Tariq Ali: And so, if we come down to the speed with which this
particular organisation swept through parts of Iraq, which you yourself
talk about in the book, how do you explain the total collapse of the
Iraqi army, Patrick? Is it in that sense not too much different from
the army created by the West in Afghanistan, the fact that they are not
prepared to fight and die for the United States?At that time it
was, al-Qaeda and Iraq was only one of a number of serious resistance
movements to the occupation but it was very evident in Baghdad at the
time when I went to American briefings that anything that happened was
attributed by the spokesman, the military spokesman, to al-Qaeda. Of
course this played well back in the US, but in Iraq it had quite the
contrary effect which people who were against the occupation think, oh
it’s al-Qaeda who’s doing all this resisting, let’s go an get a black
flag and join them…
Patrick Cockburn:
Yeah, and
even more so. I mean I think this is, it’s difficult to think of
another example in history, where there are 300 or 350 thousand men in
the Iraqi army, they’d spent 41.6 billion dollars on this army over the
last three years. But it disintegrated because of an attack by maybe a
couple of thousand people in Mosul. Why did it happen? Well, the army
was rather extraordinary. I mean one Iraqi general I was talking to
who’d been forcibly retired said at the beginning of the disaster was
the Americans, [who] when they set it up, insisted that supplies and
things like that should be outsourced, privatised.
So immediately a colonel of
a battalion nominally of 600 men would get money for 600 men, [but] in
fact there were only 200 men in it, and would pocket the difference,
which was spread out among the officers. And this applied to fuel, it
applied to ammunition… At the time of the fall of Mosul there are meant
to be 30,000 troops there. In fact, it’s estimated that only one in
three was there. Because what you did was: you joined the army, you got
your full salary and then you kicked back half that salary to your
officer, who spread it among the officers. So I remember about a year
ago talking to a senior Iraqi politician, and who said look: the
army’s going to collapse if it’s attacked. I said surely some will
fight, he said: no no no, you don’t understand. These officers are
not soldiers, they’re investors!
They have no interest in fighting anybody; they have interest in making money out of their investment.
Of course you had to buy your position. So in 2009, you want to be a
colonel in the Iraqi army, it’ll cost you about 20,000 dollars, more
recently it cost you about $200,000. You want to be divisional
commander, and there are 15 divisions, it will cost you about 2 million.
Of course, there are other ways of making money. Checkpoints on the
roads act as sort of customs barriers and a tariff on each truck going
through would be paid. So that’s why they ran away, led by their
commanding officer, the three commanding generals got into a helicopter
in civilian clothes and fled to Erbil, the Kurdish capital. And that led
to the final dissolution of the army.
Tariq Ali: It is one of the most astonishing events in recent
history, Patrick. I mean can you think of any other equivalent, even in
the last century?
Patrick Cockburn: I can’t think of any of such a large well-equipped
army disintegrating. You could say that Saddam’s army disintegrated in
’91 when attacked by the Americans, and again in 2003. But then it was
attacked by the largest military force in the world and was
being bombed. So it’s not a parallel. It of course shows that ISIS was
quite effective in spreading terror through social media, by films of
it decapitating Shia captives. So the soldiers were terrified of ISIS.
And also the whole Sunni
community, about 20% of Iraqis, maybe 6 million in the Sunni provinces,
were alienated by the Nouri al-Malaki’s regime. They were
persecuted, they couldn’t get jobs, collective punishment, young men in
villages around Fallujah – sometimes there aren’t many young men because
they’re all in jail – and some were on death row going to be executed
for crimes which somebody had already been executed for. It was
completely arbitrary.
So not
surprisingly to this day it’s one of the reasons that ISIS still has
support, that for all its bloodthirstiness, for a lot of the Sunni
community it’s better than the Iraqi army and the Iraqi Shia militias
coming back.
Tariq Ali: I mean this is something which apart from yourself and
possibly one other journalist in the entire Western media is not being
reported at all, that however violent and brutal this group seems and
is, it does have some support among the population…
Patrick Cockburn: Yes, ISIS has a number of different kinds of
support. It has support of the alienated Sunni community in Iraq and
also in Syria. That at least their victors, after all these people have
been defeated – they were defeated in ’91 by the Americans, they were
defeated again in 2003, they were marginalised, persecuted – so victory
is important to them. I think also they appeal to jobless young men, I
mean sometimes referred to as the underclass, but actually just the
poor, poor young men.
Tariq Ali: Poor and unemployed.
Patrick Cockburn: Poor, unemployed young men with nothing in front of
them: this does have an appeal for them. And the alternative is pretty
bad. I mean, the few successful counterattacks made primarily by the
Shia and Kurdish militias, that they’ve immediately driven out
the Sunni from areas were ISIS had driven out the Shia. So from the
Sunni point of view, they don’t have much alternative but to stick with
ISIS.
Tariq Ali: And is there no alternative Sunni organisation, which
at least offers a different political programme apart from this sort of
fanaticism shown by ISIS. I mean, what about the Association of Sunni
Scholars?
Patrick Cockburn: Many sort of went along with ISIS trying to sort
of ride the tiger. And … it was believed in Baghdad, and I think really
until about a month ago, that, yes,
ISIS
had appeared to have won these great victories but in fact they were
simply the shock troops of the Sunni community. And there were tribes
and there were former army officers and there were others like the
scholars who would displace them once the Sunni had got what they
wanted.
Tariq Ali: And we thought this was wishful thinking because ISIS
tends to monopolise power just as soon as it can, even when it took
power in an area in combination with others. It’s also
extremely paranoid, so it’s going to kill anybody whom it thinks is
preparing to stab it in the back or rise up against it. In Mosul for
instance, they seem to have taken hostage about 300 people. But former
generals, sort of Sunni dignitaries, the sort of people who they suspect
might lead that sort of resistance. And in Syria, in Deir ez-Zo
province, one tribe sort of rose up against them, they crushed it
immediately and executed 700 of its members. So I think it’s just
wishful thinking to imagine that ISIS is going to be displaced in the
areas it has conquered.
,
but you want to avoid a conspiracy theory that the Saudis are the sort
of master who moves the pawns on the board, which is sometimes believed
in parts of the Middle East. The Saudis have always been behind the
Jihadi movement in general, above all abroad, not within Saudi Arabia.
And generally they will support those who oppose Shia governments, and
don’t really distinguish or didn’t really distinguish who they were
supporting. But it’s also pretty clear that a lot of their support did
go to ISIS, did go to other groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, this was all
through private donors, not just Saudi Arabia, but Kuwait and Qatar,
and Turkey.
The US and Britain would [try to] distinguish between the moderate
Syrian opposition in this corner and the Jihadi extreme opposition
in the other corner. But actually the two were together, I mean there
was a report this very week by a research organisation itemising various
weapons in the hands of ISIS that appear to have been supplied by Saudi
Arabia last year to the supposedly moderate Syrian opposition, but were
immediately transferred because the gap between the two is much
more limited than you’d imagine…
Tariq Ali: Yeah. And
there’s a report in, I think, in the newspapers today as we speak, that
Steven Sotloff was sold to ISIS by a supposedly moderate Syrian
organisation who captured him.
Patrick Cockburn: Yes, his family are saying this. And it’s also
interesting that immediately the American spokesmen say: no no no that
didn’t happen, because they can see how far this undermines what may be
their policy to be announced today by Obama of building up a moderate
opposition, a third force, which is going to supposedly fight Assad and
fight ISIS simultaneously
Tariq Ali: It’s pure fantasy
Patrick Cockburn:
It’s
fantasy … in that form. But I mean it’s interesting that the commanding
general of the Free Syrian Army says that the Free Syrian Army
commanders in Syria, now get their orders directly from the Americans.
He said he and the other officers in Turkey were meant to be the
headquarters and the leaders of the Free Syrian Army. He said I think
it’s 16 commanders in northern Syria and some other, about 60 of the
smaller groups in the South, now get their equipment, advice and
instructions directly from the Americans
Tariq Ali: But Patrick, this again is pretty astonishing. That
here we had, not so long ago, the entire Western world led by the United
States determined to get rid of Assad, arming all these people, and as
you’ve pointed out arms flowing from one group to the other in
the battle against Assad. And now we are facing a situation where the
United States might actually be bombing ISIS sites inside Syria. Is this
possible?
Patrick Cockburn: Well I think so. I think they’ve gone so far down
this road to suggesting this that I think it’ll certainly happen at some
point. One of the strengths of ISIS is being able to operate in Iraq
and Syria
Tariq Ali: At the same time…
Patrick Cockburn: At the same time. And in fact its potential
constituency in Syria is bigger than Iraq, because only 20 percent of
Iraqis are Syri, are Sunni Arabs and 60 percent of Syrians are
Sunni Arabs. So potentially they could dominate the Syrian opposition
and not all of course of Syrian Sunni Arabs support the opposition,
quite a lot support the government. But they can have a far bigger reach
there and they are still expanding. I mean they are 30 miles from
Aleppo. They inflicted some of the biggest defeats, in fact the biggest
defeats, which the Syrian army has suffered in three years. [These] were
inflicted in Raqqah province within the last month by ISIS.
Tariq Ali: Okay, now let’s come to the third factor in the
situation, not discussed seriously but often referred to. The Kurdish
parties in Syria and in Iraq are clearly opposed to all this and are
fighting ISIS as best they can.The Kurds in Syria are under siege from
them, the Kurds in Iraq are determined to fight them. To what extent
is this effective and why was the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq not capable
of dealing with them in a tougher way at the very beginning?
Patrick Cockburn: I think probably the reputation of the Peshmerga in
Iraq was exaggerated anyway. They haven’t fought anybody apart from
their own [separatist] war and that was in the 90s, for many years.
They were always good at mountain ambushes and at public relations,
but otherwise it was always a bit exaggerated. I mean maybe it’s not
their fault, they were fighting Saddam’s enormous army. But that
was exaggerated. And also it has become an oil state…many Kurds are just
interested in making money and so forth. Now they say they weren’t
properly equipped.
Well, you know, you can buy arms … it doesn’t all have to come from
America. Why are there all this big hotels in Erbil their capital, and
why didn’t they have some heavy machine guns? And they also have got a
600 mile border to defend. And also they took advantage of the fall of
Mosul to extend their territories into territories [that are] disputed
with the Arabs. This made the Arabs in these mixed areas much more
anti-Kurdish than they had been previously. So there was acceptability
to what ISIS did in advancing among the Arabs, and one of the many toxic
effects of this is that the populations are now separating. First of
all the Yazidis and the Kurds and others fled, and now the Sunni Arabs
are fleeing these areas to avoid revenge attacks
Tariq Ali: And what about the Syrian Kurds?
Patrick Cockburn: Well, that’s different because they are 10% of the
population in Syria. They’re in enclaves mostly in the North East and
the North.
Tariq Ali: And Assad has given them autonomy, this is true?
Patrick Cockburn: Not quite, but they’ve sort of [made an]
opportunistic withdrawal, because he knows that … ISIS is going
to attack them … and actually you know, the people that are attacking
them are not just ISIS but Jabhat al-Nusra. All the other opposition
groups suddenly come together to attack the Kurds in these areas. I mean
it also undermines that idea that there is a moderate opposition and a
Jihadi opposition. That the Free Syrian Army and all these others come
to attack the Kurds. The [dominant] Kurds there are … the PKK which is
basically the Turkish Kurdish opposition. But they are much more
effective fighters than the Iraqi Peshmerga. In fact, they rescued quite
a lot of the Yazidis in Sinjar in Western Kurdistan
Tariq Ali: The Syrian Kurd state….
Patrick Cockburn: The Syrian Kurds, yeah. Somewhat to the embarrassment of the [Kurds] of Erbil
Tariq Ali: Yeah. So, coming to the key thing now. You’ve
written that the Skykes-Picot agreement has probably finally
finished. This was the agreement after the First World War whereby
Ottoman lands in the Arab world were divided up between France and
Britain. But Patrick, you may be right. In 2006 I felt that there
was no future for Iraq as a state because of what had happened and you’d
probably have a Shia state and a pro-Saudi Sunni state and a Kurdish
state. Do you think this is going to happen now in some shape or
form over the next five years?
Patrick Cockburn: In some shape, but not exactly, you know I don’t
think map-makers are going to sort of have the borders of their
new states there. But I think you’ll effectively have three sovereign
states in Iraq. And you do have that already. I mean, you’re a Shia in
Baghdad. If I’m in Baghdad, I can’t go an hour North of Baghdad without
having my head chopped off. Likewise a Kurd in the North and likewise
any Sunni who tries to come through any checkpoint in Baghdad or into
Kurdistan is likely to be arrested…
Tariq Ali: Well you’ve been visiting Baghdad for years, Patrick.
Are you telling me that effectively there are ethnic borders now in
Baghdad and you can’t move from one part of the city to the other?
Patrick Cockburn: No. Between Baghdad and the rest of Iraq you can’t.
I mean there are Sunni parts of Baghdad, but you had a sectarian civil
war 2006-7 in which the Sunni basically lost. So they have quite small
enclaves in Baghdad. There aren’t many mixed areas left, the
Shia dominate the city. Now these Sunni areas could rise up, but they’re
also vulnerable to counterattack from the Shia majority. There could be
a battle for Baghdad but the Sunni in the city are likely to lose it,
which is one of the reasons why they are terrified.
Tariq Ali: And there’s a Kurdish population in Baghdad too, let’s not forget…
Patrick Cockburn: Yes, but a lot of them are, have melted into the local population.
Tariq Ali: Intermarriages?
Patrick Cockburn: Intermarriages…. There’s never been sort
of hardcore Kurdish areas or enclaves in Baghdad with their own militia,
which is true of the Shia, and in a covert way is true of the Sunni as
well.
Tariq Ali: If we just move to Syria for a bit. What is your
impression of the current state of play with the sort of emergence of
ISIS, not just the emergence but the successes of ISIS, with the Americans
in NATO now trying to work up some sort of a plot or, not a plot,
but openly debating how to destroy the organisation. Surely this
is going to, I mean, immediately strengthen the Assad
regime, regardless of what is intended or not…
Patrick Cockburn: Yes, I think that’s absolutely true. And that’s of course what has put them in such a muddle. I mean
ISIS controls about 35, 40% of Syria. In eastern Syria, they control the oil fields.
They’re very close to Aleppo, which was the biggest city in Syria.
They could take over the rebel held part and then maybe they could take
over the whole city. This would be more significant than taking Mosul in
Iraq. Jihadi organisations, particularly Jabhat al-Nusra, but also
ISIS, are close to Hama, the fourth biggest city in Syria. So they’re in
a strong position. It wouldn’t take much for ISIS to reach the
Mediterranean there, where they were before they did a tactical
withdrawal earlier in the year.
So it’s rather an extraordinary situation that you have America and
the other Westerners and powers saying we’re going to intervene against
ISIS but we’re not going to do anything to help Assad. But Assad is the
main enemy of ISIS and if they’re trying to weaken Assad then they help
ISIS. And it’s the result of their, to my mind, catastrophic policies
over the last two years. It has been evident since the end of 2012 that
Assad was not going to go, previous to that there was a presumption that
in 2011 and 2012, in the Western capitals and elsewhere, that he was
going to follow Gaddafi–he was going to go down. But they’ve sort of
pretended that he was going to go. [In] negotiations in Geneva earlier
this year it was said … that the only thing worth talking about
was transition, Assad going.
But Assad obviously wasn’t going to go, because there are 14 provincial capitals in Syria and he held 13 of them. So if
you said that, in fact, you were saying: well, then the war will go
on because he wasn’t going to go. And I think for a time, they
– Washington, and the others, and the Saudis – were not unhappy
with this. It was something they could live with because he was
there but he was weak and was probably going to stay there. And then the
Jihadis were there, but they were involved in their own civil war. But
the great miscalculation was that on the Jihadis side one group would
win out, which was ISIS. And secondly, this wasn’t going to remain
Syrian on Syrian, or Iraqi on Iraqi, or even Muslim on Muslim, that
after all the new caliphate claims the allegiance of all Muslims and
claims the allegiance of the world. So its ambitions….
Tariq Ali: Are global…
Patrick Cockburn: Are global.
T
ariq Ali: And its prospectus, which is very similar to the NATO
prospectus, if you see both organisations’ prospectuses together, it’s obvious that ISIS has copied the NATO model. They
have pictures like that one in their prospectus saying this is what we
do, this is how many people we killed here, there. There’s no shame at
all about what they are doing. So
in a weird way, despite the ideology which is Wahhabi and sort
of born-again Muslimism, literalism, they are quite modern in their
approach in some ways are they not?
Patrick Cockburn:
Yes, I
mean rather amazingly so. You know, at the beginning of the Arab
uprisings in 2011, blogging, new Twitter, YouTube, were considered
progressive instruments that would erode the power of police states and
authoritarianism and so forth. But in fact, the people that have put
them to greatest use have been Jihadi organisations, and ISIS in
particular, to spread their views, to spread terror, very effectively. The families
of an Iraqi soldier in Baghdad, you know, a soldier’s wife, his mother,
they’ve all seen this stuff so, they say: don’t go back to the army,
you’ll be killed. So this is pretty effective
Tariq Ali: Patrick, what is the United States going to do now,
what are its options? I mean do you think they can have any success in
wiping out ISIS, which seems to be their plan. I mean how the hell are
they going to do it without ground troops and all the available
reports suggest that the Pentagon is opposed to putting in ground
troops. I mean are they going to find some Arab countries to act as
their auxiliaries?
Patrick Cockburn: Well, yes, … auxiliaries. I don’t think they’re
going to commit troops. I mean look what happened: the Iraqi army fled,
the Syrian army fought, it still lost. It lost an important air base in
Raqqah province a few weeks ago although it fought very hard. So I
think they’ll be very nervous of fighting ISIS. The US is looking,
Obama says, for local partners. It’s a bit unclear what this means.
Local partners in Baghdad, the parties have sort of come
together because they’re all terrified of ISIS but when you look more
closely the Kurds have agreed to nothing. The Sunni leaders have taken
some jobs in Baghdad, but these are Sunni leaders who dare not go back
their own cities and towns because they’d get their heads chopped off.
So it’s still very disorganised and divided and has only sort of
happened under pressure from the US and Iran who have parallel interests
there.
Tariq Ali: Well they know exactly the obvious ally in this, were they looking for serious allies in the region, would actually be Iran.
Which they’re not prepared to consider because they’ve demonised
Iran to such a level and the Israelis would probably be hostile to any
such notion. Because the Iranians could use any alliance with the
Americans now to get a bomb quickly like General Zia did during the war
against Afghanistan. But apart from Iran, who else is there with the
firepower?
Patrick Cockburn:
Yes, and also this applies to Syria as well. the Americans and the others are sort of refusing to make a choice …
Say we put a coalition backed by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi
Arabia. These people have money, they have influence on the Jihadis
maybe, on the Sunni community, but they’re avoiding changing
relations or ending confrontation with Iran and in Syria Russia matters a
lot. They’re still hostile to Hezbollah … and the Kurds in Syria who
are fighting ISIS rather effectively. So what is it? It’s really a
recipe for a very long war in a very confused situation.
And, you know, what are they going to do if ISIS advances into
Aleppo? Are they going to bomb it there at the same time as the Syrian
Air Force is bombing ISIS? How do they know that Syrian Air Force planes
are not going to try to shoot down American planes? Of course, what
they will do, I think, is have covert relations with the
Assad government. In fact, I’m told they already do–not to do a public
U-turn but have a sort of an understanding with them, as to some degree
happened in Iraq after 2003…
Iraqis
always used to say that Iran and the US wave their fists at each other
over the table, but they sort of shake hands under the table
Tariq Ali: Which they did.
Patrick Cockburn: Oh absolutely.
Tariq Ali: Without the Iranian green light it would have been difficult for them to take Iraq just like that.
Patrick Cockburn: Oh yes. Why did we have Nouri al-Maliki as the
disastrous Prime Minister of Iraq for eight years and then reappointed
in 2010? And I remember an Iraqi friend of mine, a diplomat, rang me up
when Maliki … basically got back as Prime Minister and said, you know,
the great Satan America and the axis of evil Iran have come together
with … catastrophic consequences for Iraqis.
Tariq Ali: Exactly. So Patrick, overall the situation is pretty grim and likely to remain so?
Patrick Cockburn: Yes, it’s grim because there are so many players
involved. There are so many different crises entangled with each other
that this is now likely to go on for a long time. There might have
been a moment two years ago when they could’ve prevented ISIS taking
off. Because really the war in Syria that changed the fortunes of ISIS.
Previously in Iraq, it benefited from the alienation of
the Sunni community, but suddenly the war in Syria relaunched ISIS,
because it destabilised Iraq. It reignited the war in Iraq which
had died down, but never quite ended. And Iraqi politicians, I remember
Hoshyar Zebari, the foreign minister saying to me at that time, if
the West allows the war in Syria to go on, that will inevitably
destabilise Iraq and that is what has happened.
Tariq Ali: On that pessimistic note, we end this conversation. Thanks very much Patrick and we will talk again no doubt.
Patrick Cockburn: Great, thank you.
Tariq Ali is the author of The Obama Syndrome (Verso).
