the city is uncertain.
But it's certainly in the tens of thousands.
And then the Islamic State, at least so far, they're attempting to put up a much greater fight for Fallujah than they did in Tikrit?
It's much more important to them strategically.
People had heard of Tikrit as it was Saddam Hussein's hometown, but it wasn't very well positioned for them to fight.
It was some distance from where their main areas are.
And they seem to have decided that they'd cause as many casualties as possible to the other side by snipers, by mortar teams, by IEDs, improvised explosive devices, that is, and booby traps, but to not put a lot of soldiers in there and fight to the last round.
But here in Fallujah, they're sticking, huh?
Seems to be.
It's also, you know, for them, it's kind of a symbolic place, because you remember in 2004, this is where there were two battles between the al-Qaeda in Iraq of the day and the U.S. Marines.
In the second one, a big fight, a lot of people killed, I think 100 Marines were killed inside the city.
Nobody quite knows.
A lot of al-Qaeda were killed, too.
A lot of artillery used, so a lot of buildings were blown up.
So this is a kind of famous battle in the annals of al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda-type organizations or the Sunni as a whole.
So I don't think that they'll just give it up.
And as I said, there are good strategic reasons.
It's close to Baghdad.
It's close to the rest of the territory in Anbar province that they hold.
Well, and as you said, too, they took it even six months before they took Mosul and declared the caliphate.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, so.
Sure.
Now, OK, so but now on the Shiite side, as you said, it's very divided.
You have the Shiite militias.
You have what's left of the Iraqi army, which is, I guess, just their special forces divisions, mostly as I understand it, anyway.
You could clarify that.
Then you have the whatever small amount of Quds Force officers from Iran coming to help.
And then the Americans in the sky.
Is that the battle, the order of battle on the.
It's sort of.
I mean, the the Shia paramilitaries, I mean, these are they have at least 60,000 men.
They're not all at Fallujah, but they have a lot of you know, there are a lot of fighters there.
They're pretty committed.
They were called up by the Grand Ayatollah Sistani, Ali Sistani last year after the fall of Mosul.
So these are people who are enthusiasts, if not fanatics, and are prepared to fight very hard.
The Iraqi army, as we know, most of it not prepared to fight very hard.
But it does have one unit called the Golden Division.
It has some interior ministry, police, maybe 10 or 12,000 men in all who will fight.
And then the question is, you know, previously, the Americans have been saying we won't fight and send use airstrikes in support of the Shia militias.
But the Shia militias kind of answer to the government these days.
So, you know, it's a big question.
Can they get their act together and can they take Fallujah?
Because what you need with the Islamic State is one wins some real victories over it.
One of the reasons that the Islamic State has expanded so fast is that it's so far, it's sort of been a winner in the crucial battles.
And when people say, oh, no, it's it's past its peak in May, suddenly it took Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province.
And for on 17th of May, on four days later, it took Palmyra in Syria.
And that shows an organization that can fight on several fronts and win victories on several fronts.
All right.
Now, so, geez, I don't know.
Can you give odds of success or how long you think it might take?
Or I guess it really just depends on Islamic State strategy, whether they decide to turn and and run and fight another day or whether they try to really stick it out.
You know, there are too many variables.
Islamic State, you know, it's one of the chilling thing about these guys is, you know, this is a monstrous organization, you know, regardless of Islamic Cameroon, you know.
But in addition to fanaticism, they have a quite high level of military expertise.
They don't just fight at every place.
Sometimes you think they'll fight.
They go to fight somewhere else.
But also, you know, with new American aircraft overhead, they don't really like fixed position fighting.
They like to pull out and then launch a surprise counterattack, quasi guerrilla tactics.
That's what they've been doing.
But I suspect at Fallujah they'll fight.
But you never can be quite certain and you can't be sure of the pace of events.
Yeah.
Well, now, so but you're pretty convinced that I guess because the Ayatollah Sistani called them out, you think the Shia will fight hard, even though they are not fighting for their home territory here?
They're, you know, out west of Baghdad and Sunnistan.
I was talking to some of the wounded who'd been fighting.
I was talking to one guy, particularly interesting.
He'd been a colonel in the regular Iraqi army.
So he'd lost a leg from a mortar bomb at the beginning of July.
This was fighting in a place called Beji, which is north of Fallujah.
And he was kind of interesting because he has a sort of professional military man's perspective on the militia.
He said, yeah, I mean, very committed, but they're under-trained.
If they should have six months training, they only get three months training.
They don't have things like, for instance, they said they're always talking on the field radios, very little security.
So the other side, in this case, the ISIS fighters can listen in on this.
They hack into this and they know when the militia is going to attack.
So but they're committed and they've been fighting, you know, for almost a year now.
So quite a lot of them are experienced.
Troops and that quite a lot of them.
OK, and now so in your article you write about, well, the article, pardon me, it's called only Iraq's clerics can win against ISIS.
And you talk a lot here about Sistani and about how the Shiite leaders, it's really on them to insist that the Shiite fighters that they have called to expel the Islamic state from the Sunni territories, that they restrain all their sectarian impulses.
No power drills.
Right.
Everybody.
Well, that's it.
I mean, you put it well.
I mean, one of the problem on American or British or whatever policy is they kind of pretend the Iraqi army is the main force of the Baghdad government and say, we'll give it training.
We'll give it air support.
So unfortunately, that just isn't true.
You know, they were defeated at Mosul.
They were defeated again in Ramadi.
The main battle force of the Iraqi government are the Shia paramilitaries.
And these, you know, they're influenced by the Iranians, some Iranian officers.
But that probably depends on the unit.
It's sort of it's not a hundred percent.
It's not even.
And some in some of the Iranians aren't there.
One senior cleric in Najaf said to me, you know, he said, look, there are more American officers here than there are Iranians.
And that's probably true.
So we've got these militia forces who are going to whatever happens are going to do most of the fighting if ISIS is going to be defeated.
In theory, they come under the Iraqi government.
They're kind of autonomous.
So the thing to do is, I mean, there's no one has to accept that.
And but then make sure that this isn't a purely sectarian force.
And the only people who can really stop that are the clergy.
I mean, the same people like Sistani and the clergy who call these call these military units into being and probably at the end of the day can control them.
Otherwise, you know, it's just all nice words.
It's interesting because, you know, I guess my understanding is that the the Iranian policy and really the the especially the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa policy has really been just kind of forget the Sunnis, to put it politely, that as long as they have the capital city and Shia stand down to Kuwait and an alliance with the Kurds, then, you know, forget you guys.
And that was kind of always their goal.
Like the the Iranians, I don't think ever wanted to have their guys attempt to rule all of Iraq because how could they?
It's just, you know, to be able to rule Fallujah, Ramadi and Mosul from Shia stand in the way that Sunni stand used to rule them.
It just seemed like too too much, too big of a bite to chew kind of thing.
So they just decided not to.
Now they're being put in the position.
They just kind of exiled them, I guess, in a way.
Now they're being put in a position because of the Islamic State where now they're going to have to go and and reintegrate Sunni stand or they've decided apparently that they're going to have to do this.
But that's a real tall order after the history of the last war and what's happened here with the civil war and the expelling of all the Sunnis from Baghdad, et cetera.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, the thing about Iraq now and before, you know, they're never sort of there's never a good solution and a bad solution, a good solution.
A lot of people stay alive in a bad way.
A lot of people get killed.
Pretty well, whatever happens is going to be resisted.
You know, people have talked about splitting up Iraq into Sunni, Shia and Kurd.
But, you know, one Iraqi politician used to say to me, said, sure, you can do that, he said, but it's not going to be a sort of nice little partition, you know, like Czechoslovakia separating into two countries.
It's going to be more like the partition of India, you know, with tens of thousands of people murdered, you know, people driven from their homes.
Because Iraq, you know, it doesn't divide up like that.
You know, there are over a million Sunni in Baghdad.
It's maybe two million.
It's a majority Shia city.
What happens to them?
So all that's pretty difficult to do.
Secondly, you've got the Islamic State, you know, in those big areas in northern and western Iraq, the caliphate so-called, and they're sending suicide bombs into Shia areas.
So even if you don't go into their areas, they're coming into yours and they're killing a lot of people.
I mean, they killed over a hundred people during a celebration at the end of Ramadan a few weeks or so ago.
And so, you know, Islamic State, this whole idea, not just the Shia, but you occasionally will say to me, why don't they just leave them alone?
And they'll sort of fester and eventually they'll collapse and so forth.
Well, first of all, they show no signs of it.
You can't really leave them alone, but they won't leave you alone.
Yeah.
Well, now, but so.
I mean, is it even possible, really?
I mean, even if Sistani insist the fact of just who they are, the Shiite militias coming to eventually, you know, Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul, isn't that enough to push every single Sunni fighting age male right into their army to fight back, to resist?
Because even if they're not bringing their power drills, they're going to be assumed to be bringing their power drills.
Right.
The Bata Brigade and friends.
Yeah, but I mean, what can you do?
I mean, this is what Islamic State will say to the people there.
You know, it'll want to frighten them.
And there's reason to be frightened.
You know, but you can't just accommodate, say, because the Islamic State has managed to terrify all the Sunni in its area to then say, we've got to keep out of there.
The you know, it's I just wonder if maybe it'd be counterproductive to the point where they're going to have to turn around and, you know, figure out something else.
And so.
I don't think there is much else to do.
You know, I think, you know, I think the Islamic State are a real sort of collection of monsters.
You can see that from the way they enslave people.
They rape women, massacre people on a mass scale.
But I mean, I never wonder comparing me with the Nazis was it's an overused parallel.
But there are plenty of things in common there.
So I think that.
If they do fight them, then.
They should use disciplined troops, I mean, not all troops do this.
Not all soldiers do this, particularly their commanding officers who order them not to and make sure they don't.
And.
You know, the sheer paramilitaries they have in some places killed people, but it's sort of the nature of Iraq and Syria at the moment that every community is terrified of the others.
Secondly, that.
Although there have been killings on all sides, really nobody carries out massacres on the scale of the genocidal scale that Islamic State does.
Sometimes you hear people, particularly in the US, saying, oh, these sheer militias and Islamic State, they're all as bad as each other.
That really ain't so.
The Islamic State is pretty well worse than anybody else.
And, you know, they try and sometimes there's an attempted rebranding of Al-Nusra in Syria, which is the Al-Qaeda affiliate.
But basically, these are very bad guys.
And I think that, you know, you need a realistic approach that in Iraq, the people are going to fight them are going to be the sheer paramilitaries.
And the thing to do is to make sure that they're properly disciplined and not go around pretending that the Iraqi army is really up and doing.
And all this sort of retraining of the Sunni tribes or something like that is going to work.
These are kind of wishful thinking to my mind.
Well, now, and speaking of the rebranding of Al-Nusra, you know, there's constant argument.
I won't characterize it.
I'll try not to.
There's a constant argument that in effect that, no, you're just wrong that that Nusra, they really don't care about attack in the West.
They never would.
And maybe they just say nice things about Al-Qaeda for the Gulf money that they need.
But they're really nice guys.
And or at least they're not that bad, not as bad as ISIS after all.
And and besides that, there's a giant army of moderates over there in Syria that it's just too bad that America will not do enough to support the moderates because we could have had basically an awakening movement from the beginning here where there never was any oxygen or any room for Nusra and the Islamic state to to rise up and be so powerful in Syria.
If only Obama had committed to training up and committing those moderates to overthrowing Assad and creating a democracy there and this and that.
So what do you say to that?
Well, it's kind of wishful thinking and fantasy, you know, they never really existed.
You know, once the Syrian revolution started uprising and it was a genuine uprising originally started being militarized, the guys who were running it, you know, from late 2011, Islamic State, al-Baghdadi was sending their veterans over to organize people.
These were the people who knew how to fight.
These are the people who had resources and weapons.
You know, there never really was much of a moderate, effective, moderate military opposition.
That's why Islamic State and the others took over.
And a lot of it, you know, moderate, but also kind of criminal gangs, you know, when Islamic State took over Raqqa, their capital, didn't actually capture it themselves.
Others captured it.
But quite a lot of locals were saying, you know, that's great because the previous lot, you know, were really a bunch of bandits, you know, at least with this lot, you know, if they don't get across them, they might cut your head off.
But otherwise, you know, they keep order.
And you find that all over, you know, in sort of Ramadi after the Iraqi army was driven out.
Somebody was telling me, I knew, seen as a brother there, the brother was staying and didn't much like Islamic State, but said, look, these guys, they came in and they got the local hospital going again.
The government didn't do that.
They brought in some heavy duty generators to get the electricity going.
So these are kind of quite effective guys from the beginning.
When it comes to the moderates, you know, it's Robert Ford, the former U.S. ambassador to Damascus, who resigned from the Obama administration because they weren't doing enough for these so-called moderates.
Earlier this year, he said, you know, the game's over.
The Syrian opposition is dominated by Islamic State or Nusra and they're all the same.
These are, you know, extreme fanatical jihadis and there's nothing much to be done about it.
You know, I was reading Charles Lister, a terrorism expert from the Brookings Institution, and he wrote that there's a joint U.S.-Saudi room, he called it, in Turkey where they helped to run the so-called moderate opposition.
And and the new I guess the Saudis, you know, take the lead in operating the army of conquest, which is the new merger between the moderates and al-Nusra, the the completion of that rebranding or the rebranding in practice, even if we're not buying it.
And and so is is that really right?
Does that coincide with your information?
American-Saudi run in al-Nusra?
You know, it's kind of a messy situation, but that's one of the weaknesses of the U.S. position, which is, yeah, it wants to fight Islamic State, but then its big allies in the region are the big Sunni powers like Qatar and like Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Turkey.
And they will sort of against Islamic State.
But when it comes to these other al-Qaeda groups, you know, they sort of rebrand them as being moderate.
You know, it just ain't so.
But I think, you know, the the the U.S. has always been ambivalent as to what to do about this.
Yeah, I think that, you know, that they want to keep in with the Turks.
And it's so it's always sort of what the intelligence services do seem sort of kind of have their own policy there.
I think that Jabhat al-Nusra, these others, you know, it's kind of a bit comical, the attempt to rebrand them.
I mean, the head of Mohammed al-Jilani, the head of Jabhat al-Nusra was on Al Jazeera, which is Qatari owned.
And so a very this very sort of kindly interview that they gave him.
And he was saying, yeah, Alawites from the government, they could come over and defect to us.
But he went on.
He said, of course, they have to convert to our brand of Islam.
And so his organization, you know, went into Druze villages, demanded they convert to this very extreme brand of Islam.
And, you know, and just when somebody resisted them, they massacred them.
You know, so there is an attempt to rebrand both in the U.S. and in the Middle East, some of these sort of Al-Qaeda affiliates.
But that's what they are.
They're very they were started, you know, by Islamic State.
They're not that much different.
Yeah, I mean, it's just basically the Syrian veterans of Al-Qaeda in Iraq from the last war compared to the more Iraqi based leadership of the Islamic State, really, right?
Yeah, and so I think that, you know, at various points, the, you know, the administration sort of admits this, you know, like Vice President Biden at one point, he had to withdraw it later, said, look, the problem is in the area is our allies.
You know, as the Saudis and the others, they poured in weapons, they poured in money to these extreme jihadis, you know, and the rest of the Syrian rebels, you know, he said, well, you know, shopkeepers and students, they didn't know how to shoot.
So from the very beginning, it was a jihadi takeover.
And even according to The New York Times and The Washington Post all along, the CIA and the Americans have been in on this and helping to coordinate the shipment of some of the guns and a lot of the money.
And, of course, guns and money are fungible.
And so they go to the guys who are most willing to fight, which means from the moderates straight into the hands of the al-Qaeda guys who don't mind dying, you know, whether.
Yeah, I mean, and also, you know, there isn't a great, they're genuine rivals, Al-Nusra and Islamic State, but there isn't also a great Chinese war between them.
I mean, the guys in Najaf and Karbala I was talking to last week, you know, they keep saying, well, weapons turn up, but in theory with the forces we are fighting and these have been given to so-called moderates in Syria, I mean, high quality U.S. weapons.
I think there's maybe some exaggeration in this, but there's also some truth in it.
Well, and there have been, not to be too conspiratorial, but there have been enough accidental drops of supplies to ISIS where you've got to start wondering, I mean, I know close enough for government work and all that, but boy, have there been a lot of those.
Well, no, I don't really believe that one, Scott.
You know, the people go on about, you know, there was once when they were defending, dropping stuff to the Kurds in Kobani and one bundle ended up with ISIS and there was a video of that and people said, oh, that shows they're helping ISIS.
Well, actually not, you know, they had 700 airstrikes against ISIS in support of the Syrian Kurds there.
I don't think they were doing that.
You know, I think their failure is not so much there is that it's a political failure that they haven't been able to properly line up the people who are combating ISIS because in the past they were worried about, you know, the Iranian participation and so forth.
It's all a bit exaggerated, to be honest.
You know, particularly to make a different point, you know, Iran is treated as if it was the Soviet Union reborn.
You know, this isn't a very big country.
It's so influential partly because it's treated as the great demon by Washington and by Saudi Arabian and the others.
You know, it's not going to take over the Middle East, whatever happens.
Yeah.
And really the most powerful thing about them is that America got rid of Saddam for them and stayed long enough to help them put their allies in charge of the entire city of Baghdad, not just the political leadership, but the population, too.
So, I mean, yeah, I mean, they're pretty hard to accuse them after that, which is the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.
You got rid of both of them.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so so one last thing before I let you go here, Patrick, just the other day, and I think it had been since 2012, but just the other day, Obama said again that Assad must go for there to be a resolution to the conflict in Syria.
And I wonder what you think of that, because it seemed like after the declaration of the caliphate, come on, I mean, what are you going to do?
You're going to still push for de-Baathification and the abolition of the Syrian army in the face of the the hedgehoppers even after the guy declares himself the caliph and everything.
And apparently, yeah, that's still the policy.
You know, this contradictory policy is it's if they say, you know, the first thing negotiations, you know, Assad must go.
It's not going to happen.
Secondly, if it does happen, the Syrian army will probably fall apart.
I think that actually, if there was a negotiated settlement, one thing that would happen after it would be that Assad would go, you know, because there'd be a new situation.
You know, in a way, Assad benefits from Islamic, being the alternative to Islamic State and Al-Nusra, because whatever these guys say, you know, that we won't kill everybody in Damascus, a large chunk of the population, people work for the government, not just Christians and Druze and Alawites, but Sunni as well, think they're going to lose their heads if these guys come in and they've got nowhere to turn to but Assad.
But if there's peace for a time and people begin to see other options, then probably Assad would go.
So in a curious way, these people who are sort of saying don't do anything that might help Assad are keeping him in power.
I mean people in Washington.
In other words, he could go at the end of the negotiation instead of that being the condition for the beginning of negotiation.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, thanks so much for coming back on the show, Patrick.
Thank you.
Good to talk to you.
All right.
That's Patrick Coburn, y'all, from The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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