#30 — Inside the Crucible
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Summary
In this episode, I speak with Michael Weiss, senior editor at The Daily Beast and co-author of a New York Times bestseller about the Islamic State, ISIS, Inside the Army of Terror, about the Syrian civil war.
Transcript
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I spoke to Michael Weiss, the senior editor at the Daily Beast, and co-author of a New
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York Times bestseller about the Islamic State, entitled ISIS, Inside the Army of Terror.
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And we focus primarily on ISIS and the civil war in Syria.
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And as you'll hear, Michael is just a fount of information on these topics.
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You might have to listen to this twice to get all the details here.
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Unfortunately, we had a few audio issues with Skype, so you'll hear a few irregularities
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But I think you'll agree by the end that listening to Michael talk about ISIS and the
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Syrian civil war has made you much smarter on these subjects.
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And you'll come away with a much clearer sense of how complicated U.S. foreign policy and
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Well, I'm here with Michael Weiss from the Daily Beast.
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Well, listen, I know you as a writer and editor for The Beast, but why don't you tell me and
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our audience a little bit more about you and how you come to know so much about the Middle
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East, which is, I'm sure, going to be the bulk of what we talk about.
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And tell us about your book on ISIS and all the rest.
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I started writing about the Middle East about 10 years ago, I think.
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Some of it was on the Israel-Palestine conflict, a lot of it then became covering the so-called
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I was working at a London think tank, the Henry Jackson Society, and of all the countries
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that had been covered, the one that wasn't, which was just then in its infancy of an uprising
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So it literally, one day, my boss sort of dropped it into my lap and said, here, you need
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to sort of assess this and tell us what we need to know.
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So it started with a survey of who the opposition on the ground was.
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We managed to get interviews with activists and leaders of the so-called local coordination
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There's a misconception that the Syrian revolution started when a dozen kids scrawled on the walls
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in Deraa, but actually the earliest protests were registered in Damascus itself, in the old
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So, you know, in the very capital, in the heart of Assad's regime.
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And what struck me is, you know, we had seen in Egypt, to a lesser degree in Tunisia, although
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we can probably get into some of that, particularly how the media has covered groups like Ennada.
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But we saw the, you know, sort of the late failure of radical hopes, teenagers turning out in
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the streets of Takara Square, protesting a pretty vicious authoritarian dictatorship.
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And then, you know, it gets hijacked by religious extremists or, you know, as they were depicted
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So now, Michael, you're talking about what happened during the so-called Arab Spring?
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And in Syria, what I was struck by was, you know, the people who were leading this uprising,
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And, you know, they had various views on which kind of country they wanted to model a future
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Some, many said, like the United States or like France.
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But what we now, one of the things that bothers me, and one of the reasons I wrote this book
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on ISIS, was to try and sort of turn back the clock to the very beginning.
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Because for a lot of people, history began when ISIS stormed into Mosul in 2014.
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And, you know, essentially this was always a jihadist insurgency.
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It was always being led by al-Qaeda and other assorted elements.
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And, you know, one of the things that I'm most interested in in my work is the relationship
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And this is something that is just characteristic of the region.
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I mean, I've done a lot of work on Russia's facilitation of jihadism beginning in Chechnya,
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but also, you know, leading up to the Syria conflict.
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I mean, they've been sending jihadists into Syria because better they blow stuff up in
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And all of this gets elided in the way that the West tends to cover these things.
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But anyway, you know, Assad's relationship with the very element that now claims to be
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trying to overthrow his regime and establish an Islamic state, I find fascinating.
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So one of the leitmotifs of our book, and I co-wrote it with a Syrian national called
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Hassan Hassan, is to kind of, you know, dredge up some of this occluded history of the way
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not only the Syrian government, but also the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein was, you
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know, if not necessarily a catalyst, then at least an underwriter of much of the unpleasantness
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Now, people forget, and you know, it is true, the Bush administration misrepresented and lied
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about a lot of the intelligence in terms of Saddam's relationship with jihadi groups
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But it is also the case, after the invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf War, he inaugurated
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something called the Islamic Faith Campaign, which was an attempt to marry the Ba'ath ideology
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And the reason for this was he saw the greatest threat to his regime, well, there were two.
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One was from Iran next door, with whom he had waged a brutal eight-year war, and the
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other was internally from Islamist elements, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood.
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So one of the unintended consequences of the faith campaign was people abandoned the Ba'athism
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And a lot of these elements have wound up, or they did wind up in the so-called anti-American
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But now, funnily enough, a lot of these former regime elements are in the upper echelons of
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You're looking at lieutenant colonels in the Iraqi army, or agents of the Muqabarat intelligence
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And some of the leading operatives, including those who constructed the ISIS franchise in
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northern Syria in 2013, they behaved very much like state-trained, almost Stasi-like intelligence
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So this is something I think, you know, that needs to get addressed.
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And this is not by any means, and I'm sure you'll want to talk about this, not to undermine
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or dismiss the element and the currents of Islamic fundamentalism that run throughout ISIS.
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It's very much a prominent factor, particularly amongst the so-called foreign fighters and the
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Mujahideen coming around from around the world who think they're going to usher in the apocalypse.
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You know, you were being asked to presume that people who, as of 2002 or even early 2003,
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were drinking wine, wearing military fatigues with epaulets they had never earned, keeping
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their 12 mistresses in their eight mansions scattered throughout the state of Iraq.
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That as of today, now that they've got the long black beard and the dish dasha, they really
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Or is there perhaps a political project that's underlying much of what ISIS is doing?
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And I think that that's something that needs greater discussion.
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And it's indeed, I mean, one of the sort of mainstays of my work is to try and figure out,
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you know, where the messianic or eschatological element ends and where the political, literal
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Well, let's talk about that, because this is just a truly complicated situation.
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It's kind of a challenge to figure out how to talk about it and, you know, which thread
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Just a few things I want to respond to, and then maybe we can figure out how to circle
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But the first thing is that what you said about the Russians exporting their jihadists, I had
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And that's kind of analogous to what the Saudis have done on some basic level.
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And just to this point about secular people cynically using religion and religious ideology
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to manipulate, recruit, and otherwise advance their political aims, there are obviously
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And people often point to that as a sign that religion isn't really as important a variable
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But what I always say at that point in the conversation is that it only works.
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A cynical, actually secular leader pretending to be devout only manages to whip up a mob or
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a political movement under the aegis of those religious ideas because the people on the ground
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I mean, it's only a successful lever to pull because it's attached to something.
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So it doesn't embarrass my overriding concern about the potency of religious ideology to have
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pointed out that some significant subset of any ostensibly religious regime is actually staffed
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by cynical, Machiavellian, mustache-twirling secularists who are just using the ambient level
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of religious sectarianism or religious faith for their political aims.
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But as you do, let's go into just what you think the psychological and political reality is
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in ISIS, if they have these ex-Baathists who, in fact, aren't religious, in fact, may even be
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Does al-Baghdadi just not care who these people are?
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Actually, it's called Saddam Hussein University, believe it or not.
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And the only way he could enroll in that program is if his family had Baath Party connections.
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A lot of people joined the Baath Party not because they were true card-carrying ideologues.
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And, you know, one of the stupider things the United States did after, of course, invading Iraq
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was the de-Baathification of the first three tiers of the party.
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So a lot of people, you know, engineers, doctors, professionals who had joined up just so they
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could get ahead in life and make a living were rendered unemployed.
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With Baghdadi, he is an absolute true believer by all accounts.
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He actually does think that, you know, the armies of Rome will clash with the armies of
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Islam in Dabik, which is a town in Aleppo province.
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You know, this is the great sort of Chileastic conspiracy that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had put
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And with Zarqawi, it was always about bleeding into Syria.
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And even people who, you know, purport to espouse a totalist or pure ideology often have contradictory
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or alternative, you know, modes of thinking or systems of belief creeping in.
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I mean, are these Baathists, are they, quote unquote, secular or apostate?
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They can have been radicalized or Salafized under the faith campaign or even just, you
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know, by the sheer brutality and chaos of living in Iraq, both pre- and post-Saddam.
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But I think it is one of the more fascinating issues of looking at ISIS.
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And look, I mean, I'm an atheist like you, you know, and our dearly departed friend Christopher
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Hitchens used to say that religion was just another form of totalitarianism.
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I think that was the kind of the driving force behind his critique of it is that, you know,
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he had kind of in some ways gone through it himself as a believing Marxist and Trotskyist.
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You know, Raymond Aron called Marxism a Christian heresy.
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And this is why, by the way, you find people who come from, you know, secular or temporal ideologies
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essentially swapping one, you know, totalitarianism for another and taking up, you know,
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some extreme form of religion or not so extreme form of religion.
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In fact, one of the leading evangelical Christians in the United States discovered Jesus in a
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He's actually Jewish, a Jewish Marxist who became an evangelical Christian.
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And this is not an attempt to embarrass—I mean, you know, I am a great admirer of your work
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and a co-thinker, so it's not an attempt to embarrass it.
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It is an attempt, though, to try and fully understand.
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And again, you know, I want to show that ISIS does not exist in this vacuum of fundamentalism.
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It has state sponsors, or I should say not sponsors, but state accomplices.
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I mean, to this day, you know, it's running all of Syria's natural gas industry
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and selling that natural gas back to Damascus, which claims to be at war with it.
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It runs most of the oil wells in eastern Syria and is selling oil not only to free Syrian army
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groups but also back to Damascus and to smugglers in Turkey and Iraqi Kurds.
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I mentioned Russia, and the reason I do is people think Vladimir Putin is this great counterterrorist, right?
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I mean, he hates Islamic radicalism, and he went to war in Syria to destroy ISIS.
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I mean, if you look at the metrics, 10 percent, according to the Pentagon spokesman Steve Warren,
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10 percent of Russia's sorties have been going after ISIS.
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Now, the rest have been going after groups that range from nationalists to Islamists to jihadists,
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including the al-Qaeda franchise, but, you know, with Putin, the goal, I think, is quite simple.
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It's exactly what Assad and the Iranians' goal has been from the beginning,
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deprive the West of any attractive, credible alternative to the dictatorship in Damascus
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and make it a stark choice of the taqfiris on the one hand or, you know, this secular war criminal on the other.
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And that's not really a choice because no one in the West, as much as they may loathe Bashar al-Assad
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and hold him responsible as well they should for the destruction of the country,
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they don't think he's going to be flying planes into buildings in New York or Washington, D.C.
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And, you know, one of the real challenges, Sam, is ISIS has broken apart or cleaved away from al-Qaeda.
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And I keep saying that, you know, we're now at a more dangerous point than we were right after 9-11
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because the way that al-Qaeda is going to compete with ISIS is through blood and fire and terror.
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And that's going to play out on the streets of Europe.
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It's playing out in Turkey, which has suffered more ISIS attacks than any other country.
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although that was a case of people being inspired by rather than being trained up and dispatched as operatives.
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But, yeah, you know, this is, we have underestimated them.
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At the same time, we have, I think, sensationalized them
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and treated them as this, you know, apocalyptic bogeyman
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when, in fact, there is a pragmatic component to what they're doing.
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I mean, the way that they've managed to take terrain, it's not because they're great fighters.
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You know, I did this long interview with a defector from one of their security services
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who told me they fight like lemmings going off a cliff.
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I mean, it's just, you know, sort of a human wave of cannon fodder,
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particularly when they go up against the Kurds in Syria.
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What they're good at is tradecraft, and also they understand the sociology of the region.
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So where they have imposed their caliphate, what I call the briar patch of ISIS,
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is the Euphrates River Valley, mostly eastern Syria, western Iraq,
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the villages and hamlets and townships alone, that sort of continuum.
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And these are areas that are occupied by Arab tribes,
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which are essentially confederations of families that span across borders.
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Remember, ISIS is dedicated to the dismantling of Sykes-Picot,
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the artificial states that have cobbled up after World War I.
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Well, to some extent, they have a lot to work with there
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because the families and the constituents of ISIS are spread, fanned across the region.
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I mean, you've got tribes in Iraq that are also in Saudi Arabia or in Kuwait or the UAE and so on.
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And the tribes have lived for hundreds of years through a very simple human political calculation.
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And that master could be Bashar al-Assad or before him Hafez al-Assad,
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It could be the American occupying force of Iraq, or it could be ISIS.
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And it was just about how do we get our daily bread and how do we subsist?
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You know, the tribes have gray and black market economies.
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They need to be able to smuggle their goods and wares and so on and so forth.
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And the way that ISIS's predecessor, al-Qaeda, was booted out of most of Iraq,
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it was so overweening and so brutal that the tribes, they didn't like the Americans,
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but they at least saw the Americans as a credible non-sectarian intercessory force
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that they could partner with to expel the Takfiris.
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Well, today, there is no credible non-sectarian force because in Iraq,
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you have either ISIS or, let's be honest, Shia militia groups,
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which in many cases are as bad as ISIS and are driven by the same kind of, you know,
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apocalyptic zeal, it's only from a different sect of Islam, backed by Iran.
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Well, if you're a Sunni tribesman, you see these guys as, you know, pogromists.
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They're going to come in and they might expel ISIS,
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but then they're going to burn your house down and they're going to take your son as a so-called
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collaborator and throw him into a dungeon and take a power drill and stick it into his head.
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So then here you're, without spelling it out, again, illustrating the mad work done by religion,
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whether it's religious belief or sectarian tribalism.
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When you ask why is ISIS so successful in gaining Sunni support and spreading,
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the answers are at least twofold and both are religious.
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Either the Sunnis support their view of takfirism, which you should probably define in a moment so as to not leave our listeners behind,
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but two, whether or not they support this extremist religious ideology,
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they are terrified of the Shia, who, as you say, will show up based on their own religious tribalism and mistreat them horribly.
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And again, we just have, you know, whether or not any particular people in power are, in fact, religious maniacs who believe the prophecies that they're advertising,
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we have religion carving up the people's lives on the ground.
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So before you jump into further thoughts here, just define takfirism and then, let's start with that, just define takfirism for the moment.
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So takfirism is the ideology of excommunication.
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If I practice takfir, I claim that even fellow Sunni Muslims are apostates, and that's essentially a death sentence.
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If I call you an apostate, it means you're marked for death and I should kill you.
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ISIS is a takfiri organization in the sense that if you are deemed insufficiently pious as a Sunni, you'll be exterminated.
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Now, that's the sort of marketing in how they present themselves.
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They don't necessarily go around and make sure that all Sunnis share the exact same religious construct as they,
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although it is true, you know, they will patrol the streets.
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They have a security unit called the Hizba, which is essentially like the Saudi morality police.
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And, you know, if you're not in mosque on Friday, you'll be punished and thrown into jail.
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But, you know, takfirism is a controversial conceit, even within the annals of Salafi jihadism.
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And, in fact, you know, Osama bin Laden was always at odds with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
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the founder of ISIS when it was known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, over this issue.
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Because Zarqawi was a genocidal maniac, pathological.
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I mean, absolutely, I mean, there's no, I don't think anyone would really try to make it controversial that he was a true believer in all of this stuff.
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This is the guy who patented the dressing of Western or non-Western hostages in the orange Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib-style jumpsuits.
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And then the beheading on video as he's reading these imprecations against the West
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and drawing moral equivalents between what the crusader, infidel, Zionist conspiracy was doing in Iraq
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But what I find fascinating is, you know, bin Laden, one of the issues he had with al-Qaeda,
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with his own franchise, essentially, was when they were going around blowing up Sunni mosques,
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They're the majority of Muslims worldwide, but in Iraq they're the minority.
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And the only way you're going to get Sunnis to reclaim the throne, so to speak, in Baghdad,
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is if Sunnis from around the world pour into Iraq
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and turn it into this Sinashore of all-out, total sectarian war
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And in doing so, you will prompt or foment their radicalization, as you say.
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I mean, drive them into these sort of, you know, paroxysms of religious fervor.
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They'll be run or overseen by Iran, which is the mothership of Shia Islam in the region,
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much the way that Saudi Arabia is for Sunni Islam.
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And these guys will go around and do what we saw them do for almost a decade in Iraq,
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form death squads, you know, the Badr Corps, a group called the League of the Righteous,
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the Hezbollah brigades, not to be confused with Lebanese Hezbollah.
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They were going around attacking American soldiers but also attacking Sunni civilians,
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So we're going to take you under the cover, by the way, of being an Iraqi state institution.
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So, you know, if you were sick, the guy who drove the ambulance and who purported to take
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you to hospital would actually be a Shia militiamen in disguise, take you to some dungeon and torture
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He wanted the Shia to become, you know, religiously extremist and radicalized so that they would
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then attack the Sunnis and the Sunnis would be driven further into the fold of Al-Qaeda and
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then precipitate, of course, this, what I call the international or global casting call for Mujahideen.
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So Iraq would become, in a sense, another Soviet-Afghan war.
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People from around the world, from the Gulf, from Indonesia, from, you know, Turkey would
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pour in and join the ranks of Al-Qaeda and eventually Al-Qaeda would subsume everyone
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and everything else, including other rival Sunni organizations.
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So remember, the insurgency in Iraq, you had groups that were Islamists, you also had groups
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that were nationalists, that just wanted the restoration of the Ba'ath Party or wanted
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But by, you know, look, we now know and we've seen ISIS became top dog because it had the
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There's a lot of nonsense in the ether about who's funding ISIS.
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By 2006, because they were controlling so much of the oil and illicit arms and contraband smuggling,
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you know, networks in Iraq, they had actually become wealthier than Al-Qaeda to the point
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where bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawari had asked them for a loan.
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So the subsidiary was meant to be financing the patron.
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And, you know, again, the complicating factors here.
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ISIS, we have seen, takes anvils and jackhammers to priceless artifacts and archaeological wonders,
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They also, though, what they don't smash up, they steal and they sell on the black market.
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And, again, you know, it could be they absolutely believe in this sort of codification system
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for artifacts or it could be, well, look, you know, what's too large to smuggle out of the
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country has to be destroyed and what's small enough to smuggle, rather, we can then sell
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If it's idolatrous art, paganist, pre-Islamic gods being worshipped, such as the Temple of
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If it's Babylonian or Sumerian coins, little trinkets that we dig out of the sand, well,
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Actually, Abu Saif, the guy that was killed in the U.S. special forces raid in eastern
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Syria last spring, he was in charge of the antiquities smuggling for ISIS.
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And, you know, they do this like, I mean, it's almost like a Talmudic enterprise of defining
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what can stay, what can go, and how you have to handle it and how you have to ask permission
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for stealing, you know, the cultural patrimony of Syria and Iraq.
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I mean, and, you know, their pretensions of statehood are not really to be underestimated.
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We like to pretend like, no, they're just a guerrilla insurgency.
00:25:37.860
They, you know, they really think, and again, whether it's motivated by religion purely or
00:25:44.980
religion plus a sense of political restoration or Sunni revanchism, they believe that they
00:25:51.620
are building a state apparatus and the caliphate is a legitimate international project.
00:26:00.040
So it's been widely reported of late that ISIS has lost a significant amount of its territory
00:26:06.620
and is showing signs of buckling under the pressure being applied to it.
00:26:17.960
So IHS, which is a British defense firm, reckons that ISIS has lost 14% of its territory across
00:26:27.220
14% of territory is not that much, but it is significant in the sense that they have been
00:26:32.400
pushed out of large quadrants of northern Syria by the Kurds.
00:26:36.280
They have lost some significant terrain, such as Ramadi, which is a provincial capital of
00:26:42.780
Anbar province that they had claimed in last May.
00:26:46.380
But what this does not account for is where else they have taken territory.
00:26:50.540
So, for instance, ISIS has what's known as wilayahs, which is the Arabic word for province.
00:26:58.460
These are essentially affiliate organizations that predate ISIS's allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi,
00:27:06.160
So Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist outfit in West Africa, has pledged allegiance to ISIS.
00:27:11.980
With the stroke of a pen, one could argue, ISIS gained 20,000 square miles of territory in West Africa
00:27:20.480
Now, does that mean that they have absolute control or the kind of terrain governance capability
00:27:29.540
But it does mean that they have people who are fired by their ideology and willing to die on
00:27:35.620
They have done similarly in Libya, which is now considered both a way station for foreign
00:27:41.840
fighters who can't make the journey into Syria and Iraq, and also, depending on who you ask,
00:27:47.460
a fallback base in the event that Mosul or Raqqa should fall.
00:27:52.860
And they're doing this since Sinai, the outfit that took down the Metrojet airliner, a Russian
00:28:00.600
Well, that will lie at Sinai is essentially a colonial outpost, if you like, of ISIS.
00:28:07.560
So that aspect of their international project really can't be discounted.
00:28:13.240
By the way, their presence in Libya puts them about less than 500 miles away from the coast
00:28:20.100
So you remember, I mean, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi says, if we're lucky, inshallah, we'll conquer
00:28:26.540
And I don't think even the top ISIS guys believe that.
00:28:31.100
But they can certainly come close enough to Europe.
00:28:33.080
And as we know, and as we've seen in Paris and elsewhere, they're already in Europe with
00:28:37.680
their sleeper cells and their sort of covert operatives, the invisible armies, as I like
00:28:45.500
And Sam, here is where absolutely religion plays a paramount role and what worries me the
00:28:51.920
ISIS, you know, if you're Baghdadi or if you're in his Shura council, you go to bed at night
00:28:58.000
in Raqqa or Mosul, wherever you're hiding, and you know that you might wake up tomorrow
00:29:03.360
and some guy you've never heard of who could have been living in his mother's basement in
00:29:08.660
Albuquerque might take an AK-47 and shoot up a school and do it in the name of your organization.
00:29:14.580
You know, the remote radicalization project, you know, the ISIS-inspired attack, that I
00:29:20.660
think is going to be their stock and trade for acts of terrorism abroad.
00:29:24.600
Because, you know, people look to an organization that seems to be successful.
00:29:31.360
Doesn't matter how ultra, in fact, the ultraviolence works in its favor for any kind of, you know,
00:29:36.620
loser, lunatic element living in any part of the world, really.
00:29:41.020
And, you know, their state building, the reason that this has to be successful for them is
00:29:47.600
because it has to inspire people to join their ranks.
00:29:50.020
If they're seen to be on the decline or on the back foot, they're not going to inspire
00:29:58.980
I know there's a very complicated answer to a pretty simple question, but welcome to the
00:30:03.760
They've taken a battering, but they've shown a remarkable degree of resilience.
00:30:09.380
And, I mean, as I'm talking to you, I just finished an epilogue to the second edition
00:30:13.940
of our book where we've interviewed people living in Deir Zor and, again, the Euphrates
00:30:19.420
River Valley, which is their strategic heartland.
00:30:22.480
And people there say, look, you know, I don't like ISIS, but I have no alternative.
00:30:26.660
In fact, because of U.S. airstrikes and the coalition bombardment, the way I made a living
00:30:34.800
So, I am sending my youngest son to join ISIS because at least he'll get a salary.
00:30:43.480
And not only do they pay the fighter a salary, but they pay subsidies for the family members
00:30:48.580
So, you know, if I were to join ISIS, I'd get $400 a month.
00:30:53.080
And my 10-month-old daughter, I'd get money to pay for her baby food.
00:30:57.860
So, again, this is their hearts and minds approach.
00:31:00.700
It's very sophisticated and it's been very successful.
00:31:04.880
And they've lost money in the sense that the oil infrastructure has been pretty depleted.
00:31:10.340
Although, and again, another Western misconception, they don't make most of their money from oil
00:31:16.200
I don't know where this myth came from, but it's a dangerous one.
00:31:19.380
They actually make most of their money through running a petty bureaucracy of taxation and
00:31:25.640
The reason they want territory, well, one of the reasons they want it is with territory
00:31:30.240
And with people comes the ability to charge if they're Muslim zakat, if they're non-Muslim
00:31:37.880
And not only that, like if you're caught smoking cigarettes, ISIS will throw you in a cage for
00:31:46.660
If you're seen to be a rival, member of a rival organization or any kind of dissident
00:31:52.140
or a resistance fighter to ISIS, if you flee a territory that they control, they'll take
00:32:01.880
They'll take your property, all of your assets.
00:32:03.500
If you run a business, they'll take your business and all of its inventory.
00:32:06.800
So they run a mafia style state in addition to a terroristic one.
00:32:15.440
One is that you bring up the topic of affiliate groups like Boko Haram suddenly magnifying
00:32:23.780
And as you spelled out, there's really no clear line between an affiliate group and what
00:32:33.400
People who are just inspired by the ideology of ISIS and join this global jihadist insurgency
00:32:41.300
really entirely on their own devices, which, you know, anyone with a gun or an internet
00:32:50.760
Obviously, you know, having people who are extremely well-trained and battle-hardened emigrate
00:32:56.000
to the West and try to get martyred while killing as many people as possible, that is kind of
00:33:02.480
But, you know, it's good enough to sow terror just by being someone who gets radicalized
00:33:07.760
in his mother's house and goes to a school and kills 20 kids.
00:33:11.380
You can just imagine how few instances of that would be sufficient to accomplish a crazy
00:33:18.180
overreaction and paralysis in any Western country.
00:33:21.560
So, given that, as you just pointed out, the compelling narrative of ISIS that will attract
00:33:27.980
lone wolves and affiliate groups in perpetuity is anchored to their perceived success as a
00:33:35.460
state, as a caliphate, well, then why not just go in and destroy them to the last man in a
00:33:44.040
month, which presumably is within the capacity of the United States or some coalition of Western
00:33:51.780
Now, I'm sure part of your answer will be an acknowledgment of how horrific the collateral
00:33:56.400
damage would likely be in that case, but let's talk about what it would take to defeat ISIS
00:34:00.340
in the most humiliating and decisive way, and why aren't we doing that?
00:34:05.560
So, there's two things I want to discuss to answer your question.
00:34:09.060
First, the state building, you know, nothing succeeds like success.
00:34:14.960
But there's another element that I didn't address.
00:34:16.640
The reason that ISIS has been so persuasive in its narrative, what is its narrative?
00:34:23.660
In, during Ramadan, in his debut sermon in July of 2014, the El Zangi Mosque in Mosul,
00:34:30.640
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi gets up and he delivers this sermon, and he says, you know, we are facing
00:34:35.260
a global conspiracy led by the United States and Russia, backed by Iran and the Rafida, which
00:34:42.260
is the bigoted term that jihadis use to describe Shia, literally means rejectionists, and, you
00:34:49.160
know, that this conspiracy is at war with Sunni Islam.
00:34:53.540
And we, the Islamic State, are the only safeguards, the only defenders and guarantors of the Sunni
00:35:01.700
Now, that, you might say, well, that's just par for the course for, you know, crazy messianic
00:35:08.120
Everything's a conspiracy and everyone's part of it except them.
00:35:11.080
The problem is, Sam, you know, in the last decade, if you're a Sunni living in the region
00:35:18.060
or just, you know, you're in a souk in Cairo or you're at some bazaar in Antakya, southern
00:35:26.220
The U.S. goes into Iraq, topples a minority regime of Saddam Hussein, dispossesses, disinherits
00:35:32.440
Sunnis from what had been a very pretty privileged and elite station, you know, ruling one of
00:35:38.800
the major capitals of the region for 30-plus years.
00:35:45.860
Syria is a Sunni-majority country, so between 60-70 percent of the country is Sunni.
00:35:52.560
Um, people are being barrel-bombed, they're having scud missiles dropped on their heads,
00:35:58.680
they're having sarin gas deployed against them, they're having chlorine bombs deployed against
00:36:02.220
them, uh, their women and sons are being gang-raped in prisons, their whole families are being burnt
00:36:11.780
They say, whatever we do, we can point to other enemies of ours who do just as much,
00:36:16.560
and if not worse, there's actually truth in that.
00:36:19.360
Uh, the Assad regime and its militias, many of them built by Iran, there's a consortium
00:36:24.840
of them called the National Defense Force, they lock whole Sunni families in their house
00:36:28.380
and they set the house on fire and let the family cook inside.
00:36:31.680
ISIS points to all this and say, well, how come nobody has come to the rescue of Sunnis?
00:36:35.840
All you, you, you stupid, you know, democratic or, you know, secular, uh, pro-Western, uh, you
00:36:45.220
You look, you look at NATO and you look at Washington and you beg them for assistance
00:36:51.100
And for a while, Sunnis are like, well, you know, it's because, uh, it's because of Israel.
00:36:55.220
You know, the Assad as bad as he is, he's kept the Golan Heights quiet for 40 years so
00:37:02.340
Then it became, well, no, it's because Obama wants to make this nuclear deal with Iran and
00:37:08.700
But now it's creeped up right to the point of the ISIS conspiracy, which is, no, actually
00:37:24.200
Uh, and it wants the Shia led by the Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran and backed by the militias
00:37:28.980
in Iraq and helped by Lebanese Hezbollah and helped now by Syrian militias that are being
00:37:34.440
These guys to be the janissaries of a new regional order and the people who are going
00:37:39.840
to pay the price are the Sunnis, but we outnumber everybody else.
00:37:43.400
So we should pour into the ranks of ISIS or if you don't like ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, the
00:37:48.880
Al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, and we have to defend ourselves.
00:37:55.720
Now in slightly churlish moments, I joke, it's hard to tell where ISIS conspiracy theory
00:38:02.120
Because if you listen to what President Obama has said, he gave three very evocative interviews.
00:38:07.960
David Remnick of The New Yorker, Tom Friedman of The New York Times, Jeffrey Goldberg of The
00:38:12.280
In each of the interviews, he was basically asked, well, don't you think that, um, that
00:38:17.420
Shia jihadism, uh, you know, along the lines of what Hezbollah has got up to or the Quds
00:38:22.740
force has got up to, isn't that just as reckless and dangerous as the Sunni variety?
00:38:27.780
And he kind of fudged the answer and he made it seem like what Iran does, as awful as it
00:38:32.820
might be, car bombings and so on, uh, there's a rationale to it.
00:38:38.400
Whereas with the Sunnis, well, these are the guys who brought us 9-11 and the Taliban and
00:38:43.120
they're all barbaric crazies and we really can't negotiate or parlay with them in any
00:38:48.160
Sunnis see that as the legitimation of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's worldview.
00:38:51.900
Um, and I, I keep insisting, you know, the, the State Department, the U.S. government,
00:38:57.740
all Western governments are putting a lot of money into the counter narrative or essentially
00:39:04.800
And in private moments, you talk to these diplomats in charge of the programs and they
00:39:09.640
And we're failing because we exhibit ISIS atrocities, but they exhibit their atrocities.
00:39:14.160
And we don't understand why are people being driven into the arms of a group that's going
00:39:17.800
to burn a man alive in a cage or blow up a car filled with guys with an RPG or drown,
00:39:23.280
you know, a collection of, of, of innocents in a cage in a, in a giant pool.
00:39:27.400
And the answer is you focus on the snuff component of those videos, but you don't focus on the
00:39:34.960
So let's take Muaz al-Kasazba, you know, the burning of the Jordanian pilot.
00:39:39.100
Um, this was, this was the video that shocked the world in many respects, even worse than the
00:39:43.560
beheading of James Foley and Stephen Sotloff and the other American hostages.
00:39:51.500
The last five minutes of it is the, the, the, the sort of violent pornography.
00:40:00.460
Kasazba sat at a table, um, wearing the orange Guantanamo style jumpsuit, uh, essentially
00:40:07.360
being interrogated, although it's couched as an interview.
00:40:10.640
And he's giving up all the operational tradecraft, all the, the operational, uh, details of what's
00:40:16.920
what Jordan and the other Arab countries of the region were doing against ISIS.
00:40:20.880
So he was giving the number of sorties that the Jordanian air force was flying, the kinds
00:40:25.160
of fighter jets they were flying, um, the names of other pilots he flew with and, you know,
00:40:32.380
ISIS used that and counterposed that with images of dead Muslim babies and women and children
00:40:38.520
being pulled from the rubble as they claim victims of these Arab bombardment attacks.
00:40:43.420
To ISIS, there is no such thing as a, an Islamic or a Muslim country in the contemporary Middle
00:40:51.060
These are, these are the so-called near enemies.
00:40:53.440
These are apostate regimes led by defunct and corrupt and venal dictatorships, monarchies,
00:41:02.380
But just to clarify here, this is a distinct complaint and allegation of conspiracy from the
00:41:13.500
Many of these regimes are Sunni that they're complaining about being attacked by.
00:41:18.080
And that's one of the ironies of, of hearing the ISIS, um, the ISIS narrative sort of taken
00:41:24.140
Sunnis have been, um, you know, the dominant sect just by sheer force of numbers.
00:41:31.240
But Sunnis are now behaving and acting and sounding like an imperiled minority, like the
00:41:36.660
Shia had done for decades, if not centuries, because, uh, they are everywhere being besieged
00:41:42.480
and in battle and they feel like they're being taken over by them.
00:41:45.400
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