09/04/16 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, September 4th, 2016, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
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And introducing our friend Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, and author of the new anthology Chaos and Caliphate, which is incredible.
Starts with his time in the beginning of the Afghan war back in 2001.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Patrick?
Pretty good, thank you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Big, complicated mess in Syria now.
Things keep changing and staying the same.
I guess, first of all, give us your take on Turkey's latest intervention against the Islamic State and the Kurds and what you think it all means.
Well, it makes the crisis even more complicated, you know.
It was already pretty bad and it's got worse because Syria is really sort of seven or eight crises and confrontations wrapped into one.
There always was a confrontation here between our, between Turk and Kurd, you know, but that's moved to center stage now.
The Turks have come across, they, but they haven't, you know, their main objection is that there's a de facto Kurdish state in northeast Syria with a population of 2 million with an army of 50,000 with an alliance with the U.S. and they've stopped it expanding further west.
I guess that's a plus for them.
But so long as that de facto state exists, it's going to be an inspiration and a sanctuary for, you know, Turkish Kurds who've been rebelling against the central government since 1984 of an ongoing guerrilla war.
So what's Turkey going to do?
Is it going to fight this state?
Is it going to sort of stay on the margins in Syria?
What's it going to do when it starts getting attacked in Syria by Kurds or by ISIS or by loads of other people who might attack you?
So foreign intervention in Syria and in Iraq, from the point of view of those doing the intervening, the first day is always the best.
You know, then things tend to go downhill.
So I think that they will with the Turks as well.
So, you know, now we're going to see Turkey's become a bit of a big player, but there's so many players here.
It's just difficult to see them all agreeing at the same time to bring this terrible war to an end.
Well, and now I guess there's a real question of what the U.S. will do.
The U.S. certainly sided with Turkey when it came to pushing the Kurds back across the Euphrates there.
Are they going to, I guess, end up just stabbing the Kurds in the back, leaving them high and dry to Erdogan's tender mercies?
Well, I guess a lot of people, especially the Kurds, would like to know the answer to that.
Maybe the U.S. hasn't worked out what it's going to do.
You know, it's sort of in the long term, Turkey is, you know, it's a big ally in the Middle East, the world depends more on Turkey than it does on the Kurds.
But in the short term, if it's fighting Islamic State, then its most effective ally has been the Syrian Kurds, you know, as the ground troops supported by U.S., the firepower of the U.S. Air Force.
So, you know, they can't, if they drop the Kurds at this stage, this is a very big plus for Islamic State.
So I doubt if they're going to do that immediately.
But what are the Turks going to do?
Are they going to, you know, they're demanding, and the Americans have supported them, they're demanding that the Kurds pull back east of the Euphrates River.
And the Americans say that's happening, the Turks say it's not happening.
Because it's very difficult, because, you know, in an area, who knows, you know, there's a force called the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is the main fighting force of which is the two Kurds, the YPG, the People's Protection Unit, the Arabs there too.
You know, not everybody has Arab or Kurd written on their forehead.
So, are the Turks going to treat anybody who opposes them in that area as a Kurd?
Are they going to attack?
They describe the, you know, this 50,000, well, they claim 50,000 YPG, Kurdish guerrillas are all terrorists in that area.
What are they going to do if they capture any of them?
Are they going to shoot them or throw them in jail?
You know, so there's a whole series of nasty things that can happen.
Well, and now the YPG, correct me if I'm wrong, they basically have been careful to not fight with Assad up until recently, but they fought against Assad's forces in a town in eastern Syria that they had recently taken from ISIS, right?
Yeah, basically what happened was this, that the Syrian Kurds were always sort of marginalized and persecuted for a very long time.
Then in 2012, the Syrian army sort of pulled back to focus in other areas.
The Syrian Kurds took over there, the places where they were the majority, and they then found that the ISIS and al-Nusra were attacking them, so they fought them.
So, they suddenly had something in common with the Assad government in that they both were opposing ISIS and the other jihadis.
So, they didn't get attacked by Assad, but there are some areas, particularly this town of Hasakah, a place called Qamishli, another city just to the north of that, where there remain some pro-government militias drawn from local Arab tribes.
It's a very sort of an area, a lot of Bedouin in that area, and some Syrian soldiers, and there's always been tense relations there.
What was interesting was that, I think it was the 18th of August, that fighting started between these, the Kurdish police, they're called the Asayish, and these local militias.
It escalated, the Syrian army used some heavy weapons, the Kurds retaliated, plus a couple of roads around this, around Hasakah, and then the Syrian air force bombed them, the first time the Syrian air force been used in that area against the Kurds in five years.
So, the Kurds are saying this is really the government of Damascus sending a signal to Turkey that you're against the Kurds, we're against the Kurds, why don't we get together?
Probably, it is a bit like that, but at the same time, Ankara, Damascus, Turkey, and Syria are so far apart on so many issues that Turkey's trying to get rid of, is trying to have regime change in Damascus, it's supporting the, it used to support, tolerate ISIS, now it supports the non-ISIS guerrillas, but al-Nusra and people, I doubt if that's going to change very much.
So, there are shifts, but, you know, people are always predicting, you know, game-changing developments in Syria, decisive changes, they very seldom happen, so there are shifts, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're decisive shifts.
So, yeah, that's a very important point about the recent announcement, I guess, that the Turks had backed off their insistence on Assad leaving.
They said, well, he can be part of the transition instead of he has to go at the start of any transition, which had been their previous standard, but I guess what you're saying is, hey, if they're still backing the al-Nusra front, then it doesn't really matter if they've changed what they say a little bit.
Al-Nusra has still been on regime change in Damascus, of course, right?
Yeah, and, you know, most of the armed, the thing about the Syrian opposition is the armed opposition is dominated by the Islamists.
Now, there are loads of people opposing the government in Syria politically, but they're not, you know, and as refugees, but they're not the armed opposition, and that is, you know, about 80 percent of that's probably controlled from Turkey these days.
You know, so now we see what will happen, you know, Vladimir Putin was saying today, you know, that getting close to the U.S. for an agreement on ceasefires and other things in Syria, well, you know, it might happen.
One shouldn't be too cynical, but one's heard this sort of stuff before, and, you know, there are just so many players, foreign players with their own interests.
They all claim to be desperate to fight Islamic State, but in fact, they're pursuing their own interests in Syria.
Difficult to see all these people simultaneously agreeing for to freeze the war, to have a ceasefire.
Yeah, well, you know, I guess it was five years ago you warned on the show that this really could turn into a 15-year or more Lebanon-style civil war, where there are just so many competing interests with so many different competing interests and conflicts of interest, that once it gets started, it's almost impossible to stop.
So, here we are five years into it.
Sort of, it's, you know, it reminds me of the Lebanese civil war, you know, where you had, you know, there are lots of sort of centers of power based on, you know, one sectarian group, you know, whether it's Muslims or Christians or Alawites or whoever, foreign countries that have intervened, and all these groups are sort of strong enough to stay in the game, to avoid defeat, but they're not strong enough to win, and this keeps the war going.
You also have, you know, quite a lot of people who think they have a lot to fight for.
It's difficult to see how a compromise comes out of this.
Meanwhile, you know, I'm in Damascus as we speak, and a bit less violent than when I was here last, I'm right in the center of the city, in the old city.
There were no mortar bombs coming down periodically and killing people.
That stopped.
I don't hear artillery booming away.
The government's retaken quite a lot of Damascus, but there are big, there's still some big rebel areas.
People otherwise poorer than they were, things very expensive, government salaries have remained the same.
We could talk about, you know, price rises the whole time, and you see people who are selling second-hand clothes in the street and things like that you wouldn't have seen previously, but, you know, still things work.
Nightlife, more people, people go out more in the evening, so you're near an area where I am now, about 20 bars have opened in the last couple of months, somebody was telling me.
So things are a bit worse in that respect, but also Syrians have kind of got used to things being bad.
They don't like it, but there isn't much they can do about it.
Right.
Now, so the Kurdish forces to the side for the moment, Patrick, the, I guess I had read that what was going on in eastern Aleppo with the Al-Nusra and and whatever other forces there, that they were basically on their last legs, that they were, it was sort of their battle of the bulge or something where they were making their last ditch effort, but that, you know, any kind of, you know, sound victory and reoccupation of that territory by government forces would really signal a serious setback, if not an end, to that jihadist rebellion.
Do you think that that's accurate?
Yeah, I might be a bit skeptical about that.
The reason is this, the way things work here is that when one side, let's say the Syrian rebels in this case in around Aleppo, not ISIS, but the others, when they're doing badly, they're on the back foot, the government's doing well, and, you know, with their allies, Russia and Iran and Hezbollah and Lebanon, then the backers of Al-Nusra and co. company, you know, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, inject more money, more weapons, more support, and they come back, then they do quite well, and then the backers of the government give their guys more support, you know, so we have these sort of decisive victories or game-changing events announced or proclaimed, but somehow it doesn't happen because whoever is just lost a battle is going back to their supporters and getting, you know, more support, so they don't lose decisively.
Now, this has really been the pattern over the last few years, you know, the government sort of surrounded the East Aleppo, the rebel-held part, cut their main road, it's called Castello Road, to the north of the city, to the main rebel areas, and then a few weeks later, the rebels do the same thing to the main road supplying the western end of the city, which is held by the government.
It's kind of a symbol of the stalemate that we're seeing.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and, well, and we did see that same kind of thing.
I think I may have even asked you the exact same question about the Battle of Homs back in, what, 2012 or 13 or whichever, about, well, it seems like they've already lost their attempt to overthrow the state here, but then, same as now, well, more help is coming, which really raises the question, I know, Patrick, that, you know, U.S. intervention isn't everything, always, in every case, but I wonder if America had taken the opposite tactic here, if the Obama administration had said to the Israelis and the Turks, especially, and the Qataris and the Saudis, that, listen, we know that you hate Assad, but we hate al-Qaeda more, and so we're just not going to tolerate anything that's going to help, you know, the Sunni-based insurgency from Iraq days make any advances in Syria or anywhere else, and all you satellite allies of ours are going to back down on this, whether you think that it all still would have, they would have just ignored us and gone on anyway, or do you think that maybe they would have gone along with America, but the rebellion and the war still would have happened anyway, or, I know it's all kind of a counterfactual, but I'm trying to measure just how important American intervention is.
Yeah, you know, I'd like to have a coherent answer.
I don't think I really do, because the, you know, it's clear from the sort of reports that have been leaked, particularly the famous DIA report, I think it was in August 2012, say, the armed opposition is, you know, being dominated by jihadis and guys from Iraq, that they had the information there.
A lot of them didn't believe it.
In a curious way, they were sort of faced with this dilemma, should they, I think it's a dilemma that's been there since 9-11, you know, should they, the so-called war in terror, I mean, the most disastrous war ever since the terrorists, you know, were quite small in number, now very large in number, but that they wanted to pursue these people, but they didn't want to do it so at the expense of their relations with their main allies in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, you know, you just name them, Turkey, Qatar, and also Pakistan, you know.
It seems to me an amazing event that the U.S. had a great big army in Pakistan fighting the Taliban.
Everybody kind of knew that the Taliban stayed in business because it was backed by Pakistan, and Pakistan even accreted energy, but they never really put heavy pressure on Pakistan to stop that, though that meant they were going to lose the war, so they've showed extraordinary sort of loyalty and faithfulness to their old allies, because I guess that's the basis of U.S. and Western power in the Middle East and South Asia, but they've got to pay a price for that, you know, that you have the Taliban, you have Al-Qaeda, you have Islamic State, and they're never quite, you know, they're still a haver.
They don't want to do things that, contrary to the interests or the views of their, the Saudis and the Turks and the Pakistanis and Gulf monarchies, but the result is that these monstrous sectarian religious cults have been able to flourish and still aren't out of business.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I wonder if you think this is a thing.
If you go back to 9-11 era and, you know, the 1990s, you have this argument about whether the jihadis, I guess mostly, you know, the veterans of the 80s operation in Afghanistan and all of that, of whether they should take on their local leaders that they hated, you know, like the king of Saudi or Mubarak in Egypt, or whether they should focus on the United States, and then as the saying goes, or the legend goes, Zawahiri and Bin Laden decided that we ought to attack the Americans first, because only after we bleed them dry and force them all the way out, like we did the Russians, only then can we really create the state we want to create without the risk of them coming and bombing it.
And I wonder whether you think that any, you know, near-term victory against the Islamic State in northwestern Iraq and eastern Syria will amount to proving Bin Laden right and proving to the various jihadis, as you said, a lot more now than there were back then, that actually, yep, you got to keep attacking the Americans to get them to finally exhaust themselves before we can make our move, and that Baghdadi's folly will only prove Bin Laden correct and create much more of a problem for Americans and for our western European allies here in the near-term future.
Yeah, I don't know.
I think, you know, the Islamic State goes down, this type of jihadism, you know, extreme sectarianism isn't going to go out of business.
You know, the whole armed opposition in Syria, so far as I know, including sort of so-called moderate elements, all want to have a state under Sharia law, you know.
It's ideologically, they're not much different from, you know, Daesh isn't, ISIS ideologically isn't that much different from Al-Qaeda and Al-Nusra and the various others.
So that isn't going to disappear.
Islamic State, I guess, you know, a cult of violence, a cult of cruelty, you know, worse than the others, though the others are pretty bad.
What will happen after they go down?
Impossible to say, really.
I mean, kind of this book I've just written, you know, is really about the chaos in which these movements flourish.
There are eight wars going on between Pakistan and Nigeria now, the three big insurgencies, including the one in Southeast Turkey.
States are failing, wars start, they don't end.
ISIS, you know, Al-Nusra, they're very much the sort of children of war.
They came out of wars, and there was no sign of those wars ending.
So maybe Islamic State goes down, but so long as you have these wars, then, you know, other organizations, Al-Qaeda, what I think of as the Al-Qaeda clones, I think will still be in business.
Well, and, you know, I remember, I guess it was about a year, maybe two now, where the FBI admitted that they hadn't been keeping track of Americans who had gone off to Syria to fight because, hey, no problem, right?
They're on the side of the angels, the Al-Qaeda guys who are fighting against Assad.
So it wasn't until the rise of the Islamic State that they realized that, or, you know, that the politics dictated that, oh, these the rebels are the bad guys again, and so we better start keeping tabs on which Americans are going over there.
And I'm sure the problem is much worse in Europe, if it comes to them losing Mosul and Raqqa, where do they go?
Organizations do or don't do, you know, they have these massive budgets, you know, enormously increased since 9-11, and they don't do the most obvious things, you know.
And also governments, you know, because there's so many contradictions in their policy between, you know, refusing to quarrel with the states that were most involved with supporting jihadism, that they've created this sort of mythology, you know, mythology of the Syrian armed moderates, with the British saying, you know, that there were 70,000 armed moderates waiting to spring to arms, things which everybody in Syria and the region knows are fantasy.
And somehow governments, you know, they've never got a grip on this.
And, you know, for a long time, you know, it's pretty obvious that the border trying to close was the, you know, the Turkish border with Syria.
That's where all these jihadis were coming into Syria.
That's the way they were going out.
It's only happening now.
But, you know, it's pretty amazing when we have all these atrocities in Paris and Brussels and Nice and elsewhere.
It's only now that this border is finally being closed.
All right.
Now, let me ask you about Mosul and the impending attack there.
I was talking with Daniel Davis, the former lieutenant colonel whistleblower from the Afghan war.
And he was in Kurdistan and talking with the Peshmerga.
And they were saying to him that they were afraid that when the Shiite militias and the Iraqi Shiite army take Mosul from the Islamic State, that they won't just liberate it, that they'll take it and maybe, you know, cleanse it, so-called cleanse it of Arab Sunnis and try to keep it for themselves.
And yet the map says Mosul's pretty far from Shiastan, which is why it was so easy for ISIS to take in the first place.
Of course, a year before Mosul fell, you reported and explained on this show that the Iraqi Shiite army was already basically AWOL from Mosul and coming back safe behind Shiite lines, leaving it wide open for ISIS to take.
But so I wonder if you think that that is a real problem, or maybe even if you think that there's a threat that the Peshmerga might try to take Mosul and make it a Kurdish city after they kick ISIS out.
Yeah, I think we should go, you know, if they let's say there's an attack on Mosul.
Now, one thing about all these sieges to bear in mind, there are guys outside trying to keep, you know, besieging a city or a town, it might be Mosul, it might be Damascus, it might be somewhere else, but often the guys inside want to keep the civilian population there as sort of human shields, you know, ISIS in some areas, you know, five-story apartment buildings, you know, and floor one and two would be ordinary families, four, three, the third floor would be fighters, ISIS fighters, and the four and five would be families again.
So they want to keep people there.
But if they lose control, you know, maybe a million people would come out, even before anybody entered, Kurds or Shia or Iraqi army entered Mosul, maybe a million people would come out, certainly the World Food Program and other UN agencies were pre-positioning food for a million people displaced from Mosul if there's a battle there.
You know, what happens then if these guys take it?
Now, you know, maybe we have a tremendous battle and much of the city is destroyed, but supposing ISIS withdraws, army goes in, you know, I mean, you know, Shia, Iraqi army, because one thing to bear in mind, you know, these armies, most armies in the world, particularly these armies, their first thought is to steal anything they can, you know, they loot everything of value disappears very fast.
I mean, I was in one village, abandoned Christian village, just close to the front line, the Peshmerga there, Kurdish soldiers.
And they were saying to me, oh, we preserved all these Christian houses.
But the later I was talking to the Christian, Christians from there, and they say, yeah, they said, if you want to find our furniture, you know, they do, it wasn't taken by ISIS, it was taken by the Peshmerga.
It's in the markets in the local cities there.
They took everything.
That's kind of the nature of armies in this part of the world, probably in every part of the world, come to think of it, but mass looting.
The other thing, Scott, which is kind of pretty bad is that, you know, sectarianism is at every level now.
It's in armies, it's in governments, but it's at local level.
It's just so many people being killed, you know, Daesh, Israeli, ISIS, you know, by massacring Yazidis, raping, destroying.
Then the Yazidis will blame local Sunni Arab villages.
They'll think they're complicit.
They believe they're complicit with the Islamic State.
If the Islamic State is driven back, then some of the villagers will go with them and the Yazidis will say, well, that proves they were with them, they played with them.
Or if they stay, they say they're sleeper cells.
That's the phrase you hear all over the place, sleeper cells.
So, you know, it's actually quite dangerous to stay because of the local popular reaction.
When Sunni Arabs were trying to get into Baghdad about a year ago, you know, most of them were kept out of Baghdad by the government.
Those that got in, but sort of local in each Shia district, they said, we don't want these people in our district.
We think they're all secret agents for ISIS.
So, you know, it's really difficult to reverse this sectarianism.
And the Sunni Arabs in Iraq, you know, have taken a terrible pasting.
That kind of community is being destroyed.
Mosul is their last big city.
Ramadi is destroyed.
Fallujah is empty.
Tikrit's semi-empty.
Quite a lot of people back there, but not great.
So the community of five, six million people in Iraq, about 20 percent of the population, who are on the losing end.
I was talking to one from Ramadi, and the guy said, you know, we're the new Palestinians.
We know where to go.
Right.
Yeah, that's the whole thing.
Once they lose Mosul, if they really are cleansed out of there, the civilian population, where do they go?
Raqqa?
Yeah, well, they don't want to go there.
You know, there isn't much there.
You know, it's a much bigger city.
Maybe, you know, a lot will stay.
Maybe they'll end up in refugee camps.
You know, a lot of people, you don't have to drive them out, because the level of fear is so high, they'll flee anyway.
Then you can say, oh, I'm all in favor of these people coming back, but let's wait another month.
You know, well, we get restored electricity and water, just somehow it doesn't get restored.
So eventually, these people turn into permanent refugees.
You know, we're having, right across this wave of territory in Iraq and Syria, you know, wherever there's a minority, those minorities are getting driven out, and a single community is taking over.
You know, this sort of stuff happened in the Balkans, and in the past, and in Turkey, but now it's happening in this area.
We used to have a lot of minorities, diverse communities, but these diverse communities are coming to an end.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for being generous with your time.
Again, as always, Patrick, appreciate it.
No, not at all.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That is the heroic Patrick Coburn.
He writes for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
You can also find his articles at unz.com, unz.com.
Turkey may be overplaying its hand.
Lots of great stuff there.
And check out his latest book, Chaos and Caliphate, and two great ones before that on ISIS as well.
All right, y'all, that's the Scott Horton Show.
All right, y'all, and that's anti-war radio for today.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
Find my full interview archive and sign up for the podcast feed at scotthorton.org, and follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
See you next week.