09/11/15 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, live here on the Liberty Radio Network, noon to two Eastern time.
Full archives at scotthorton.org.
Next guest today is the great Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent in Britain.
You can also find his archive at unz.com, unz.com, three very important recent pieces.
Only a U.S.-Russian agreement can spur a settlement in Syria.
Refugee crisis.
Where are all these people coming from and why?
And ISIS are threatening to capture a vital highway in Syria.
And it goes on like that.
Those are just the three latest there.
Welcome back to the show.
Patrick, how are you?
Hi.
How are you?
I'm doing really good.
I really appreciate you joining us here.
And if we could start with the highway there, you know, a little bit of a lay of the battlefield in Syria.
Who's making what progress at whose expense right now?
Could you sketch us a thumbnail there?
Islamic State.
ISIS has taken more than half of Syria now.
They've got most of the east of the country, apart from that part which is held by the Kurds.
West of there, you have the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad.
In the north, you have Jabhat al-Nusra and the various al-Qaeda type organizations.
Now what's important is that, you know, as people know, I think that ISIS captured Palmyra, this famous ancient city, in fact, on the 22nd of May.
This was at a time, let me say, that the senior U.S. officers in charge of the campaign against ISIS were announcing that they'd got its measure and they'd stopped it.
And then it captured Ramadi in Iraq and Palmyra in Syria.
Since then, they've advanced westwards.
And they're now about 20 miles from a really crucial road, the north-south road called the M5.
It links Damascus north to cities like Homs and Hama and Aleppo and the coast.
It would be really serious if ISIS cut this road.
They're only 20 miles away from it.
So that's a big change on the battlefield.
I don't think that Assad will implode like Qaddafi in Libya or the Iraqi army in 2003.
But the situation has got very serious.
They've also lost their last remaining oil field.
So they're being squeezed.
But the people who are winning are ISIS, the Islamic State.
They're getting stronger.
Okay.
Now, the Turks have been pushing for a so-called safe zone in northern Syria on and off again over the last four years.
But now it seems like there's some talk of NATO going ahead and going along with that.
But then I saw some headlines that said that ISIS preempted them by rolling right into that area that was supposed to become the safe zone.
Safe zone, does that just mean no-fly zone, by the way?
Or can you tell us the status of that?
Well, the Turks wanted a sort of no-fly zone, which directed against Assad and the Syrian government.
But it actually seems to have been directed against the Kurds.
The Kurds were doing pretty well against ISIS, advancing south and west.
And the Turks wanted to stop them moving west to the Euphrates River.
And so it was partly directed against them.
The U.S. has never gone along with the idea of a safe zone.
And you know, the Turks are talking about it being taken over by opposition.
But the only opposition around, I'm afraid, is Jabhat al-Nusra and the al-Qaeda clones.
The U.S. was trying to build up a moderate force.
But you know, as you may have seen, it was pretty tiny, 54 guys had been trained.
And they were immediately ambushed by Jabhat al-Nusra.
So there's really nobody there except al-Qaeda types to take over this free zone or ISIS to advance into it.
And now, by the way, speaking of these groups, I mean, of course, al-Nusra and ISIS both are outgrows of al-Qaeda in Iraq, basically the next generation of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
But when they talk about Arar al-Sham and they talk about the Free Syrian Army, which, you know, obviously sounds like a pretty Western name for the group in the first place.
But they've come and gone repeatedly over the years.
We hear that, well, they all just went ahead and joined al-Nusra.
And then a couple of months later, we hear, yeah, the FSA went and fought a battle again.
And I just wonder if you could, I mean, I know you say that there's not a dime's worth of difference between Arar al-Sham and al-Qaeda as far as their beliefs and all that kind of thing.
But could you, first of all, compare their numbers for us, give us some kind of ballpark about how big these different groups are, and then, you know, maybe how well they work with the U.S. versus with the Islamic State, that kind of thing, because that's really the argument that the war party makes here is that even David Petraeus is coming out and saying we should peel off the moderate members of al-Nusra who really don't care about Zawahiri either way, and use them against the rest of al-Nusra and the Islamic State.
Yeah, it's kind of crazy, you know, I mean, these Islamic State, al-Nusra, Arar al-Sham, you know, people, their ideology is pretty well the same.
You know, these are fundamentalist Sunni Muslims.
They want to impose Sharia law.
They do impose Sharia law.
Jabhat al-Nusra was trying to present itself a little bit more moderate, so their leader gave an interview and said, well, we wouldn't kill all Alawites, which is a Shia sect in Syria, but of course, they'd have to convert to his particular variant of Islam.
And at about the same time, when some Druze and some villagers objected to this forcible conversion, they were immediately massacred.
So there isn't a great deal of difference in the ideology between these people.
Their numbers, I don't really know.
There are differences over how big ISIS is.
I'd say sort of 50,000 plus Kurds and others would say larger.
The CIA has said less.
I don't think really people really know in Iraq and Syria how many people they can actually send into the front line.
Likewise, the other groups, but in the tens of thousands.
So I think of this attempt to say that there are kind of moderate al-Qaeda guys.
Let me take an example, Arar al-Sham.
About 18 months ago, ISIS suicide bomber blew up some of their leaders, including their deputy leader.
Then it turned out that the deputy leader, Arar al-Sham, the more moderate jihadis happened to be the representative, the main representative of al-Qaeda in Syria.
So, you know, these guys, they're all pretty similar.
Well, and it sure it sure seems like the government has known this all along.
Of course, you've been writing about this and I've been interviewing you about this on the show all along since before this or since the start of this war, basically.
And I saw where you cited also this recent DIA report that was uncovered that Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, who's now out of the DIA, who was the commander at the time, has verified the import of this memo in an interview with Al Jazeera saying, yes, this was on my desk and we took it seriously.
And I took it to the White House and argued based on this memo that by backing the rebellion against Assad and pushing regime change against Assad, we are de facto creating an Islamic state.
He didn't say, you know, we own Baghdadi, the Islamic state.
But he said we're creating an Islamic state in eastern Syria and we're in danger of it actually taking over western Iraq as well, since that's lawless, uncontrolled Sunni stand right now, just a giant power vacuum waiting for them to come back.
And that that memo is from 2012.
I was joking at the time.
I bet we could go back and find an interview of me interviewing you from probably that same day or that same week saying the same thing in that DIA report, that this is the the crazy fire that we're playing with here, backing our enemies.
Yeah, it is.
It is pretty crazy, isn't it?
Because, you know, all that was pretty obvious at the time that the the armed opposition from an early stage was taken over by extreme jihadis, al Qaeda types.
This wasn't really reflected in most of the media coverage, but it was pretty evident on the ground.
But they haven't really had a policy that they don't really have a policy.
No, you know, they're attacking.
There are two of the main, most effective opponent of Islamic state in Syria was the Syrian Kurds.
But then the U.S. has just done a deal with the with the Turks, which is primarily directed against the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, which is the organizing party, a militia of the Syrian Kurds.
So the outcome of this deal is in the interests ultimately of Islamic state and against that of their opponents.
Again, that's sort of pretty crazy.
There's a lack of any sort of coherent policy towards combating the so-called caliphate, which is why it's still getting bigger.
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing that the president of the United States, even just three or four weeks ago, I guess now, reiterated for the first time since 2012, I think, that Assad must step aside, which is just a giant poison pill, making sure that no negotiation will be possible.
And I guess since then, though, now, Putin came forward even after that and said that that Assad would be willing to negotiate and would be willing to share power with, you know, decent opposition, healthy opposition, Putin said, I guess, was the translation.
Is there anybody for him to negotiate with?
Is there a real possibility of a peace treaty?
Well, you can find people to negotiate with.
The problem is they don't have any power on the ground.
Right.
Lots of people in hotels in Istanbul and Ankara and other parts who are very happy to come and negotiate.
The problem is that, you know, if they go back to the opposition part of Syria, they'll lose their heads.
They don't really have any.
They don't have any power.
I think that, you know, what's the policy of the US?
Well, what would they really like to do?
Well, they'd like to get rid of Assad, but they want to maintain the Syrian state.
I mean, they want to do what they didn't do in Iraq in 2003 and four when they got rid of Saddam and then found they dissolved the Iraqi state.
And then Al-Qaeda and other movements like that moved in.
But actually, they could do that because if they simply announced that they were going to when Islamic State attacks from Palmyra to say, you know, we will be acting against Islamic State and we'll be acting for the Syrian army.
We're not defending Assad.
They've been trying to do this to, you know, this would be quite effective.
They would be supporting the Syrian state.
They wouldn't be supporting Assad.
But basically, they don't seem to have any policy.
They seem to have ceded it partly to Saudi Arabia.
They want to kind of keep in with their traditional Sunni allies, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf monarchy, monarchies, Turkey.
They don't want to offend these people.
And that makes it impossible to have a real counterattack against Islamic State.
Well, and now so if we could switch to the eastern front of the Islamic State in what used to be called Iraq, the war between southern Shiastan and and the Islamic State there.
It seems like, well, there's very little coverage of it, but it was announced quite a few weeks ago that they're launching a major siege against Fallujah, a major attack on the Islamic State in Fallujah and Ramadi, both at the same time.
Sounded kind of funny because they can't seem to keep a hold of the apparently now worthless Baiji refinery or the adjacent town, the very small town of Baiji.
But now they're launching full scale assaults on Fallujah and Ramadi, except I can't read a thing about it because nobody's covering it.
So can you tell us what you think is going on there?
Much.
You know, it's kind of a stalemate.
You know, they took Ramadi.
There's no real counterattack.
You know, what's U.S. policy?
Well, to try and build up the Iraqi army and try and create a Sunni sort of second force, which is going to be opposed to Islamic State.
But, you know, this is trying to revive an old policy that from about 2006, seven, the surge.
And I think you can do all that again.
That's sort of only half worked when there are 150,000 American soldiers in Iraq.
It's really very unlikely to work now.
And the Iraqi state, the Iraqi army, you know, it's very it's dysfunctional.
It's incredibly corrupt.
You know, it's really a sort of it's going nowhere.
And at the same time, suspicion of the Shia militias and as being under Iranian influence.
So I don't again, you know, there isn't really an effective policy.
And the Islamic State stays where it is.
I don't think it'll expand because it depends.
It comes out of the Sunni Arab community.
There are about 20 percent of Iraqis, 20 percent Kurds and 60 percent Iraqi Shia.
So it's difficult for it to expand in Iraq, unlike Syria, which is 60 percent Sunni Arab.
But they're not retreating either.
At some point, of course, the Shia may counterattack.
The Shia militias may counterattack up the Euphrates Valley.
It's the Euphrates Valley is really the heart of the caliphate.
But that isn't happening yet.
So you have this kind of stalemate.
But with Iraqis feeling pretty demoralized, I think about 450,000 have left this year.
There are 17 or 18 flights to Istanbul every day, full of people leaving.
There's a sort of sense of demoralization and things getting worse.
You don't really hear about it so much as Syrian refugees.
But there's a smaller but still very significant exodus from there.
Well, you know, it's it's pretty contrary to the narrative in Washington, D.C. about just how much we're all supposed to hate Iran and Assad and especially Putin in Russia.
But it sort of seems to me like a perfect place, a perfect time and place for the Americans to completely butt out of the Middle East, especially now that we got Russians on the ground, apparently obligated to helping Assad survive.
Let them fight our stupid war on terror for us.
Perfect time to let the Russians make themselves the enemy of these guys for a while and leave us the hell alone.
And since apparently all America can do is make everything worse and worse and worse, whether we're fighting against Al-Qaeda or whether we're fighting for them, we're making them more powerful every day.
Yeah, but I you know, this story about the Russians moving in, you know, when you go into it, it's got very little substance.
There's a photograph or some video around about one Russian armoured personnel carrier, fairly modern make.
And there's a very brief conversation, which may be in Russian, might be in Arabic, could be in English.
Nobody's quite sure.
Very sort of incoherent to people saying that Eshel Raz in Russian or maybe they were saying something in Arabic.
That's the evidence for more Russian troops.
There's some shots from pictures from Jabhat al-Nusra showing some MiG-29s with the Syrian Air Force using those as well.
Pretty insubstantive.
You know, the Russians have never been had a big base there.
You know, people used to talk about the Russian naval base at Tartus in 2013.
How many Russians were there?
Four.
Four.
This was the great big base.
So there's a lot of sort of fantasy and exaggeration coming out of reporting from Moscow and Beirut on this.
I suppose the Russians might send more.
You know, they supply, they arm the Syrian army.
They might do more.
But I don't think they're going to send many, many troops there.
Yeah, I guess, you know, it's in the Washington Post version, all the Russians confirm their presence.
But yeah, the unnamed number of advisers.
But nothing beyond.
Yeah, this sort of Cold War revisited, you know, the Russian advisers moving into some country.
Fantastic excitement, you know.
But I think it mostly baloney.
It might happen, but it hasn't happened yet.
Now, so Ayman al-Zawahiri put out a podcast the other day where he said, look, I don't recognize the caliphate as being legitimate by the book or anything like that.
However, the Shia and the crusaders are worse.
And so I think we ought to fight with them.
Now, mostly in the media, the spin seems to be, oh, as a wall, he talks bad about the Islamic State.
But it seemed to me like what he was saying was, you know, we ought to be getting along better.
And he's trying to head off the idea of the rehabilitation of of, you know, Syrian al-Qaeda, the Al-Nusra Front as the moderates here and saying, you know, we're we're we're better off fighting.
With the Islamic State against the Americans and with the Americans against the Islamic State.
And, you know, I'm not sure if you saw this, Patrick, but there was an article about Stanley Cohen, the Jewish human rights lawyer from New York, who was negotiating through some contacts that he had through Kuwait and Jordan in order to try to get one of the hostages released.
And in the course of the negotiation, part of it was he was healing a rift between an al-Qaeda cleric and an ISIS cleric.
And the ISIS cleric was the student of the al-Qaeda cleric.
And they had this big disagreement and they were actually working it out.
And they were actually going to patch up or were apparently pretty near patching up the split.
And then the Americans swooped in and scotched the negotiation and the hostage was beheaded was how it worked out.
But it just the point being, it seems like not only these guys very much alike, it seems like at any time they might go ahead and and combine their forces in Zawahiri and Baghdadi, maybe to make up here.
These these guys, first of all, they're viscerally anti-American on all sides.
You know, you can't if you're you're so jihadi, it's kind of it's not back in Iraq.
You know, you could get sort of Iraqi Sunni tribes to ally themselves with America when you're dealing with jihadis.
You know, who have a whole sort of ideology in which the U.S. and non-Muslims or people who aren't belong to that particular variant of Islam are regarded as heretics or, you know, demonized.
So it's pretty difficult for these guys to sort of shift over and suddenly become allied to the Americans without losing a lot of support or getting killed.
So I think that all this sort of this idea that somewhere there's a sort of moderate al-Qaeda faction, you know, is just sort of crazy.
How likely do you think it is that al-Nusra or al-Qaeda and the Islamic State will heal their rift and join back together again?
And I guess what difference do you think these guys that have killed each other?
You know, they're off to power, but it's sort of, you know, ideology isn't much different.
But, you know, they're both all bidding for power and they've killed a lot of each other.
So I can't see them sort of suddenly.
And these are very sort of savage, you know, cruel people.
So I can't see them, you know, kissing and making up.
Yeah.
But at the same time, I don't see them becoming sort of suddenly moderates or allied to the Americans.
You know, while you have the whole opposition basically dominated with these people, this sort of works militarily against Assad.
But politically, it doesn't quite, because the people who are in Assad's corner who, you know, aren't really pro-Assad, but they prefer, they don't have any choice.
They prefer him to the alternative, which is basically losing their heads.
So long as the opposition is all dominated by these people, then people who are in a corner with Assad have got no alternative but to fight with it.
Yeah, I know a Syrian who said everybody hates Assad, but they back the army, you know, which is protecting them from these guys.
Sure, that might be a good idea to go and help the Syrian army when they're fighting Islamic State.
Yeah.
Because at the moment, if people think in Damascus, well, Assad goes, probably, you know, the army will begin to break up.
They'll be, you know, nobody, you know, uniting anything.
And the next thing is we'll have al-Qaeda in the Islamic State here, you know, killing all the Alawites, the Christians and the Sunni who are in Damascus.
Remember, you know, you know, there are other cities in like Tartus that used to be Alawite.
They're now mostly Sunni because they're full of Sunni who fled from Islamic State.
Any Sunni, you know, who sort of may not like Assad, but they're even more terrified of Islamic State or they work for the army or they work for the government.
They're all vulnerable.
So, you know, there is a way of combating Islamic State.
But, you know, Washington, London, the others, Paris, they really haven't done this.
They haven't when it comes to the crunch.
They won't stand up against Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
They won't do various obvious things.
That's why Islamic State is still there.
And now speaking of which you mentioned earlier that unlike in Iraq, in Syria, it's a 60 percent majority Sunni population.
And of course, it's the state is certainly backed by the minority secular coalition of the Druze and the Christians and the Shia and Alawites, as you mentioned, but one percent of the Sunni.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
I wanted to ask what percent of the Sunnis of Syria support the state versus the revolution?
Because they painted in very kind of black and white sectarian terms as though all Sunnis are on the side of the revolution.
Yeah, this is sort of, you know, if that was true, they don't take it over, you know, three years ago.
I've been a diplomat in Damascus said to me, look, you know, you've got three factions, you've got the the government, then you've got the anti-government and then you've got people who are anti the anti-government, i.e., you know, a very large constituency of people who don't much like the government, but they're even more terrified of the government's opponents.
And, you know, you have to sort of factor this in.
So would you say that's a majority of the Sunnis of Syria?
I wouldn't know, but I think, you know, then you have people who are, you know, being bombed by the government, you know, being barrel bombing.
What happens when the opposition takes over an area?
The government says, oh, we're going to bomb that area.
Everybody should get out.
And then they treat anybody in there as being an enemy.
So they drop, you know, barrels full of explosives and artillery and everything else on that area.
They devastate and go through North Damascus.
I've driven through there.
You know, it's like the pictures you've seen of Dresden or Hamburg in 1945.
You know, just heaps of ruins everywhere, just mile after mile.
Scary place to drive.
Other places, opposition places, you know, they've just been shattered.
It should also be said, the opposition, you know, they don't have the same far, but they quite happily fire guns into the Aleppo, into the big artillery, into the government side.
It's also completely indiscriminate.
I stay normally in a Christian place called Bab Tuma, which is a Christian part of the old city.
You know, we have mortar bombs coming.
We've had, when I've been there before, there's always been mortar bombs coming in, not for a few a day.
A few people killed, badly injured and so forth.
Again, completely indiscriminate.
So has Assad has killed more civilians?
Yeah, definitely.
But he's got more firepower.
But would the opposition, if they had more firepower, do the same?
You know, all the signs are yes.
Yeah.
And again, you know, back to the refugee crisis here real quick.
You mentioned how bad it's getting.
It seems like and you made the comparison, too, to the de-Baathification of the Iraqi army and the abolition of the Iraqi army.
And maybe that they're trying to skirt around and regime change just Assad, but not accomplish that.
It looks like, you know, they're not going to be able to have their cake and eat it, too, kind of deal here.
And that's really, you know, if if Nusra and ISIS do much better, they're already at the outskirts of Damascus.
If they're actually able to to get rid of Assad.
How in the world do the Western powers think that they're going to keep the state, though, but not Assad?
I mean, obviously, at that point, the jihadists are going to completely overthrow the government and dissolve the army, et cetera, try to take it over.
And at that point, that's when the real refugee crisis begins.
Right.
We're only at we haven't even got to the regime change part of this nightmare story yet.
You know, the real problem starts when basically every last Christian, Druze, Shia, Alawi and a lot of the Sunnis, too, all will have individually death marks on their head, convert or die at the hands of al-Qaeda in Syria.
Oh, yeah, sure.
Yeah, you know, four million refugees out of the country at the moment.
You know, ISIS takes the main road, begins to take Damascus.
These other cities, you know, you'll have the same number.
You'll have a larger number trying to get out of the country.
I don't know if they'll be able to get out, but there'll be the same tremendous pressures.
I'm not but I mean, I think that other things might happen.
I don't think the Russians, I don't think the Iranians, the Shia community in the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon, you know, they see the battle for Syria as being a battle they can't afford to lose.
So ISIS increases their strength and they'll up the ante, too.
So I don't see Islamic states that are taking over like they did in Mosul in June last year in Iraq.
But I do see a lot more fighting.
I think they're advanced.
I think that then the Shia in Iraq, in Iran, in Lebanon will try and counter that.
I don't think they'll let Assad go down.
So, you know, the future is really one of more war.
All right, so that is the great Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
His latest book is The Rise of Islamic State.
And you can find his archive also at UNZ.com.
That's UNZ.com.
Only a U.S.-Russia agreement can spur a settlement in Syria.
Refugee crisis.
Where are all these people coming from and why, et cetera, et cetera.
UNZ.com.
Thanks very much for your time, Patrick.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
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