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We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
By God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been who's win?
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we're killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I got Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk and they run all his articles also at unz.com, unz.com.
He's the author of The Age of Jihad, Chaos and Caliphate, The Rise of the Islamic State and a lot of books before that too.
You can find all his collected works there on his Amazon page.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you, sir?
Pretty good.
Thank you.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
Boy, do you write important stuff here.
Before we get to today's story, which is huge, I wanted to ask you about Mosul in, I guess what used to be Eastern Islamic State, Northwestern Iraq.
The second to last major stronghold of the Islamic State there has now finally been liberated by a combination of American and Iraqi and I don't know what other forces there.
But you have reported, I think alone, have been reporting casualties on order far greater than any other media outlet has been talking about that I can see there.
Can you describe what you've seen?
Yeah.
I'm a bit surprised that more people haven't focused on this.
First of all, this was a very long siege.
I think it was just under nine months.
But more significantly, what led to the really heavy casualties is two things.
One, Islamic State, ISIS, Daesh, were refusing to let people out and shooting anybody who tried.
Sometimes people found heaps of bodies, 60 or 70 people.
Unlike most other sieges, it was impossible for the civilian or very difficult for the civilian population to get out.
A lot of them did, but quite a number didn't.
As ISIS got pushed back into a smaller and smaller enclave in West Mosul, more and more people were crammed into fewer and fewer buildings.
Now, these buildings were coming under attack, not just from the air, but from artillery and rocket bombardment from the Iraqi army.
They had howitzers.
They had Grads, which are multiple rocket launchers, not very accurate.
You sort of blaze away in the general direction of the enemy.
There was a continual artillery bombardment going on in Mosul, hitting buildings that were pretty old, pretty fragile, and were crammed full of people.
I have accounts of people who said there were 50 or 100 people in a single building.
This went on for a long time.
Now, the UN agency says that looking at satellite photographs, 5,000 buildings alone in the old city alone were destroyed.
Many other districts, I think there were 16 districts in Mosul, which the UN says were completely destroyed.
People not being allowed out with very prolonged artillery bombardment and air attack and all these buildings destroyed, it's really not surprising that civilian casualties should be very heavy.
I'm not sure why others reported what happened to a family or a street, but haven't really joined up the dots.
A lot of people were being killed.
Well, I think what happens is the government says, well, maybe as many as a dozen people have died, and then others say, well, we have specific news reports that show it's at least two dozen, but then they don't really go beyond that.
There's so many deaths that aren't reported at all.
Yeah, I mean, Kurdish intelligence, I mean, the former Iraqi foreign minister and the finance minister told me on the record that Kurdish intelligence believes that upwards of 40,000 people might have been killed.
I don't know.
Since the Iraqi government didn't make any effort to find out, the civil defense had about 25 guys and one truck and one small crane, and none of them had been paid.
A lot of these people were just under the rubble, so nobody's ever really going to find out how many people died there.
Yeah.
Well, now, but you've been there, and the 40,000 number sounds credible to you, it sounds like, huh?
Yeah, I mean, I think it was in the tens of thousands.
I don't know if it's 40,000, but I think it was in the tens of thousands.
Yeah.
So, I guess then, I mean, we had talked about this in over the course of the war against the Islamic State, about how in, I guess, in Tikrit and in Fallujah, I guess they held out in Tikrit and Fallujah, they pretty much fled pretty quickly.
In Ramadi, they held out a little bit longer, but then also fled.
And then the big question was whether they were going to really try to hold out for Mosul, or whether they would run for Mosul.
And I think you had predicted back a year ago, they don't really have anywhere else to run, maybe to Raqqa, but they're running out of options, these Islamic State guys, running out of geography.
And it seems now, they say that Tal Afar, near the Syrian border, has been liberated.
And so, is the Islamic State now pretty much down to Raqqa only, Patrick?
Well, yeah, and you know, these are big defeats, let's not underestimate Caliphate as a territorial entity, added to pieces.
But to keep in mind also that in some of these places like Tal Afar, Islamic State clearly decided not to fight, suffer heavy casualties, and to try and revert to guerrilla war.
I don't know if they're going to succeed, because they have so many enemies, but you know, that seems to be their strategy.
And you know, in Iraq, some places they defended, some places they didn't.
In Ramadi, most of the civilians had already left.
In Fallujah, a lot of them left through sort of humanitarian corridors.
I think that Mosul was different, that Islamic State decided to just kill anybody who tried to leave the city.
And then now, so as far as Raqqa, I mean, the Marines already have the place surrounded, and they're working with the Syrian Kurds.
But are the Iraqi forces, are they also moving on Raqqa to pinch them from the west?
No, it's mostly the Syrian Democratic Forces, which are sort of meant to be partly Arab, the local Arab tribes, but the main sort of punching power is the Syrian Kurdish organization and the People's Protection Units.
But because these are so much disliked by Turkey, it's given a sort of Arab coloring.
And there are Arabs fighting there, but the majority of the fighters are Kurds, and certainly the most effective fighters.
Yeah, I mean, they've been moving.
And the thing is, Islamic State has devised some fairly effective tactics to hold cities like that against ground attack and heavy bombardment that they've, in Mosul and again in Raqqa, they've dug enormous sort of networks of tunnels where they can hide, where they can move about, where they can launch surprise attacks, they can keep their supplies.
The way they usually operate is have a small squad with a sniper and a few other people, then they'll go into a building and snipe, fire a few shots, maybe shoot somebody on the other side, then immediately they're out of that building through holes that have been cut in the walls.
So when there comes a territory, artillery, fire, air attack, they're not there anymore.
It's just the civilians to bear the brunt of this.
Yeah.
Do you have an estimate of how long you think it'll take to finish rousting the Islamic State out of Raqqa and turning them fully back into a group?
They took the old city there last week.
I've heard about a week ago from commanders there, Kurdish commanders, that they think it's going to take about two months.
Okay, keep in mind one other thing that I think people haven't mentioned enough.
You know, it's in the interests of the Syrian Kurds to be in the process of taking Raqqa, because that keeps, you know, they're allied to the U.S., they're supported by the U.S. and other air forces.
But if they actually defeat Islamic State in Raqqa and elsewhere, then the U.S. may not have any further use for them.
Their main use will no longer be there, so they're very worried that the U.S. will return to its alliance with Turkey and leave the Syrian Kurds isolated, and they'll be squeezed between the Damascus government and Erdogan in Turkey.
So, you know, in some ways it's in their interest to keep that fight going, to not actually win it.
What you say about the Americans using them up and spitting them out seems inevitable.
Yeah, well, they do have some other alternatives, and, you know, they have some up-and-down relationships with Damascus.
Historically, Assad and the Damascus government had always oppressed the Kurds in the north.
A lot of them are second-class citizens.
A lot of them weren't even regarded as citizens.
And actually the first, sort of, some of the first demonstrations against the Assad government came in Kurdistan, but in Syrian Kurdistan.
But these days, you know, against Turkey, against the Jihadis, they might get a better deal from Damascus and from the Russians, so they might look in that direction.
So I think they're wobbling.
They probably prefer to stick with the Americans, but nobody quite knows what long-term American policy will be.
Will they, sort of, revert to Turkey and, you know, basically betray the Kurds?
Well, they probably wouldn't say betray, but they'd say, you know, that they no longer need the Kurds.
So that's what the Kurds worry about, though.
All right, hang on just one second.
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All right, now, so we have been very privileged, me and this audience, to have been very privileged to have been talking with you about the war, well, really all the way back to Iraq War II and all through the Libya War and the intervention in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State.
And so people can go back and check the archives and find all these interviews of, it's almost like a flip book, a step-by-step as the rise of when al-Qaeda in Iraq came to Syria and they created the al-Nusra Front.
And then it was back in 2013 that Baghdadi and Jelani, his deputy, split.
And Jelani stayed loyal to al-Qaeda and Baghdadi went ahead and created his caliphate.
And now you have this important, oh, now it's three years later, the caliphate is pretty much on its last legs being smashed in eastern Syria and western Iraq.
And then you have this brand new piece out today in The Independent, while defeat of ISIS dominates global attention, al-Qaeda builds strength in Syria.
So I want to hear all about Idlib province, everything about, like you say in this article here, but I wanted to start with the theory before the practice, Patrick, because wasn't it the case that al-Qaeda's argument was we have to keep attacking the Americans because only after they finally withdraw from the region after declaring bankruptcy, only then will we be able to create a caliphate, otherwise the Americans will come and bomb it.
Which is then exactly what happened when Baghdadi quit listening to Zawahiri.
So I wonder whether in the arguments among jihadis, whether this, you know, latest turn of events has really proven Zawahiri right and whether you think that means that al-Qaeda is going to focus their attention again on the United States?
Yeah, I don't know if you can carry the argument that far, but it's an important question.
You're right to raise it.
The, yeah, I mean, first of all, you know, at the height after the capture of Mosul in 2014 by Islamic State, you know, they were saying, yeah, we've captured it against, you know, great odds.
And the caliphate, this shows that we're declaring the caliphate.
And, you know, at that point, they're advancing on Baghdad.
They were sweeping through Eastern Syria.
They were making sort of what they thought of as God-given gains on the ground.
So, you know, they seem to have been divinely inspired.
Of course, now that they're on the retreat and being defeated, that argument doesn't work anymore.
And that isn't going to be an inspiration to potential followers, as it once was.
I mean, the caliphate.
So, yeah, I mean, while those who, Al-Qaeda, which advocated a more cautious approach would seem to have won that argument.
But of course, also, I mean, Al-Qaeda, which in Syria has gone through different name changes.
At one moment, it was the Jabhat al-Nusra, the Al-Nusra Front.
Currently, it's exactly the same guys.
It's Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.
But, I mean, let's just call it Al-Qaeda.
And after the fall of East Aleppo, they moved again.
They'd always been very, the strongest rebel movement there, Islamist movement.
They moved against their former allies, Arar al-Sham, which ideologically was pretty well the same, that sort of fundamentalist Sunni Arab movement, backed by Turkey.
They moved against them.
And they've become, they're now in complete control of Idlib province, which is west of Aleppo.
And the areas around that, probably about 2 million people there.
Also, which is very important, they control a border crossing with Turkey, so they can get in supplies and ammunition and things.
And this is probably the biggest concentration or the biggest, most powerful sort of Al-Qaeda, small de facto state, if you like, that we've ever seen, certainly since 9-11.
And they'll benefit from ISIS, Islamic State collapsing.
Among other things, the leaders don't necessarily sort of move from one organization to another, but the foot soldiers will.
There are a lot of hardened fighters who were with Islamic State, who probably now move over to Al-Qaeda.
It's much more fluid on the ground there than people imagine.
So, you know, they're in a pretty powerful position there.
Now, you know, we'll see in the next year or two or the next few months, you know, will the US, Russia, all the others, focus on destroying Al-Qaeda in Idlib?
Well, maybe, but who knows?
They're not as provocative as Islamic State.
Islamic State was a genius for creating enemies.
They basically regarded themselves as being at war with all the world.
Al-Qaeda is a bit more careful on who it alienates and when.
Wow.
So here's the thing, though.
Now, the Washington Post reported a couple of months ago, and I guess everybody seemed to agree that this was real, that although they spun it as treason, that Trump ordered the CIA to stop backing the jihadists in Syria because this is only just, that's what Russia wants or whatever.
That was the Washington Post spin.
But on the facts, though, everybody seemed to agree that that was really right, that in fact, one story had it that Pompeo, the new head of the CIA, had given a briefing to Trump showing him the al-Zinki Free Syrian Army guys beheading the little boy, the Palestinian boy, and that he said, so don't you think we should call this off, Trump?
And Trump said, yes, let's call it off, which I think was kind of his platform all along anyway on that.
But then you're telling me, oh yeah, no, there's a border crossing between al-Qaeda-stan in Idlib province and Turkey, our NATO ally that we know America's been working with on supporting these jihadists all this time anyway.
Charles Lister has talked about that, the American-Saudi room, as he called it, in Turkey, where they coordinate this stuff.
And so I wonder, what is the truth of this?
Is the CIA, are the Americans still behind this, or they can't stop the Turkeys from continuing the policy, the Turkish, I mean, from continuing the policy anyway, or what?
It's a mix of all these things.
You know, that policy has been pretty disastrous in Syria, both from the American point of view and from Turkey's point of view, too.
I mean, Turkey, from an early stage in 2011, thought, you know, at one point, the then Turkish prime minister, Davutoglu, in I think the end of 2011, no, maybe I think it was 2012, said, you know, it's not years, just a matter of weeks or months before Assad goes.
You know, they really got the place wrong.
Now, you know, they're not that, their relations aren't so, Turkey's relations aren't so good these days with the new al-Nusra, with al-Qaeda.
On the other hand, it probably doesn't want to wholly alienate them.
It also maybe could send its own troops in there.
That means a whole lot of other complications.
Certainly, confrontation with Assad, Turkey's kind of retreating from the policy it had from the sort of five years after, four or five years after 2011.
The accepting that Assad is going to stay, and its hostility is much more towards the West these days.
It's also difficult to intervene because they have an understanding or an alliance with Russia.
Russia doesn't want them to intervene or probably doesn't.
So it's a complicated situation.
But al-Qaeda there will try and sort of stay in being, stick around sort of for as long as they can, and they remain a very powerful force.
Well, one thing worth mentioning on the ground in these places is, you know, one of the reasons that Islamic State and al-Qaeda are so militarily strong is one, you know, they've got very committed guys who will fight, who will also experience, but also they have suicide bombers in large numbers.
Any successful rebel offensive in Syria has always been led by suicide bombers.
That's, you know, otherwise these guys are light infantry.
They don't have much artillery than tanks and stuff like that, but they do have these suicide bombers and these are pretty effective.
And in Idlib, they'll have a lot of these.
So that makes them a significant military force, whatever happens.
Well, you know, it's certainly true that, you know, somebody like Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, who's supposed to be some kind of realist or something, he's made some of the most hawkish statements about Assad and that, yeah, no, he cannot stay, a long-term solution must include him stepping down from power at some point, and these kind of statements.
And so I guess it still kind of is up in the air, whether the Trump administration itself, nevermind D.C., has really made up their mind even one way or the other about what to do with this, even though you might have thought that Assad had won.
Yeah, I don't know the answer to this, but, you know, but on the ground, they haven't really done much to prevent Assad's army moving east.
You know, they, as you know, the Syrian army relieved this city, Deir ez-Zor, it's the biggest city in eastern Syria, which is a vast area of desert, but it has oil wells and other things there.
This city had been besieged by ISIS for three years, just being relieved by the Syrian army, and they'll move east from there, about half the oil production capacity is just to the east of the city, which they've relieved.
So, and they're not doing much to stop that, or anything to stop that at the moment, probably because they don't think a confrontation is there in their interests.
They don't have any allies to do it with who are effective, because they want to do it for them.
They don't want American mercenaries.
So it looks as though they're going to tolerate that.
But as always, you know, with the Trump administration, one doesn't know, you know, maybe the Trump administration doesn't know.
Well, I wonder about the Saudis, too.
You know, there's that famous quote from Prince Saud al-Faisal, where he told John Kerry, he said, Daesh is our response to your support for the Dawa, which, of course, means the Shiite parties that America installed in power in Iraq War II.
But so I wonder whether you think that that's really changed, that the Saudis maybe have backed off their support for Islamic State?
I think also they've got other preoccupations these days, you know, they're involved in this war in Yemen, which I mean, it's horrific.
And they're bombing the place and, but they haven't won it, you know.
Secondly, they're involved in this, you know, confrontation with Ghattar.
Now, it used to be Saudi Arabia and Ghattar, they used to be the financiers and to a degree, the organizers of support for the rebels in association with Turkey.
Now, Saudi Arabia's got other things to think about now.
And also, it doesn't want to bet on a loser.
It's pretty obvious that in the long term, the Syrian rebels are losers.
So I think in effect, Syrian policy, Saudi policy in Syria has changed, maybe not rhetorically, but in terms of the amount that they're prepared to do and the amount they can do.
Well, it certainly seems, I guess, I don't know about the Turks and the Arab states, but it sure seems like from the point of view of the United States and Israel, that this policy since 2011, at least if unless you want to go back further, but that this policy of backing the jihadis there has completely blown up in their face.
And they ended up creating the Islamic State, which was a bridge way too far.
So then they waged this three-year war, Iraq War Three, to destroy the Islamic State.
But now if you listen to them tell it, boo-hoo, they have accidentally created the Shiite crescent that used to just be a figment of their imagination.
They've now expanded the power and influence of Iraqi Shia-stan and that Baghdad government even further east in what they're panicking and calling this direct land bridge through to Syria and to Hezbollah, which is what they supposedly were trying to prevent.
They go on about this land bridge as if the Iranians couldn't communicate with their allies in Syria and Lebanon beforehand.
They're all things like planes.
And most of the ammunition and so forth comes from the Russians anyway.
So, you know, the audience kind of propagandists this sort of, you know, yeah, it's significant that the allies of Iran, the Shia and the sects associated with the Shia now sort of are dominant, you know, in Iran, in Iraq, in Syria, and in Lebanon.
But they were, you know, they are the majority on the ground there, not in Syria, but if you take all these countries together, the majority are Shia.
And, you know, so this was always the case.
Now we have this sort of the so-called land bridge as if the Iranians are going to be sending chariots or something to Lebanon and so forth.
You know, people, you know, this kind of propaganda thing normally lies on the map showing, you know, this route.
This route, you know, it's not actually a road, you know, what are they going to send on this?
Are they really going to send to all this very long distance?
You know, I think that that's nonsense.
You know, the land bridge is sort of a bit of rhetoric.
It's symbolic, yeah, but it's symbolic of the fact that the Iranian allies and the Shia or sects associated with the Shia, like the Alawites, have come out the winners in this whole sort of convulsion in that part of the Middle East, you know, in Iraq and Syria to a degree in Lebanon.
They've come out the winners, but it's actually to say there's a new sort of road going to be built for them.
So I don't think that that's going to make any difference.
And then the Iraqi Kurds like to sort of try and frighten the Americans, saying that, but I don't think they really believe it.
You know, so are we getting to the end of this?
Yeah, we, you know, the Islamic State is going down.
Al-Qaeda is still there and is more powerful.
You know, actually the Trump policy as being in Iraq, really it's continuing the Obama policy.
It really hasn't changed much.
You know, Obama did more militarily than the White House admitted when he was in it.
Trump does sort of less new in Iraq than he pretends, and to a degree likewise in Syria.
It hasn't changed that amount, but overall Trump has, you know, what he's actually done on the ground seems to indicate that he wants to keep out of it.
And he wouldn't have been very smart to try and oppose the Syrian army moving east, because you can only do it by bombing them and then you get involved in another war.
They don't have any local allies.
You know, after all the CIA and the others spent, you know, years and hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars trying to create a pro-American Arab rebel, non-jihadi, you know, fighting force, and they failed notoriously.
And they're certainly not going to be able to do it by this end of the day, so they don't have allies to do that.
So now as far as the Russians, they're busy in Raqqa now, but they'll probably come to Idlib next, huh?
Yeah, I imagine that, you know, that at some point they will go for the Syrian army.
When they've defeated ISIS, they'll think about attacking Idlib.
At the moment, they want the western side of Syria to keep quiet, because Assad has always been short on combat troops.
You know, they have guys, you know, so you see guys at the checkpoints on the road, you know, very fat, you know, smoking cigarettes and taking small bribes, you know, but this isn't really the army.
The actual combat army has always been short of troops, and they can only really fight on one front at a time.
Now they're fighting one front at a time, so they're fighting Islamic State in eastern Syria.
They don't want trouble in the west at the moment.
And they might guess, I guess, al-Qaeda might attack them, but for the moment they want to keep things quiet.
All right, well, listen, I appreciate you coming back on the show, Patrick, to talk about this stuff.
Thank you so much.
All right, you guys, that is the great Patrick Coburn.
He is the Middle East correspondent at The Independent.
This latest one is a blockbuster here.
While defeat of ISIS dominates global attention, al-Qaeda builds strength in Syria.
And check out his great books, of course, Age of Jihad and Chaos and Caliphate.
Hey, and check out his blurb in my book, which is Fool's Error and Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
All right, thanks, you guys.
