Making Sense - Sam Harris - March 06, 2016


#30 — Inside the Crucible

Topics
ISIS and Syria civil war
Hosted by
Sam Harris
Guests
Michael Weiss
Mentioned
Assad Saddam Hussein Zarqawi Osama Bin Laden Bashar Assad Vladimir Putin Boko Haram Mujahideen Obama Christopher Hitchens Jeffrey Goldberg Stephen Sotloff Hafez Assad Marvin Olasky David Remnick Raymond Aron Steve Warren Tom Friedman James Foley Uncle Toms and 10 more
#29 — Throw Open the Gates #31 — Evolving Minds

Episode Stats


Length

42 minutes

Words per minute

174.4

Word count

7,354

Sentence count

380

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

34

sentences flagged

Hate speech

70

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.
00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.
00:00:10.880 Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber
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00:00:34.640 of our subscribers.
00:00:35.880 So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
00:00:46.540 I spoke to Michael Weiss, the senior editor at the Daily Beast, and co-author of a New
00:00:51.300 York Times bestseller about the Islamic State, entitled ISIS, Inside the Army of Terror.
00:00:56.340 And we focus primarily on ISIS and the civil war in Syria.
00:01:00.780 And as you'll hear, Michael is just a fount of information on these topics.
00:01:05.300 You might have to listen to this twice to get all the details here.
00:01:08.600 Unfortunately, we had a few audio issues with Skype, so you'll hear a few irregularities
00:01:12.340 there.
00:01:12.800 But I think you'll agree by the end that listening to Michael talk about ISIS and the
00:01:16.380 Syrian civil war has made you much smarter on these subjects.
00:01:19.740 And you'll come away with a much clearer sense of how complicated U.S. foreign policy and
00:01:25.000 the war on terror now are.
00:01:27.200 And now I give you Michael Weiss.
00:01:35.080 Well, I'm here with Michael Weiss from the Daily Beast.
00:01:38.280 Michael, thanks for coming on the podcast.
00:01:39.860 Thanks for having me on, Sam.
00:01:40.880 Well, listen, I know you as a writer and editor for The Beast, but why don't you tell me and
00:01:47.220 our audience a little bit more about you and how you come to know so much about the Middle
00:01:51.280 East, which is, I'm sure, going to be the bulk of what we talk about.
00:01:55.080 What's your background?
00:01:56.420 And tell us about your book on ISIS and all the rest.
00:02:00.240 So my background is in journalism.
00:02:02.480 I started writing about the Middle East about 10 years ago, I think.
00:02:06.860 Some of it was on the Israel-Palestine conflict, a lot of it then became covering the so-called
00:02:14.100 Arab Spring in 2011.
00:02:16.360 I was working at a London think tank, the Henry Jackson Society, and of all the countries
00:02:21.080 that had been covered, the one that wasn't, which was just then in its infancy of an uprising
00:02:26.680 against the government, was Syria.
00:02:28.840 So it literally, one day, my boss sort of dropped it into my lap and said, here, you need
00:02:32.860 to sort of assess this and tell us what we need to know.
00:02:36.060 So it started with a survey of who the opposition on the ground was.
00:02:40.820 We managed to get interviews with activists and leaders of the so-called local coordination
00:02:45.300 committees from every province in the country.
00:02:48.040 There's a misconception that the Syrian revolution started when a dozen kids scrawled on the walls
00:02:52.520 in Deraa, but actually the earliest protests were registered in Damascus itself, in the old
00:02:57.220 city.
00:02:57.700 So, you know, in the very capital, in the heart of Assad's regime.
00:03:01.660 And what struck me is, you know, we had seen in Egypt, to a lesser degree in Tunisia, although
00:03:07.500 we can probably get into some of that, particularly how the media has covered groups like Ennada.
00:03:12.840 But we saw the, you know, sort of the late failure of radical hopes, teenagers turning out in
00:03:17.420 the streets of Takara Square, protesting a pretty vicious authoritarian dictatorship.
00:03:22.760 And then, you know, it gets hijacked by religious extremists or, you know, as they were depicted
00:03:30.000 in the West, so-called moderate Islamists.
00:03:32.400 So now, Michael, you're talking about what happened during the so-called Arab Spring?
00:03:36.880 Right, right.
00:03:37.820 And in Syria, what I was struck by was, you know, the people who were leading this uprising,
00:03:42.820 I mean, they really were small-D Democrats.
00:03:45.700 And, you know, they had various views on which kind of country they wanted to model a future
00:03:50.480 post-Assad Syria on.
00:03:51.860 Some said, like Turkey.
00:03:53.560 Others said, like Tunisia.
00:03:54.820 Some, many said, like the United States or like France.
00:03:57.880 But what we now, one of the things that bothers me, and one of the reasons I wrote this book
00:04:02.940 on ISIS, was to try and sort of turn back the clock to the very beginning.
00:04:06.960 Because for a lot of people, history began when ISIS stormed into Mosul in 2014.
00:04:12.320 And, you know, essentially this was always a jihadist insurgency.
00:04:17.260 It was always being led by al-Qaeda and other assorted elements.
00:04:21.400 And, you know, one of the things that I'm most interested in in my work is the relationship
00:04:25.740 between terror and state actors.
00:04:28.380 And this is something that is just characteristic of the region.
00:04:32.740 And it even goes beyond the region now.
00:04:34.880 I mean, I've done a lot of work on Russia's facilitation of jihadism beginning in Chechnya, 0.95
00:04:40.240 but also, you know, leading up to the Syria conflict.
00:04:43.500 I mean, they've been sending jihadists into Syria because better they blow stuff up in 0.98
00:04:48.200 Aleppo or in Raqqa than they do in Dagestan.
00:04:51.160 And all of this gets elided in the way that the West tends to cover these things.
00:04:54.880 But anyway, you know, Assad's relationship with the very element that now claims to be 0.59
00:04:58.900 trying to overthrow his regime and establish an Islamic state, I find fascinating.
00:05:03.860 So one of the leitmotifs of our book, and I co-wrote it with a Syrian national called
00:05:08.300 Hassan Hassan, is to kind of, you know, dredge up some of this occluded history of the way
00:05:15.880 not only the Syrian government, but also the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein was, you
00:05:22.560 know, if not necessarily a catalyst, then at least an underwriter of much of the unpleasantness
00:05:26.760 we're seeing now.
00:05:27.600 Now, people forget, and you know, it is true, the Bush administration misrepresented and lied
00:05:32.300 about a lot of the intelligence in terms of Saddam's relationship with jihadi groups
00:05:37.020 such as al-Qaeda.
00:05:37.920 But it is also the case, after the invasion of Kuwait in the first Gulf War, he inaugurated
00:05:42.820 something called the Islamic Faith Campaign, which was an attempt to marry the Ba'ath ideology
00:05:47.760 with Salafism.
00:05:49.040 And the reason for this was he saw the greatest threat to his regime, well, there were two.
00:05:53.980 One was from Iran next door, with whom he had waged a brutal eight-year war, and the 1.00
00:05:59.940 other was internally from Islamist elements, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:06:03.640 So one of the unintended consequences of the faith campaign was people abandoned the Ba'athism
00:06:08.280 and took up the Salafism.
00:06:09.840 And a lot of these elements have wound up, or they did wind up in the so-called anti-American
00:06:15.240 and anti-Iraqi insurgency from 2003 onwards.
00:06:19.100 But now, funnily enough, a lot of these former regime elements are in the upper echelons of
00:06:24.920 ISIS.
00:06:25.660 You're looking at lieutenant colonels in the Iraqi army, or agents of the Muqabarat intelligence
00:06:31.580 services.
00:06:32.620 And some of the leading operatives, including those who constructed the ISIS franchise in
00:06:37.500 northern Syria in 2013, they behaved very much like state-trained, almost Stasi-like intelligence
00:06:46.640 operatives.
00:06:47.140 So this is something I think, you know, that needs to get addressed.
00:06:50.880 And this is not by any means, and I'm sure you'll want to talk about this, not to undermine
00:06:55.640 or dismiss the element and the currents of Islamic fundamentalism that run throughout ISIS.
00:07:00.640 It's very much a prominent factor, particularly amongst the so-called foreign fighters and the
00:07:06.180 Mujahideen coming around from around the world who think they're going to usher in the apocalypse. 0.99
00:07:10.360 My thesis is at the very high level.
00:07:12.860 You know, you were being asked to presume that people who, as of 2002 or even early 2003,
00:07:21.040 were drinking wine, wearing military fatigues with epaulets they had never earned, keeping
00:07:27.340 their 12 mistresses in their eight mansions scattered throughout the state of Iraq.
00:07:31.480 That as of today, now that they've got the long black beard and the dish dasha, they really
00:07:36.040 want to usher in the end times?
00:07:37.780 Or is there perhaps a political project that's underlying much of what ISIS is doing?
00:07:42.260 And I think that that's something that needs greater discussion.
00:07:46.740 And it's indeed, I mean, one of the sort of mainstays of my work is to try and figure out,
00:07:51.240 you know, where the messianic or eschatological element ends and where the political, literal
00:07:57.820 state building begins for them.
00:07:59.680 Well, let's talk about that, because this is just a truly complicated situation.
00:08:04.960 It's kind of a challenge to figure out how to talk about it and, you know, which thread
00:08:09.580 to pull first.
00:08:10.860 Just a few things I want to respond to, and then maybe we can figure out how to circle
00:08:14.360 in on the details.
00:08:15.960 But the first thing is that what you said about the Russians exporting their jihadists, I had 0.99
00:08:20.940 frankly never heard before.
00:08:22.120 So that's very interesting.
00:08:23.580 And that's kind of analogous to what the Saudis have done on some basic level.
00:08:27.640 And just to this point about secular people cynically using religion and religious ideology
00:08:35.740 to manipulate, recruit, and otherwise advance their political aims, there are obviously
00:08:41.700 instances of that throughout history.
00:08:44.200 And people often point to that as a sign that religion isn't really as important a variable
00:08:50.800 as it seems.
00:08:51.640 But what I always say at that point in the conversation is that it only works.
00:08:56.380 A cynical, actually secular leader pretending to be devout only manages to whip up a mob or 0.84
00:09:04.080 a political movement under the aegis of those religious ideas because the people on the ground
00:09:08.720 really believe these things.
00:09:10.320 I mean, it's only a successful lever to pull because it's attached to something.
00:09:14.480 So it doesn't embarrass my overriding concern about the potency of religious ideology to have
00:09:21.100 pointed out that some significant subset of any ostensibly religious regime is actually staffed
00:09:28.860 by cynical, Machiavellian, mustache-twirling secularists who are just using the ambient level
00:09:34.980 of religious sectarianism or religious faith for their political aims.
00:09:38.840 Feel free to respond to that.
00:09:40.000 But as you do, let's go into just what you think the psychological and political reality is
00:09:45.780 in ISIS, if they have these ex-Baathists who, in fact, aren't religious, in fact, may even be
00:09:51.980 apostates, what has happened?
00:09:53.460 Have they converted?
00:09:54.380 Does al-Baghdadi just not care who these people are?
00:09:57.060 I mean, al-Baghdadi is sort of an outlier.
00:09:59.660 He has a PhD in Islamic studies.
00:10:02.840 Actually, it's called Saddam Hussein University, believe it or not.
00:10:05.820 And the only way he could enroll in that program is if his family had Baath Party connections.
00:10:10.700 So, I mean, this is the thing.
00:10:12.300 A lot of people joined the Baath Party not because they were true card-carrying ideologues. 0.96
00:10:17.500 And, you know, one of the stupider things the United States did after, of course, invading Iraq 0.86
00:10:21.820 was the de-Baathification of the first three tiers of the party. 0.88
00:10:26.520 So a lot of people, you know, engineers, doctors, professionals who had joined up just so they
00:10:31.100 could get ahead in life and make a living were rendered unemployed.
00:10:35.280 With Baghdadi, he is an absolute true believer by all accounts.
00:10:39.120 He actually does think that, you know, the armies of Rome will clash with the armies of
00:10:44.140 Islam in Dabik, which is a town in Aleppo province.
00:10:47.740 You know, this is the great sort of Chileastic conspiracy that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had put 0.87
00:10:53.000 forward.
00:10:53.940 And with Zarqawi, it was always about bleeding into Syria. 1.00
00:10:56.420 So that goal has been achieved.
00:10:58.500 But, you know, I absolutely agree with you.
00:11:00.680 Look, you know, life is complicated and messy.
00:11:03.120 And even people who, you know, purport to espouse a totalist or pure ideology often have contradictory
00:11:12.940 or alternative, you know, modes of thinking or systems of belief creeping in.
00:11:20.460 So, again, I don't know.
00:11:22.120 I mean, are these Baathists, are they, quote unquote, secular or apostate? 0.82
00:11:25.860 Not necessarily.
00:11:26.500 They can have been radicalized or Salafized under the faith campaign or even just, you
00:11:32.400 know, by the sheer brutality and chaos of living in Iraq, both pre- and post-Saddam.
00:11:41.000 But I think it is one of the more fascinating issues of looking at ISIS. 0.58
00:11:44.620 And look, I mean, I'm an atheist like you, you know, and our dearly departed friend Christopher
00:11:50.200 Hitchens used to say that religion was just another form of totalitarianism.
00:11:53.840 I think that was the kind of the driving force behind his critique of it is that, you know,
00:11:58.020 he had kind of in some ways gone through it himself as a believing Marxist and Trotskyist.
00:12:03.900 You know, Raymond Aron called Marxism a Christian heresy.
00:12:06.960 There are a lot of similarities, you know.
00:12:09.560 And this is why, by the way, you find people who come from, you know, secular or temporal ideologies
00:12:15.700 essentially swapping one, you know, totalitarianism for another and taking up, you know,
00:12:21.800 some extreme form of religion or not so extreme form of religion.
00:12:25.740 In fact, one of the leading evangelical Christians in the United States discovered Jesus in a
00:12:32.940 Moscow hotel room when he found a stray Bible.
00:12:36.440 Marvin Olasky is his name.
00:12:38.380 He's actually Jewish, a Jewish Marxist who became an evangelical Christian.
00:12:41.900 So things like that happen all the time.
00:12:43.860 And this is not an attempt to embarrass—I mean, you know, I am a great admirer of your work
00:12:50.000 and a co-thinker, so it's not an attempt to embarrass it.
00:12:53.680 It is an attempt, though, to try and fully understand.
00:12:57.140 And again, you know, I want to show that ISIS does not exist in this vacuum of fundamentalism.
00:13:04.920 It has state sponsors, or I should say not sponsors, but state accomplices.
00:13:09.760 I mean, to this day, you know, it's running all of Syria's natural gas industry
00:13:14.020 and selling that natural gas back to Damascus, which claims to be at war with it.
00:13:19.520 It runs most of the oil wells in eastern Syria and is selling oil not only to free Syrian army
00:13:25.980 groups but also back to Damascus and to smugglers in Turkey and Iraqi Kurds.
00:13:32.440 I mentioned Russia, and the reason I do is people think Vladimir Putin is this great counterterrorist, right?
00:13:39.600 I mean, he hates Islamic radicalism, and he went to war in Syria to destroy ISIS.
00:13:44.680 Well, no.
00:13:45.120 I mean, if you look at the metrics, 10 percent, according to the Pentagon spokesman Steve Warren,
00:13:50.240 10 percent of Russia's sorties have been going after ISIS.
00:13:52.880 Now, the rest have been going after groups that range from nationalists to Islamists to jihadists,
00:13:59.400 including the al-Qaeda franchise, but, you know, with Putin, the goal, I think, is quite simple.
00:14:06.360 It's exactly what Assad and the Iranians' goal has been from the beginning, 1.00
00:14:11.240 deprive the West of any attractive, credible alternative to the dictatorship in Damascus
00:14:17.900 and make it a stark choice of the taqfiris on the one hand or, you know, this secular war criminal on the other.
00:14:24.320 And that's not really a choice because no one in the West, as much as they may loathe Bashar al-Assad
00:14:28.840 and hold him responsible as well they should for the destruction of the country, 0.88
00:14:32.820 they don't think he's going to be flying planes into buildings in New York or Washington, D.C.
00:14:37.580 ISIS would if it could.
00:14:39.580 And, you know, one of the real challenges, Sam, is ISIS has broken apart or cleaved away from al-Qaeda.
00:14:46.540 And I keep saying that, you know, we're now at a more dangerous point than we were right after 9-11
00:14:51.320 because the way that al-Qaeda is going to compete with ISIS is through blood and fire and terror.
00:14:57.840 And that's going to play out on the streets of Europe.
00:14:59.840 It already has.
00:15:01.200 It's playing out in Turkey, which has suffered more ISIS attacks than any other country.
00:15:05.560 So that's a NATO member.
00:15:07.440 And eventually it's going to come here.
00:15:08.940 I mean, arguably it did with San Bernardino,
00:15:10.720 although that was a case of people being inspired by rather than being trained up and dispatched as operatives.
00:15:17.640 But, yeah, you know, this is, we have underestimated them.
00:15:21.680 At the same time, we have, I think, sensationalized them
00:15:25.180 and treated them as this, you know, apocalyptic bogeyman
00:15:29.260 when, in fact, there is a pragmatic component to what they're doing.
00:15:33.540 I mean, the way that they've managed to take terrain, it's not because they're great fighters.
00:15:37.040 You know, I did this long interview with a defector from one of their security services
00:15:42.000 who told me they fight like lemmings going off a cliff.
00:15:46.080 I mean, it's just, you know, sort of a human wave of cannon fodder,
00:15:49.560 particularly when they go up against the Kurds in Syria.
00:15:51.980 What they're good at is tradecraft, and also they understand the sociology of the region.
00:15:56.940 So where they have imposed their caliphate, what I call the briar patch of ISIS,
00:16:02.280 is the Euphrates River Valley, mostly eastern Syria, western Iraq,
00:16:06.240 the villages and hamlets and townships alone, that sort of continuum.
00:16:12.060 And these are areas that are occupied by Arab tribes,
00:16:15.680 which are essentially confederations of families that span across borders.
00:16:20.560 Remember, ISIS is dedicated to the dismantling of Sykes-Picot, 0.86
00:16:23.860 the artificial states that have cobbled up after World War I.
00:16:27.040 Well, to some extent, they have a lot to work with there
00:16:28.600 because the families and the constituents of ISIS are spread, fanned across the region.
00:16:32.680 I mean, you've got tribes in Iraq that are also in Saudi Arabia or in Kuwait or the UAE and so on.
00:16:38.560 And the tribes have lived for hundreds of years through a very simple human political calculation.
00:16:45.160 Whoever is the master, you cut a deal with.
00:16:48.140 And that master could be Bashar al-Assad or before him Hafez al-Assad,
00:16:51.840 or it could be Saddam Hussein.
00:16:53.400 It could be the American occupying force of Iraq, or it could be ISIS.
00:16:56.280 And it was just about how do we get our daily bread and how do we subsist?
00:17:01.720 You know, the tribes have gray and black market economies.
00:17:04.320 They need to make money.
00:17:05.520 They need to be able to smuggle their goods and wares and so on and so forth.
00:17:09.300 And the way that ISIS's predecessor, al-Qaeda, was booted out of most of Iraq,
00:17:14.860 it was so overweening and so brutal that the tribes, they didn't like the Americans, 0.98
00:17:19.840 but they at least saw the Americans as a credible non-sectarian intercessory force
00:17:24.020 that they could partner with to expel the Takfiris. 1.00
00:17:27.660 Well, today, there is no credible non-sectarian force because in Iraq, 0.90
00:17:32.120 you have either ISIS or, let's be honest, Shia militia groups,
00:17:36.840 which in many cases are as bad as ISIS and are driven by the same kind of, you know,
00:17:41.620 apocalyptic zeal, it's only from a different sect of Islam, backed by Iran. 1.00
00:17:46.080 Well, if you're a Sunni tribesman, you see these guys as, you know, pogromists. 1.00
00:17:50.880 They're going to come in and they might expel ISIS, 1.00
00:17:52.840 but then they're going to burn your house down and they're going to take your son as a so-called 0.98
00:17:56.300 collaborator and throw him into a dungeon and take a power drill and stick it into his head. 0.97
00:18:00.120 So then here you're, without spelling it out, again, illustrating the mad work done by religion, 0.99
00:18:05.760 whether it's religious belief or sectarian tribalism.
00:18:09.180 When you ask why is ISIS so successful in gaining Sunni support and spreading, 0.99
00:18:15.000 the answers are at least twofold and both are religious.
00:18:19.200 Either the Sunnis support their view of takfirism, which you should probably define in a moment so as to not leave our listeners behind,
00:18:27.340 but two, whether or not they support this extremist religious ideology,
00:18:32.720 they are terrified of the Shia, who, as you say, will show up based on their own religious tribalism and mistreat them horribly. 0.99
00:18:41.480 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,
00:18:52.520 we have religion carving up the people's lives on the ground. 0.90
00:18:56.600 So before you jump into further thoughts here, just define takfirism and then, let's start with that, just define takfirism for the moment.
00:19:04.120 So takfirism is the ideology of excommunication.
00:19:08.000 If I practice takfir, I claim that even fellow Sunni Muslims are apostates, and that's essentially a death sentence. 1.00
00:19:17.320 If I call you an apostate, it means you're marked for death and I should kill you. 1.00
00:19:21.320 ISIS is a takfiri organization in the sense that if you are deemed insufficiently pious as a Sunni, you'll be exterminated. 1.00
00:19:30.380 Now, that's the sort of marketing in how they present themselves.
00:19:35.420 But again, there are exceptions.
00:19:37.460 They don't necessarily go around and make sure that all Sunnis share the exact same religious construct as they,
00:19:45.920 although it is true, you know, they will patrol the streets.
00:19:48.900 They have a security unit called the Hizba, which is essentially like the Saudi morality police.
00:19:53.700 And, you know, if you're not in mosque on Friday, you'll be punished and thrown into jail.
00:19:57.520 But, you know, takfirism is a controversial conceit, even within the annals of Salafi jihadism.
00:20:04.700 And, in fact, you know, Osama bin Laden was always at odds with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
00:20:10.780 the founder of ISIS when it was known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, over this issue. 0.82
00:20:16.280 Because Zarqawi was a genocidal maniac, pathological.
00:20:20.500 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.
00:20:28.020 This is the guy who patented the dressing of Western or non-Western hostages in the orange Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib-style jumpsuits.
00:20:37.120 And then the beheading on video as he's reading these imprecations against the West
00:20:41.400 and drawing moral equivalents between what the crusader, infidel, Zionist conspiracy was doing in Iraq
00:20:46.800 and now what he is doing in retaliation.
00:20:51.320 But what I find fascinating is, you know, bin Laden, one of the issues he had with al-Qaeda,
00:20:56.740 with his own franchise, essentially, was when they were going around blowing up Sunni mosques, 0.56
00:21:01.260 I'm sorry, Shia mosques and Husanias. 1.00
00:21:03.760 Zarqawi's goal was very Machiavellian.
00:21:05.900 You know, Sunnis are a minority in Iraq.
00:21:08.680 They're the majority of Muslims worldwide, but in Iraq they're the minority.
00:21:12.020 And the only way you're going to get Sunnis to reclaim the throne, so to speak, in Baghdad, 1.00
00:21:17.800 is if Sunnis from around the world pour into Iraq
00:21:21.100 and turn it into this Sinashore of all-out, total sectarian war 0.99
00:21:25.860 and essentially exterminate the Shia. 0.98
00:21:28.120 So his project was genocidal. 1.00
00:21:29.760 Kill all the Shia. 1.00
00:21:30.500 And in doing so, you will prompt or foment their radicalization, as you say. 1.00
00:21:37.900 I mean, drive them into these sort of, you know, paroxysms of religious fervor.
00:21:42.660 They'll be run or overseen by Iran, which is the mothership of Shia Islam in the region, 0.98
00:21:48.760 much the way that Saudi Arabia is for Sunni Islam.
00:21:52.140 And these guys will go around and do what we saw them do for almost a decade in Iraq,
00:21:56.480 form death squads, you know, the Badr Corps, a group called the League of the Righteous, 0.93
00:22:01.100 the Hezbollah brigades, not to be confused with Lebanese Hezbollah.
00:22:03.900 They were going around attacking American soldiers but also attacking Sunni civilians,
00:22:08.460 rounding them up and saying, what's your name?
00:22:10.920 It's Omar, so you must be a Sunni. 1.00
00:22:12.400 Show me your ID card.
00:22:13.320 Right, okay.
00:22:13.900 So we're going to take you under the cover, by the way, of being an Iraqi state institution.
00:22:19.260 So, you know, if you were sick, the guy who drove the ambulance and who purported to take
00:22:24.140 you to hospital would actually be a Shia militiamen in disguise, take you to some dungeon and torture 1.00
00:22:29.160 you and probably kill you. 0.99
00:22:31.020 So Zarqawi wanted this to happen. 1.00
00:22:32.560 He wanted the Shia to become, you know, religiously extremist and radicalized so that they would 1.00
00:22:38.460 then attack the Sunnis and the Sunnis would be driven further into the fold of Al-Qaeda and 0.58
00:22:43.440 then precipitate, of course, this, what I call the international or global casting call for Mujahideen.
00:22:48.800 So Iraq would become, in a sense, another Soviet-Afghan war. 0.76
00:22:53.320 People from around the world, from the Gulf, from Indonesia, from, you know, Turkey would
00:22:59.200 pour in and join the ranks of Al-Qaeda and eventually Al-Qaeda would subsume everyone
00:23:04.440 and everything else, including other rival Sunni organizations.
00:23:08.300 So remember, the insurgency in Iraq, you had groups that were Islamists, you also had groups
00:23:13.000 that were nationalists, that just wanted the restoration of the Ba'ath Party or wanted
00:23:17.340 Sunnis to be back on top.
00:23:19.260 So it was very complicated.
00:23:21.100 But by, you know, look, we now know and we've seen ISIS became top dog because it had the
00:23:27.600 most brutal methods.
00:23:29.240 It became the wealthiest organization.
00:23:31.960 I mean, people forget.
00:23:32.980 There's a lot of nonsense in the ether about who's funding ISIS.
00:23:36.480 Well, ISIS is funding ISIS.
00:23:37.640 By 2006, because they were controlling so much of the oil and illicit arms and contraband smuggling,
00:23:44.380 you know, networks in Iraq, they had actually become wealthier than Al-Qaeda to the point
00:23:49.080 where bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawari had asked them for a loan.
00:23:53.080 So the subsidiary was meant to be financing the patron.
00:23:56.920 And this is how they get on.
00:24:01.200 And, you know, again, the complicating factors here.
00:24:04.040 ISIS, we have seen, takes anvils and jackhammers to priceless artifacts and archaeological wonders, 0.84
00:24:11.960 world heritage sites as defined by UNESCO.
00:24:15.660 They also, though, what they don't smash up, they steal and they sell on the black market.
00:24:20.700 Now, they justify this.
00:24:22.320 And, again, you know, it could be they absolutely believe in this sort of codification system
00:24:28.600 for artifacts or it could be, well, look, you know, what's too large to smuggle out of the
00:24:34.200 country has to be destroyed and what's small enough to smuggle, rather, we can then sell
00:24:40.500 and remunerate ourselves.
00:24:41.760 But they justified it as follows.
00:24:43.260 If it's idolatrous art, paganist, pre-Islamic gods being worshipped, such as the Temple of 0.99
00:24:50.480 Baal, that all has to go.
00:24:52.860 If it's Babylonian or Sumerian coins, little trinkets that we dig out of the sand, well,
00:24:59.440 we can sell that.
00:25:00.420 They have a whole department.
00:25:02.420 Actually, Abu Saif, the guy that was killed in the U.S. special forces raid in eastern
00:25:06.740 Syria last spring, he was in charge of the antiquities smuggling for ISIS.
00:25:12.420 And, you know, they do this like, I mean, it's almost like a Talmudic enterprise of defining
00:25:18.700 what can stay, what can go, and how you have to handle it and how you have to ask permission
00:25:24.000 for stealing, you know, the cultural patrimony of Syria and Iraq.
00:25:28.120 It's very sophisticated.
00:25:29.520 I mean, and, you know, their pretensions of statehood are not really to be underestimated.
00:25:34.560 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.
00:25:56.980 There's no self-deception about that.
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.
00:26:11.000 What do you make of those reports?
00:26:12.800 Are they true?
00:26:13.700 Is that wishful thinking?
00:26:15.040 It's true, but only up to a point.
00:26:17.960 So IHS, which is a British defense firm, reckons that ISIS has lost 14% of its territory across
00:26:25.360 Syria and Iraq in 19 months.
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,
00:27:04.100 the leader of the organization.
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
00:27:19.100 with that pledge of allegiance.
00:27:20.480 Now, does that mean that they have absolute control or the kind of terrain governance capability
00:27:27.920 that they do in Syria and Iraq?
00:27:29.160 No.
00:27:29.540 But it does mean that they have people who are fired by their ideology and willing to die on
00:27:34.980 their behalf.
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 0.99
00:27:58.660 commercial plane killing over 200 people.
00:28:00.600 Well, that will lie at Sinai is essentially a colonial outpost, if you like, of ISIS. 0.88
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
00:28:19.000 of Sicily.
00:28:20.100 So you remember, I mean, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi says, if we're lucky, inshallah, we'll conquer
00:28:24.500 Rome.
00:28:25.280 But they're not going to conquer Rome.
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
00:28:42.380 to call them.
00:28:44.320 And this is the thing.
00:28:45.500 And Sam, here is where absolutely religion plays a paramount role and what worries me the
00:28:51.600 most.
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 0.79
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. 0.52
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, 0.88
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 0.96
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
00:29:54.440 as many operatives.
00:29:56.840 So, look, they've taken a battering.
00:29:58.980 I know there's a very complicated answer to a pretty simple question, but welcome to the
00:30:02.800 Middle East.
00:30:03.140 Yeah, no, it's good.
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
00:30:32.560 has now been rendered obsolete.
00:30:34.800 So, I am sending my youngest son to join ISIS because at least he'll get a salary. 0.97
00:30:39.740 ISIS pays like $400 a month to its fighters.
00:30:43.480 And not only do they pay the fighter a salary, but they pay subsidies for the family members
00:30:47.480 of that fighter.
00:30:48.580 So, you know, if I were to join ISIS, I'd get $400 a month.
00:30:51.280 My wife would get $200.
00:30:53.080 And my 10-month-old daughter, I'd get money to pay for her baby food. 0.59
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
00:31:15.460 sales.
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
00:31:24.580 surcharging.
00:31:25.640 The reason they want territory, well, one of the reasons they want it is with territory
00:31:29.520 comes people.
00:31:30.240 And with people comes the ability to charge if they're Muslim zakat, if they're non-Muslim
00:31:34.480 jazia, which is, you know, an Islamic tax.
00:31:37.880 And not only that, like if you're caught smoking cigarettes, ISIS will throw you in a cage for
00:31:42.520 three days, but they'll also charge you money.
00:31:44.680 Charge you $1,000.
00:31:45.800 You have to pay a fine.
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
00:31:57.460 your house.
00:31:58.720 So, you know, it's jihadist eminent domain. 0.54
00:32:01.140 They'll take your house. 1.00
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.
00:32:12.880 Right, right.
00:32:13.540 Well, you made some interesting points there.
00:32:15.440 One is that you bring up the topic of affiliate groups like Boko Haram suddenly magnifying
00:32:21.920 the influence of ISIS.
00:32:23.780 And as you spelled out, there's really no clear line between an affiliate group and what
00:32:30.560 we tend to call lone wolf attacks.
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
00:32:45.820 connection can now do.
00:32:47.340 And I agree with you.
00:32:48.280 That is a—that's my larger concern.
00:32:50.760 Obviously, you know, having people who are extremely well-trained and battle-hardened emigrate 0.98
00:32:56.000 to the West and try to get martyred while killing as many people as possible, that is kind of 0.85
00:33:01.560 the worst-case scenario. 0.82
00:33:02.480 But, you know, it's good enough to sow terror just by being someone who gets radicalized 0.80
00:33:07.760 in his mother's house and goes to a school and kills 20 kids. 0.54
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 0.95
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
00:33:50.780 powers to do?
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.
00:34:12.940 That's a main element for sure.
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?
00:34:21.420 I should define that first.
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 0.96
00:34:42.260 is the bigoted term that jihadis use to describe Shia, literally means rejectionists, and, you 0.60
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 1.00
00:35:01.360 ummah.
00:35:01.700 Now, that, you might say, well, that's just par for the course for, you know, crazy messianic 0.98
00:35:07.440 terrorist group. 0.89
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 1.00
00:35:18.060 or just, you know, you're in a souk in Cairo or you're at some bazaar in Antakya, southern
00:35:24.500 Turkey, what have you witnessed?
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.
00:35:42.820 Then, revolution kicks off in Syria.
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
00:36:08.560 alive. 0.76
00:36:09.200 This is the thing.
00:36:10.200 ISIS traffics in moral equivalence.
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 0.94
00:36:24.840 of them called the National Defense Force, they lock whole Sunni families in their house 1.00
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? 1.00
00:36:35.840 All you, you, you stupid, you know, democratic or, you know, secular, uh, pro-Western, uh, you 1.00
00:36:42.800 know, Uncle Toms, basically. 1.00
00:36:45.220 You look, you look at NATO and you look at Washington and you beg them for assistance
00:36:49.080 and they don't come to your aid.
00:36:51.100 And for a while, Sunnis are like, well, you know, it's because, uh, it's because of Israel. 1.00
00:36:55.220 You know, the Assad as bad as he is, he's kept the Golan Heights quiet for 40 years so 0.99
00:36:59.920 the U.S. won't intervene because of Israel.
00:37:02.340 Then it became, well, no, it's because Obama wants to make this nuclear deal with Iran and
00:37:07.640 he doesn't want to rock the boat.
00:37:08.700 But now it's creeped up right to the point of the ISIS conspiracy, which is, no, actually
00:37:15.220 there is a conspiracy against the Sunnis.
00:37:18.260 Uh, the United States prefers the Shia. 0.97
00:37:21.180 It wants to be in bed with Iran. 0.99
00:37:24.200 Uh, and it wants the Shia led by the Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran and backed by the militias 0.83
00:37:28.980 in Iraq and helped by Lebanese Hezbollah and helped now by Syrian militias that are being
00:37:33.500 built as we speak.
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. 1.00
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.
00:37:52.340 It's become a very, very compelling narrative.
00:37:55.720 Now in slightly churlish moments, I joke, it's hard to tell where ISIS conspiracy theory
00:38:00.200 ends and U.S. foreign policy begins.
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
00:38:11.500 Atlantic.
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 0.99
00:38:22.740 force has got up to, isn't that just as reckless and dangerous as the Sunni variety? 1.00
00:38:27.780 And he kind of fudged the answer and he made it seem like what Iran does, as awful as it 0.95
00:38:32.820 might be, car bombings and so on, uh, there's a rationale to it.
00:38:36.420 They're less reckless.
00:38:37.320 They're more self-interested.
00:38:38.400 Whereas with the Sunnis, well, these are the guys who brought us 9-11 and the Taliban and 1.00
00:38:43.120 they're all barbaric crazies and we really can't negotiate or parlay with them in any 0.98
00:38:47.400 way. 0.99
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
00:39:02.420 anti-ISIS propaganda.
00:39:04.800 And in private moments, you talk to these diplomats in charge of the programs and they
00:39:08.600 tell you we're failing.
00:39:09.640 And we're failing because we exhibit ISIS atrocities, but they exhibit their atrocities. 0.77
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. 0.97
00:39:27.400 And the answer is you focus on the snuff component of those videos, but you don't focus on the
00:39:33.000 other 15 or 20 minutes.
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.
00:39:46.940 Who burns a man alive in a, alive in a cage?
00:39:49.900 Well, that's a 20 minute video.
00:39:51.500 The last five minutes of it is the, the, the, the sort of violent pornography.
00:39:56.420 The first, uh, 15 minutes of it is what?
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,
00:40:30.400 the attack formations and so on.
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
00:40:50.480 East.
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,
00:41:00.240 Hashemite, Wahhabist, whatever.
00:41:02.380 But just to clarify here, this is a distinct complaint and allegation of conspiracy from the
00:41:09.980 Shia-Sunni sectarian civil war.
00:41:13.500 Many of these regimes are Sunni that they're complaining about being attacked by. 0.98
00:41:18.080 And that's one of the ironies of, of hearing the ISIS, um, the ISIS narrative sort of taken
00:41:23.420 up by Sunnis.
00:41:24.140 Sunnis have been, um, you know, the dominant sect just by sheer force of numbers. 1.00
00:41:29.920 I mean, demography is destiny, right?
00:41:31.240 But Sunnis are now behaving and acting and sounding like an imperiled minority, like the 1.00
00:41:36.660 Shia had done for decades, if not centuries, because, uh, they are everywhere being besieged 0.99
00:41:42.480 and in battle and they feel like they're being taken over by them.
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