04/01/07 – Sami Rasouli – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
I have on the line Sami Rasouli.
He is an Iraqi who was an expatriate, lived in the United States for, I believe, about 30 years.
A very successful restaurateur from Minneapolis, Sinbad's restaurant.
And since the war, he has moved back to Iraq and has created something called the Muslim Peacekeeper Team.
A Shiite Muslim from Najaf, Iraq.
Welcome to the show, Sami.
Thank you, Scott, for having me.
Nice to make your acquaintance here.
And now, did I get that right?
You're a Shiite originally from Najaf?
Well, yes.
I was born and raised in Najaf.
Najaf is considered as a Shiite city, populated mostly by Shiites, but always there are Christians here and there are Sunnis, too, and in the old days there were Jews, actually, in this city.
And until now there is an alley called – a Jewish alley used to be Jews there, wholesaling, manufacturing shoes, and wholesaling to the main bazaar which is adjacent to the alley.
And actually they own most of the shops in that main bazaar.
This is before the 1948.
And Iraq, which is known as that beautiful treasure of the wonderful mosaic fabric of society, actually it's not about only Shiites and Sunnis that live in Iraq.
There are other sects, the Mandaean, the Saadia, the John Baptist sect, and also there are the Yazidis, who are held as satanic worshipers, and actually they deny this, but they live in Sinjar, in a place where the Nineveh province is in the north, and they have a nice story.
The Yazidis back on September 2005, when the city of Tal Afar was bombed by the U.S. Air Force, forcing lots of Sunnis and Shiites who lived in Tal Afar, forcing them to leave.
This was cited as a great success by the president.
Well, the success and the progress I always keep hearing from this administration is nothing but destruction in Iraq.
But the Yazidis who saw those Shiites and Sunnis families seeking refuge from their city in Sinjar, they hosted them, they opened their homes and hearts and told them, please stay here as long as you want, and we know you're not holding us as clean as you are, we're going to leave you here, and we go stay with our relatives, and to that point you feel you're safe, you can go back home.
But they never did, because the agony and the problem of Iraq today has been going on since the last four years.
So they have had no opportunity to go back home.
No, actually they came down.
This story was narrated to me by the second Grand Ayatollah Sayyid Muhammad Sa'id al-Hakim in Najaf-1.
I visited him with a group of Muslim peacemakers along with the Christian peacemakers such as Sister Peggy Gish and Michelle Abed-Nar.
That was back in January 2006, last year actually.
We learned about the story and the Talafar people, Shiites and Sunnis, were in Najaf and Karbala that we tried to supply them with some food, clothing, and shelter.
And today, Scott, as you may know and your listeners, there are four million Iraqis that have been displaced at least for the last two years.
Two millions are displaced inside their own country as refugees, and the other two millions are outside Iraq.
And most of those four millions are the middle class, which actually has been destroyed in Iraq and replaced by a new generation that, for us, it's a strange generation.
Kids who couldn't go to school back in 1991 due to the harsh sanctions that Iraq has been subjected to, so kids aged 7 to 15, now they are adults, mostly join the poor trained army personnel in Iraq newly, of course, the new army, and the new formed police forces.
And many of those, the stranger, which don't hold the Iraqi real values in Iraq, placing the middle class in Iraq, most of them are criminals in the streets, unemployed, most of them, the employment runs about 65%.
When I go back, every time, looking for the generation, the people that I belong to, the middle class, hardly I found some.
They are either dead, chased out of the country, or imprisoned, or I don't know where they are.
Iraq is not Iraq.
Iraq is broken.
Iraq is lawless in the name of the Western democracy, actually American freedom, that was delivered back in 2003.
So the four million displaced, which there's actually a great report done by the Minority Rights Group International by Pruthi Taneja, that discusses the four million refugees, and particularly some of those very small ethnic and religious sects that you mentioned, Jews and Mandeans and Assyrian Christians, and all the other groups besides the major Shiite and Sunni and Kurdish groups, who along with, as you say, the middle class of the country, the bread and butter of the country, have been dispersed.
I believe what you're telling me now is there's really no one left except those who are unable to leave, or those who are willing to go and work for the occupation government.
Correct.
And also the rumors that we keep hearing here, the Sunnis killing Shiites or vice versa, the smokescreen that is used with actually what's happening in Iraq today, I would like to tell you that as you introduced me, as Sami from the Shiite city in Najaf, but my wife is Sunni, and Iraqi people, most of them are intermarried from all sects with no difference.
They managed to live for the last 13 years, 13 centuries actually, in a harmonious way, and what you see in Iraq today is not Sunnis are killing Shiites, it's actually people we don't know, that they are hired by third parties to destroy Sunni's mosque, destroy Shiite's mosque, and set bombs, goes off in markets where people are there just to demonize and make the resistance Iraqi element to look bad.
What is going on, there are 150,000 mercenaries in a form of private contractors, they are civilians, and I don't know if you or your listeners know about the story back in 2005, actually it was September 2005, when two British soldiers were caught in Basra wearing Arab clothes and having supplies of explosive devices, guns and other weapons in a private car, they were caught, then the British authority at that time, they stormed the jail, and they freed them, and we never learned about their mission at that time.
Right, well, I do remember that story, and in fact I spoke with Professor Juan Cole from the University of Michigan, maybe just a day or two later after that, and if I remember correctly, I don't know if I remember all the details, but the original accusations were that they had all these explosives and so forth, but what they really had was laid out for the cameras, and it wasn't bombs, and Juan Cole said it looked to him like they were on a surveillance mission, they had lately been harassing the Imam who they were within rifle range of when they were captured, and that basically they were undercover monitoring this guy that they were planning on capturing, and were routed and got in a gunfight and got captured.
So I understand, I believe what you're saying is, you believe that the sectarian violence, that the most egregious sectarian killings are not done by, say, Iran-backed Shiite factions, or foreign fighter al-Qaeda, jihadists on the Sunni side, but that it's the Westerners who are fomenting this covertly.
Correct.
Part of our Muslim Peacemakers team is to be in touch with the religious leaders, political leaders, government officials and tribal leaders and others, to bring them together and listen to their thoughts and views on what's going on in Iraq, and personally, with a group of MPT, we were able to meet with Sayyid Muqtada Sadr, who is the leader of the Al-Mahdi movement in Iraq.
As well, I met Dr. Haris Abbari, he is the head of the Muslim Scholar Board in Baghdad, separately.
Haris Abbari represents the Sunnis sects, and Muqtada represents partially the Shiites sects in the south.
So both indicated to me about they never and will never authorize any spell of Iraqi blood, no matter what the background of those Iraqis are, and always they met and draw together plans to work together.
But if you remember, on February 22nd of 2006, when the Samarra Golden Dome of Al-Imam Hassan Al-Haskari and his father, Al-Alhadi, was destroyed, we never got any investigation that resulted to clarify who was behind this bombing.
That's true, they just basically assumed it was Zarqawi and the foreign al-Qaeda fighters that did it.
Right, but the housing minister, later that day, he came out with initial information based on their own investigation, but it was not a thorough investigation, until now it's considered a mysterious operation that risked the Iraqi people and the casualties of the violence, and then risen from like 20 Iraqis got killed every day.
Now Sam, let me stop you here and make sure I understand you.
You're saying that the Westerners, perhaps in an event like the Samarra attack on the Golden Dome mosque, that they're maybe staging some of these to foment violence among Iraqis, or that they're staging every bit of it, that every truck bomb, you're not saying every truck bomb and every Shiite death squad is the Americans.
Well, let me put it this way, there are four factors that incite the violence in Iraq.
The first and the most biggest one is the United States forces in Iraq, the occupier forces.
Second, the resistance that counter the occupation and those resistance, Iraqi resistance fighters who target the U.S., only the U.S. military bases, the convoys that travel on the highways, and snipers that target American individuals.
And the third element is the criminals, homegrown and internationally, who are coming to Iraq to do their work for money and beyond that.
The fourth forces are the foreign intelligence agencies, and among them I would like to put the private contractors who are operating their jobs in civilian clothes, and they run about 100,000 to 150,000 of them, mainly actors of the Blackwater Corporation and also the Dine Corporation.
So those are not clear what they are doing.
Well, if I tried to add five and six foreign fighter jihadists on the Sunni side and the Iranian backed Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution and their army, the Badr Brigades, or even seven, the Mahdi Army, you're saying that these groups are not five, six, and seven on your list?
Remember, the Badr Brigade is sort of part of the government right now for mostly the interior ministers.
So the Shiite death squads to you count as the Americans by proxy, basically?
Well, that's exactly what I would like to say.
I would like to put them at the fourth because they are not clear.
They are intelligence agencies, work for foreign forces, including the U.S., the Israelis, the Iranians, and others, and the al-Qaeda members.
If you remember, John Martha was in Iraq over a year ago, and when he came back, he talked about a thousand members of al-Qaeda, and he indicated most of them are run by Iraqis, like they are Iraqis, most of them, who became extremists.
I would like to go back to the generational product of sanctions and the war for the last four years, people who can easily move rumors around and carry operations that really don't fit to the Iraqi society, and those forces are, as you mentioned, allowed to be working in Iraq because they target Americans too.
Right, and in fact, there's news we're featuring on antiwar.com today in the front line section.
I forget which newspaper it was, but we're featuring a story today, which is Sunday, the first of April, no fools, and that story is about local Sunnis turning against al-Qaeda and saying, you're no longer welcome here, we don't want your help anymore.
Exactly.
They are allowed there only because they are targeting the occupation forces.
Sammy, I just wanted to make sure and clarify that when you say foreign intelligence sources, that you're not just saying American Britain, but also Iranian involvement, Saudi involvement, Syrian perhaps.
Mossad too.
The Israelis are there too.
We know they're interfering at least in Kurdistan.
Well, in the southern sector too, and I'm just trying to tell you that Iraqis feel this war is done in Iraq, not for the interest of the American people.
The American has nothing to do with this war, but this war in Iraq, and maybe the war will be in Iran, it would be done on behalf of the Israelis.
This is the general feeling an intellectual Iraqi is saying.
The war in Iraq at least is about four letters, O for oil, I for Israel, and L for location or logistics you may say.
Right, Ray McGovern's acronym there.
Absolutely.
I have no problem with that.
Now let me ask you, you mentioned about, and this is what I really want to understand, and this is the real benefit I think that you can provide an insight from being there, and you did get to describe this a bit at the beginning as well, but I want to know more about what life is like for the average Iraqi.
You've already told me that the middle class, the educated, the professionals, the tradesmen are all gone.
The ethnic and religious sects have been banished basically, that there are four million displaced Iraqi refugees, two million of them have been lucky enough to get out of the country, two million displaced within.
I know you told this reporter from the Minneapolis Star Tribune that this cannot begin to change until America leaves.
So really the two-parter, I want to know more about what life is like for the average Iraqi in terms of electricity, water, sewage, schools, hospitals, roads, basic standard of living in that sense, and also what you believe is the solution to this problem, why it is you believe that America must leave immediately.
Well, America, because America failed to secure Iraq, to improve their life.
America failed to secure Iraqi's livelihood.
The Iraqis were promised and told that their life will be improved, and nothing of this happened.
The infrastructure has been deteriorating and literally destroyed.
I mean, last year when I came, the people in Baghdad were able to get four hours of electricity a day.
Now shrank to two hours.
So things are going to be really worse, worse and worse every day.
The U.S. failed completely in Iraq, and it took the U.S. major job or major progress in Iraq, was nothing but more destruction to the Iraqi life, to the country, to the future, to the memory that has been erased.
The history has been eliminated in Iraq by having the museums broken and looted.
You know the story.
You cannot ask the rapist to stay with the raped woman as a therapist.
Iraqis have been handcuffed and legs tight, blindfolded and thrown in the sea, and asked not to be wet.
Iraqis need their country back.
Iraqis only can rebuild their country and can rebuild and rule their country.
So until the U.S. leaves, then we know Iraqis are responsible.
Until this minute, it's the responsibility of the U.S., and I would like to shed some light on some numbers.
There are over a million Iraqi widows today in Iraq.
Women are shipped to sell their bodies out of their country in neighboring countries.
It's really painful.
4.5 million Iraqi kids under the age of five are malnourished.
We don't have the fuel in Iraq.
We have hard time to get some kerosene, to have some lanterns lit in our homes in Iraq.
We have problems to have propane gas to have our stove on to make some reasonable food and nutrition.
In Iraq, you have to stay two days.
You sleep two nights in your car in order to get your fuel, and the price is gone 25 fold up.
This is the country where it floats in a sea of oil.
You cannot find fuel where the fuel is shipped out of the country to the rest of the world.
The oil in the south is flowing to be shipped without meters.
Until recently, you believe that for the last four years, no meters, nobody knows how much is going out of the Iraqi wealth of oil, and the 700,000 Iraqi today in Jordan are considered illegally because they escaped the violence.
They have their kids who are school-aged.
They run between 170,000 to 230,000.
They are not allowed to go to school in Jordan because, according to the Jordanian local law, they are illegal and their parents cannot afford to send them to private schools.
So what kind of future are these kids going to have?
And we are here in a war against terror, as we hear.
Tell me, Scott, tell me, those kids, if they grow and they are not educated, they easily will be extremists.
And as you know, the extremism is under rise, whether it's in Iraq, in Afghanistan, elsewhere.
This war got stopped, and we should not act desperately because we are desperate to have our initiate another war in Iran, to forget about what's going on in Iraq initially, to forget what's going on in Lebanon and Palestine, and go and wage another war in Iran.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm talking with Sami Rasouli.
He's an Iraqi-American who lived in Minneapolis and is a successful restaurateur, owner of Sinbad's restaurant in Minneapolis.
And he's returned to Iraq and is the head of the Muslim Peacemaker team.
Well, you just, I think, pretty clearly put the lie, Sami, to the idea that somehow we're fighting them there so we don't have to fight them here, when in fact what we're doing is destroying the lives of people and giving them countless more motives to want to fight against the United States.
It's a pretty preposterous idea, and yet still it needs debunking, and so I appreciate that.
But the biggest excuse now on the part of the war party for not leaving Iraq is that things will be worse.
I mean, let's be honest, at least, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but if we can have a pretty realistic appraisal of the situation here, the Kurds and the Shiites have all the oil, and the Sunnis don't.
And the Sunni minority used to rule, and now they don't.
And so they're fighting because they want to control a monopoly government, whereas the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution types are just as happy to have extreme federalism or even partition.
The Kurds could probably go either way.
Motad al-Sadr, I think, wants a strong central state, but he wants to rule it with an iron fist and put a drill in the head of any Sunni who resists him.
And what America has done is, as you very well describe, destroyed the society, but it seems that what they've also done is put the American soldiers in the position of fighting the Sunni minority that they're actually protecting from the Shiite majority that has now been installed, the Iran-backed factions.
And that most Americans believe, and in fact I think I even believe, that when America leaves, the violence is going to get much worse, that this is going to have to be fought to some kind of conclusion, and the American presence is preventing that conclusion.
I think we ought to leave anyway because I don't think we're going to be able to put off these kind of circumstances to a point where they'll be better.
I think, as you say, we're making matters worse all the time.
But when we leave, do you believe that somehow there's going to be a multi-ethnic coalition government that's going to be able to hold this country together and not just a theocratic dictatorship of one sect or another over everyone else?
Absolutely not, Scott, and I tell you why.
You remember those four factors by classifying as instigating the violence in Iraq.
When the U.S. leaves, there will be no reason for the resistance to fight.
They will lay down their weapons and...
Well, but won't they have a reason to violently resist the domination by the Shiite majority?
Well, the Shiite majority, it's a hoax.
I mean, not because they are majority or not.
I mean the current government.
The current government is the fiction of our creation.
They don't represent average Iraqi.
They are confined in the green zone, my friend.
They don't know what's going on.
So if America left the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, the Dawa party, they would be ruined.
They would be leaving.
They cannot stay.
And what about Muqtada al-Sadr?
He's homegrown power.
Well, he is part of the equation.
If he wants to participate in the political process, he better realize he cannot impose himself, but he will participate in that.
And he was used by Maliki, by the Hezbollah, the Dawa party.
And he is demonized also by the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq by al-Hakim.
Muqtada al-Sadr, he is one figure leader.
His aides have been detained or killed, driven out of the country.
Even him, nobody knows where he is.
But when I met him, he indicated any mutual relationship between countries should be based on respect and acceptance and recognition, but not by occupation and imposing a country on others.
He was referring to the U.S. That's why he was taking the stand against the occupation.
But when it comes to the rest of the Iraqi factions, Iraqi political party or religion, he always said, Islam treated Iraqis just like the come teeth.
You understand what I mean?
Like equally.
Whether they are Muslims or non-Muslims, Shias or Sunnis, Kurds or Arabs, always he indicated.
But we demonize the guy.
We call him all the time a thug.
Well, his guys put drills in the head of the people they execute, man.
He never agreed when we talked to him about this.
He never said that these practices, which you refer to as death squads, those are until now.
We don't know who they are.
We just speculate.
But they run under the supervision of the Iraqi government through the interior ministry.
Absolutely.
And this is supervised also by the U.S. forces.
Absolutely.
Yeah, that part's not in dispute whether this is all America's fault or not.
But still, this is my understanding is that the interior ministry in the Iraqi army is basically a mix between the Mahdi army and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution's Badr Corps.
And that, you know, they're taking turns putting drills in the heads of Sunnis.
The Mahdi army was a spontaneous movement that took place right after the fall of Saddam.
And those like neighborhood young men, they were a follower of Muqtada al-Sadr.
They support his line politically and religiously.
They gathered to protect the properties of the people, the homes, the women and others in Najaf and Karbala.
But over the time, we give it the importance and we give it the idea that al-Mahdi army is something real.
It's not as you think.
There are a base, a lot of followers to say Muqtada al-Sadr.
Like you have about five million Shiites who are in the south.
They follow his house, which is seminary.
And it's called the spoken house versus the silent house, which is a sistani house.
So both are like competing to get the followers and the sector of the south, the shared sector of Iraq.
Now, the Hezbollah, Maliki and Ja'fari, they are leading a party, but they don't have the base.
So they had to strike a deal with Muqtada al-Sadr to be the leader and using the base of Muqtada when the second election took place and they won.
And if you pay attention to the prime minister, he is not a part of the Supreme Council.
Right, he's Dawah.
Right, he is Dawah.
So why al-Hakim lost?
Al-Hakim has no such actually approval or support that al-Mahdi has.
And the Dawah also, they don't have the support.
But now by having the eight most important eight that consult with Said Muqtada in Iraq, they've been chased like five.
Last Monday, there was a car carrying a mother who just gave birth to a baby.
She with her father, with the husband and sister, they got shot at in Najaf.
The baby got killed and others got injured.
Then brothers of the mother came, two brothers came and they got shot too, got injured.
This report, I had it two days ago from Najaf.
The story was told to me a week ago, but not in detail.
And the reason, because the U.S. is chasing al-Mahdi army leaders such as aides of Muqtada's father.
Again, if the U.S. leave tomorrow, I believe profoundly Iraq will start to heal.
They might have their own clashes on civil war, as you may say.
But everybody is saying, we better have it now, not a year from now or ten years from now.
We got to get over with the Iraqi problem.
The occupation should be ended now.
And my feeling, the occupation will not end.
It's going to continue and the Iraqis will pay dearly the price of the occupation.
How soon are you going back to Iraq, sir?
I'm going at the end of May.
At the end of May.
And you'll be spending the meantime back here in the States asking Americans to please get out of Iraq?
Well, I'm trying.
I'm trying, but I believe the U.S. sees it's withdraw from.
Iraq is a disastrous defeat, which is not only for the U.S., mainly for the Israelis who are pushing the U.S. to stay in Iraq and also driving the U.S. to another war with Iran maybe soon.
Let me ask you one more thing.
You've brought up the possibility of war with Iran a couple of times here.
I've read two pretty disturbing quotations, one from Moqtada al-Sadr, another from Abdulaziz Aqin, the head of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, both of whom have said that if Americans are going back to Iraq, they're going back to the United States.