08/24/12 – David Enders – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is scotthorton.org.
Keep all my interview archives there.
Later on in the show, Eric Margulies will be here to talk about the death of Melissa Zanawi in Ethiopia, and what that's going to mean for the interests of the American Empire there.
But first, we go to David Enders on the phone from Turkey, lately writing from Syria.
Welcome back to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Good.
I'm great.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Let's see, last time we talked, it was about the rape camps, or at least refugee camps where the women are being constantly raped in Libya.
Now here, you've been covering the Syria war for McClatchy.
I hope they're paying you good.
I heard that your colleague, Austin Tice, is missing.
Has anybody heard from him?
We're hoping that he'll be able to get out.
We don't have very much clear information at the moment.
But we are optimistic that he's going to be able to get out, that he is okay.
That's good.
Yeah, I read a few of his dispatches from there.
Pretty dangerous war zone to be in.
Extremely dangerous.
Is it pretty clear who took him at all, or it could be anybody?
We're not.
So far, a number of unconfirmed rumors.
And I mean, that's been my primary assignment for the last week, is trying to sort these out.
And I can just, the most I can really say is that we have reason to believe he's at least safe for the moment, and hopefully he'll be able to get out of the country very soon.
Okay.
Yeah, and reading some of his dispatches, he's definitely a brave guy.
Some of the things that he was doing in order to hook up with the rebels and report from their end of the fight, pretty dangerous work.
Yes.
No, he was giving an incredible window into especially what's been happening in and around Damascus and how hard it is to move, not just for a journalist, but for the rebels themselves and he's doing incredibly, incredibly dangerous work.
And what we're seeing now, I mean, today in Damascus, or the last few days in Damascus, is that the army is once again on the offensive and it's pounding a lot of the neighborhoods that rebels sort of took over about a month ago after the bombing that killed some of Assad's inner circle.
Damascus neighborhoods?
Yes.
Damascus neighborhoods.
Yes.
Neighborhoods and suburbs.
Right.
Yeah.
I just wanted to clarify that.
Yep.
But I won't try and interrupt.
Go ahead.
No, not at all.
And so the dynamic at the moment is very much one of back and forth.
The army will hit an area hard, raid, arrest, execute people, then they pull out, the rebels come back in, continue to launch guerrilla attacks, hit and run attacks, and this dynamic has sort of been repeating itself over and over again.
And then at the moment, we also have some very serious humanitarian situations in homes, especially around the southern city of Daraa in some areas.
Homes are virtually cut off.
There are reports people are having trouble getting food, basic medical supplies in a lot of places have been a problem for a long time, and so, I mean, the situation is just getting worse.
I mean, the last couple days, the death toll has been just on, for the rebels and civilians, it's very hard to get a sense of what the death toll of the government forces is on a day-to-day or a weekly or any sort of real basis.
The government stopped reporting military casualty numbers at the end of June.
It stopped releasing those.
But for rebels and civilians, the death toll has been around 200 the last two days, 100 a day in Damascus.
And that's according to who?
That's according to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, which is a network of anti-government activists and rebels inside the country, although they, from what I've seen, do a pretty good job vetting names, trying to cross-reference when possible.
I mean, I've been on the ground with some of the people who feed them information and kind of gotten a sense of how accurate they are, and I believe those numbers to be pretty accurate.
Well, yeah, I mean, I guess they did say fighters and civilians.
For a long time there, I don't know if it's this particular group you're citing or not, but it seemed like any time there was a battle, all rebels killed were reported to be innocent civilians, which, you know, in a way, hey, they're civilians who pick up rifles, so they're still civilians.
But then again, if it was the American government killing them, they'd be militants, and fair game.
You're exactly right.
And that's been largely missed, especially at the beginning of this, I think by a lot of the media, and the rebels themselves went to great lengths to try and downplay the amount of fighting they were actually doing.
And though, of course, militarily it was extremely asymmetric, extremely mismatched, they were fighting.
And when you're picking up arms against the Syrian government, or even sometimes when you're not, you can expect to be killed.
So it did, I think, misrepresent, certainly, what was happening for some time.
I think that is a very important point.
But now we are getting, I think, a clearer picture of what's happening.
All right, now, well, geez, I really want to ask you all about your Kurdistan piece, but you got all these other pieces about the refugees.
But even before we get to the refugees, I want to ask you about, you know, what you think about the balance of power as it stands now between, or balance power is maybe the wrong choice of words, but the relative strengths of the rebellion versus the army.
Because it seemed like back in, what, in late March, wasn't it?
There was the big offensive against Homs, where the military seemed to pretty much win the day.
And now there's been a lot of fighting, as you said, in Damascus and in Aleppo.
But it doesn't seem like, you know, these cities are changing sides, you know, en masse like that, you know.
How many rebels are there doing the fighting?
How much support do they have among the population, especially these major cities where it really counts?
Well, I think they have less support inside Aleppo than they do outside of Aleppo.
And traditionally, there's been tension between the countryside of Aleppo and the city itself, which comparatively is very prosperous.
What we have is a guerrilla conflict.
The rebels are not a force designed necessarily to hold territory.
And they say this, and they will say that we are fighting a guerrilla war, which we expect to go on for years.
And we know it's a war of attrition, and we know our strategy is to wear the government down.
And so this tactic of taking space and then withdrawing in the face of these overwhelming attacks is not surprising.
But I think what...when you ask about support or how many rebels are doing the fighting, in some places, there's a lot of support.
And in many places, what you hear and what you see is you have more fighters than you do weapons.
And people are overwhelmingly supportive of this movement, and because their sons are brothers, their fathers are a part of it, because in some places, they've been fighting the government militarily or politically for a long time.
And I think it's interesting maybe to take into account the American army fighting in Iraq and how we saw that in street combat or in ground combat, they were terribly ineffective against the guerrilla force.
They could use massive firepower to, for instance, level a city like Fallujah, but actually, on the ground, they were not particularly effective.
And I think we can think of the Syrian military in very much the same way.
One, it's a military that was designed for a conventional war and not to fight a guerrilla war in its own cities.
And also, they're using extremely old equipment.
I mean, you don't need a particularly sophisticated anti-tank rocket to destroy a T-72 or a T-62 tank, which are old Russian tanks, and then they've got a lot of old Russian armored personnel carriers, and the rebels have become quite adept at planting roadside bombs, you know, which they're making with fertilizer, in order to pin down the army or force the army to have a lot of trouble using main roads and moving around.
So the dynamic that's developed is one where the army has laid siege to both sides.
They're fighting a war of attrition.
The army lays siege to these areas the rebels take.
It lays siege to these cities the rebels take, the places where they do have the support.
It exacts an extremely heavy toll on the civilian population, and now you have the introduction of air power, in addition to, in some cases, what is shelling that compares with the kind of destruction we saw in Fallujah in Lebanon at the hands of the Israeli army in 2006.
I didn't personally work in Chechnya, but a lot of people have compared it to the Russian shelling of Grozny, and just, in some cases, massive destruction by artillery.
All right, now, what about foreign support for the Syrian rebellion?
We hear lots about Qatari and Saudi and CIA support funding organization, a base in Turkey where the Free Syrian Army is protected and supposedly, you know, built up, and then you're telling me all their weapons are really old and almost useless.
Well, I was talking about Syrian military weapons.
Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were talking about the rebellion had gotten a hold of some of this stuff.
So the rebellion, are they better armed than the Syrian army at this point?
No, no, no, no, no, no, not at all.
In some cases the rebels have managed to capture Syrian armor and used it, and usually what happens then is the Syrians quickly destroy captured tanks or armored personnel carriers with air power, is what happens.
I was mostly joking there.
No, the rebels are mostly fighting still with RPGs and light weapons.
They've acquired mortars.
A lot of the weaponry is coming from Iraq, it's literally coming from old Saddam Hussein era stockpiles.
There is some newer equipment coming in off black markets in Turkey, in Lebanon, in Jordan.
There is a lot of money coming from the Gulf.
By the way, sorry to interrupt, but I want to really get a good confirmation there.
Are you reporting that there's arms coming in from Saddam Hussein's old stashes in Iraq from the formerly Sunni-based insurgency, aka the enemy from our last war there?
Most certainly.
Great, okay.
I just want to be able to quote you on that for sure later on.
No surprise, obviously, but there you go.
Those weapons are very easily identified as manufactured in Iraq, and so you do have foreign support.
I don't think you have direct CIA advisors on the ground or anything like what we had in Libya, where there was foreign intelligence inside the country directing, fighting.
We've seen no evidence of that.
We've seen no evidence that they're getting, as of yet, getting more sophisticated anti-tank.
We have seen some old anti-tank weapons, nothing particularly new or sophisticated like NATO countries were handing out to the Libyan rebels.
Certainly there have been efforts, and there are ongoing efforts, to get this stuff into Syria and into the rebels, but it's being met with some trepidation by the Turkish military and secret services, who definitely want to be in control of which groups are getting this and want to know what's going in and where it's going.
We're seeing the groundwork being laid for that.
I think it's certainly fair to say that, although we haven't seen evidence it's happening yet.
All right, well, now I want to switch to some of your reporting about the refugees.
You've got Palestinian and Iraqi refugees in Syria who've been stuck there because of the conflicts in their homelands.
Now you've got a bunch of Syrian refugees fleeing Syria.
I don't know if they're going to Iraq and to Palestine or what, but what's going to happen to all these helpless people?
Most of the Syrians who have been forced to flee their homes are internally displaced.
The numbers are probably well over a million at this point.
The majority that have left the country have gone to Turkey.
After that, Jordan has received the most, then Lebanon, and then Iraq has received a much smaller number, although a significant one.
Also mostly Kurds fleeing into Iraqi Kurdistan, which has made it extremely, is extremely hospitable thus far to Syrian Kurds coming to Iraqi Kurdistan.
And as of yet, I would say the most that there was here in Antakya, a small demonstration yesterday, I didn't see it, my colleagues told me about it, of apparently Turks complaining about the influx of Syrian refugees.
But it doesn't seem to be having any serious effect on the area as such.
In Jordan, refugee flows are often good, especially at the beginning of conflicts, because it's the well-off refugees who flee first, and they give Jordan's economy a boost.
That happened for a long time with Iraqis.
Lebanon is certainly the place where the situation is the most dire with regards to refugee flow.
The country already suffers from a housing shortage, especially in northern Lebanon, where many of the refugees are going, and there are quite simply just lots of tensions between Lebanon's sect and Syria's occupied Lebanon for 30 years.
And so there are many, many Lebanese who bear deep grudges against the Syrian government, some of whom have gone to fight across the border.
And so it's very much exacerbating tensions in Lebanon and the fighting that's been taking place in Tripoli, Lebanon's second-largest city in northern Lebanon, between Alawites and Sunnis.
And that's something that's been sort of a long-standing clan feud even before this happened.
What we're seeing, I think, has become much worse, especially as Lebanon is a conduit for weapons and money into Syria.
And so the actors in this long-standing feud are having this political dimension added to it, and also a lot more weaponry.
One of the consequences, which I would have thought they could have anticipated, I think a lot of people are surprised.
It's not just me.
I keep reading other people saying that they're surprised that the government of Turkey would be so reckless to participate in this rebellion in Syria, the civil war, whatever the hell it is, going on in this conflict in Syria right now, as much as they have.
And they certainly should have been able to predict that Assad could do something like grant autonomy to Syrian Kurdistan, such as it is, which I know very little about.
But what a great, not even chess move, just checkers move to double-jump Erdogan and pick a good fight right back.
I don't know why you didn't anticipate it, but now it looks like more and more dominoes are falling like this.
I think you said that so far the Kurdish refugees have been welcomed into northern Iraq.
How long before these borders are simply redrawn and a real Kurdistan begins to exist there?
Well, I'm not going to make that prediction.
I think you have a situation where obviously the Syrian Kurds look at the autonomy the Iraqi Kurds enjoy and imagine something like that coming perhaps sooner rather than later.
And what the Iraqi Kurds have learned is that even should Kurdistan come into existence, it's a landlocked country with potentially extremely hostile neighbors.
And I think what the Iraqi Kurds have really done amazingly well and very smartly is to engage Turkey, which is allowing them to export their oil independent of Baghdad and has given them this autonomy.
And Erbil, which is the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, is booming.
It's in much better economic shape than the rest of the country and Baghdad itself.
So the dynamic that you have right now in Syrian Kurdistan is that Assad has put weapons into the hands of essentially the PKK, the Kurdish Workers' Party, which has a long-standing fight with the Turkish government.
And so the official name of the party is PYD, which is essentially the Syrian wing of the PKK.
But I mean, I saw actual Turkish PKK fighters all over the place, really, in Syrian Kurdistan.
And when we're talking about Syrian Kurdistan, we're talking specifically about Hasakah Province, which is the northeastern corner of Syria.
And at the moment, I mean, it essentially enjoys this weird kind of stasis.
There are still Arabs there as well.
There's still a number of regime supporters.
There are a number of people who code as revolutionaries.
But at the moment, things are more or less being run by PYD, which is this PKK offshoot, which is sort of...which also subscribes to, very similar to the Syrian Baath Party, one-party rule, essentially.
So there are many people, Kurds who side with the revolution, who are very concerned, saying, you know, we didn't...we're fighting for not another party to come in and control us in this way.
There's a lot of tension between the Kurds, and Iraqi Kurdish leaders have sought to mediate and to sort of tamp down the potential effect of having the PKK in some sort of control of a province in Syria, essentially.
And there are regime elements still there.
There are Syrian government elements still there, carrying out operations.
But they're basically doing it in such a way that they're trying not to turn the entire Kurdish population against the Syrian government, and add another front to this war for the Syrian government.
And so, the general drift is certainly Kurdish independence.
And I think we'll probably see the Syrian Kurds be canny enough not to encourage Turkey to attack.
And that point about, couldn't the Turks have seen this coming?
A lot of people think Turkey is pretty ham-handed with their foreign policy, and not always the brightest.
And that they essentially talked themselves into a corner by supporting the rebellion.
Were they all educated in America or something?
I don't...
I mean, Turkey is not a place that I've covered before, so I don't want to talk about Turkish foreign policy too much.
But this was a discussion I was actually having with a correspondent who is based in Istanbul yesterday.
And he just said, yeah, a lot of people think they're just not that clever.
And a little bit arrogant, yes, perhaps very American.
And so, yeah, that's what I thought, too.
That was my initial reaction was, well, duh, especially after he threatened to do it, threatened to do this quite some time ago.
I had missed the initial threat, I guess.
But no, no, this was in the works months ago.
I mean, because the PKK was in Syria until 1996.
And Hafez Assad, Assad's father, kicked them out, and they basically went to Iraq.
So I don't know why it wasn't, you know, also potentially in the greater scheme of things, Turkey is much more interested in having a tight ally in power in Syria.
And that's the thing, this really could be not that smart of a move.
It could ultimately just be Assad shooting himself in the foot by graining this autonomy, right?
I think it's much more a move of desperation than of cunning.
That was my impression, was there's no getting this one back.
So, yeah, I mean, it could just be losers all around if, you know, the Turks end up losing influence over their Kurdish population.
If there's a war by any of these states to try, you know, another new war by any of these states to try to retain their Kurdish populations, I mean, this could be bad news for a long, long time.
Most certainly.
All right.
Now, I want to ask you one more thing real quick, and I'm sorry, we only got like a minute and a half or something, but on American involvement, do you have much of a picture from there as to, you know, how interested they are in really seeking regime change or, you know, like there's this quote from the New York Times here where they're quoting the administration people naming all the reasons that you or I could come up with why they ought to probably not pursue a policy of supporting al-Qaeda fighters and regime changing Bashar al-Assad and that, you know, not least of which is provoking Iran and Russia to intervening even more on the other side and all of these kinds of things.
Hillary Clinton has been kind of warning against intervention even as she's been overseeing it for months now, and I wonder whether that's a little bit of honesty creeping through there that they really don't want to do this, but they don't want to not do it either, so they're just kind of walking a tightrope and they don't know what the hell to do.
Like maybe they're the Turks, you know, in this situation.
I think that's probably a pretty accurate assessment is that really they don't know what to do.
It's really hard to take it back though once you start, you know?
Right.
Well, that's the slippery slope, and it's hard to imagine that in some way we won't become more involved.
I think that's just the way America works in this region, or at least not more involved through our proxies.
All right.
All right.
I'm sorry we're going to leave it there because it's time for Eric Margulies, but I really appreciate your time on the show as always, David.
Good work.
Anytime.
Thank you.
Everybody, that's David Enders reporting for McClatchy Newspapers at McClatchyDC.com, and you can often find them at the Kansas City Star and the Miami Herald, their prominent McClatchy re-runners.