isis is funding their regional terrorist campaign by exporting oil through the very countries it is the greatest threat to, Iraq, Syria, Jordan and Turkey. Meanwhile, the U.S. taxpayers are paying for the U.S. military "advisers" on the ground and to conduct airstrikes in Iraq to stop isis from taking over the country. No doubt, if we haven't already started doing so, we will be sending military advisers to Jordan and increasing our military aid to Jordan and Turkey (our NATO ally), all at American taxpayer expense. Meanwhile, the governments of our Gulf State allies continue their pathetic Islamic infighting over who they should be and are funding and supplying in the Syrian civil war while their governments turn blind eyes to their citizens financial support of isis and al qaeda ( we should remember the 9/11 terrorist who struck America were from saudi arabia ) Our government, the Obama administration as well as Congress, will continue the propaganda campaign about the threat isis presents to this country a la saddam hussein's WMD to justify the next Middle East War. The government and main stream media talking heads are already mouthing the scripted disinformation from the American military-industrial complex how if we had been supplying the "right" Syrian rebels this situation with isis would have never developed. They are using the brutal murder by isis of James Foley to both outrage and frighten Americans. They will progress to the patriotic responsibility we have to defend America and American interest in the Middle East (i.e. American defense contractors and American oil / energy companies) from the isis terrorist to justify American troops being sent back to Iraq and possibly into Syria. And too many Americans will loose their lives, or be mentally and physically wounded (and then neglected by the nation they serve) in the name of corporate profit margins. Will America be stupid enough believe the propaganda, to believe the deception and manipulation by the warmongerers and sacrifice our troops in another pointless Middle East war? We stopped our government from getting involved in Syria last year, and we have a responsibility to stop further involvement in Iraq and Syria now. This from +Al Jazeera America and +PBS NewsHour .....
JUDY WOODRUFF: And now we learn more about the threat the Islamic State poses and how they’re recruiting Westerners.
That
comes from Steven Simon, who served as a senior director for Middle
Eastern and North African affairs on the National Security Council staff
from 2011 to 2012. And Shadi Hamid, he’s a fellow at the Brookings
Institution’s Center for Middle East Policy. He’s also the author of
“Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle
East.”And we welcome you both to the NewsHour.
Steven Simon, I will just start with you. How — we have been reading so much about ISIS, ISIL, Islamic State, recently. How are they different from these other extreme groups, and particularly al-Qaida?
STEVEN SIMON, Middle East Institute: Well, they’re different in terms of their tactics, and I think in terms of their overall strategy. Their tactics, as we have seen, are savage.
They deploy savagery as a tactic. This is a tactic that has been repudiated by core al-Qaida. You know, the al-Qaida leadership in South Asia, Ayman al-Zawahri, the current leader of al-Qaida and the replacement for bin Laden, he has specifically enjoined al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, from doing the kinds of things that he is doing, because, from an al-Qaida point of view, it alienates most Muslims. And that’s a serious defect in the strategy.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, Shadi Hamid, is that the main difference, that this is just a more extreme — a group that is just far more willing to take extreme actions?
SHADI HAMID, Brookings Institution: That’s a key difference, but it goes well beyond that.
They’re not your terrorists of early to mid 2000s that were blowing things up and just killing innocent civilians without any kind of vision of how to build something. What’s really scary about ISIS is that they actually have a governing program. They actually control and hold territory. They provide social services. They run local government. They provide some modicum of law and order.
So they are actually able to obtain some local support in Iraq and Syria precisely for those reasons. So it’s the viciousness along with governing.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, Steven Simon, is that one of the reasons they have been able to attract the supporters, the members, the young men who have come not only from the Middle East, from that part of the world, but we also know Westerners from Europe, even from the United States?
STEVEN SIMON: Well, this side of the successful Muslim movement challenging the West in particular, challenging those who want — who are perceived to want to kill Muslims is a galvanizing thing, I think, for Muslim young men in many places, including Europe.
In Iraq, in particular, though, ISIS is benefiting from the mismanagement of Iraqi affairs by the Iraqi government, the exclusion of Sunnis from public goods, the disregard for Sunni interests, in the wake of the massive dislocation that followed the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
There’s a lot of unhappiness among the Sunni majority population, especially those Sunnis who are concentrated in the areas where ISIS has gotten a foothold. So ISIS is able — has been able to join forces with the Baathists, former Saddam people, and other disaffected individuals to gain a pretty serious grip.
JUDY WOODRUFF: What about in Syria, Shadi Hamid? I mean, they were clearly able to swell their forces, draw more adherents in Syria, and, again, from the West, from Europe, from the United States. What’s the appeal? And we just — we saw in the video, the terrible video with James Foley, the man who was there with him had a British accent.
SHADI HAMID: This actually worries me that we’re focusing so much on Iraq, and senior administration officials focus on that part of it. They barely even mention Syria. Obama clearly doesn’t even want to talk about that.
But the rise of ISIS is more directly tied to Syria than it is to Iraq. And Syria experts were warning this administration a year-and-a-half ago, saying that if there is more — this power vacuum continues and we can’t support the more mainstream rebel forces, extremist groups like ISIS are going to gain ground.
So I think that we have been kind of asleep at the wheel. Americans are waking up to the threat right now, but ISIS has been beheading Arabs and Muslims for over the past year.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So why is that an appeal? What’s the appeal to young people to join?
SHADI HAMID: Well, I think part of the problem with the kind of Arab spring is that peaceful protest didn’t work, working within the democratic process didn’t work, so we had peaceful protesters in Syria, but they were being shot down and slaughtered by the Assad regime.
We had mainstream Islamic movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, which were trying to work within the democratic process. Yes, they had — we, as Americans, don’t share their values. They were deeply conservative and illiberal, but at least they were saying that there has to be a process.
ISIS is saying that you can have an Islamic state through brute force, that you don’t have to wait, you don’t have to be gradualist about it. And there’s a kind of appeal, the kind of — I think for radicals and for radicalized Europeans, they see a kind of purity to their vision.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And let’s pick up on that, Steven Simon.
What is it — for young men living — who are Muslim living in Europe, living in the United States, I mean, what is the draw?
STEVEN SIMON: Well, I think they see themselves engaged in a noble and virtuous endeavor. They’re doing something that they feel is a fight for a really good cause.
And it’s interesting, because they don’t see themselves as going to join a terrorist movement. They see themselves going to join liberators. And, for this reason, for example, they tweet and Facebook their way to the battlefield, to the delight, I have to say, of law enforcement and intelligence officials in Western Europe and the United States.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So I guess the — you know, stepping back, the question on everyone’s mind, Shadi Hamid, is, what is the threat here, both to the region, the wider region beyond Syria and Iraq, and then ultimately to Europe and then to the United States?
SHADI HAMID: Yes.
So we shouldn’t underestimate ISIS. And I worry that with all this rhetoric about ISIS being inexplicably evil, to use John Kerry’s words, that we will just look at them as these kind of fringe extremists, but we have to understand the root causes of their rise and also their staying power.
If we don’t have any plan to understand the Syrian roots of the conflict, ISIS is probably going to be with us for the foreseeable future, three years, five years, 10 years, God knows how long. So that’s what’s so scary about this is that they are a reality on the ground. In some ways, they’re the most successful extremist group in modern history.
So there isn’t an easy solution, unless there is a coherent vision that addresses both Iraq and Syria.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, I mean, what would you add to that, Steven Simon? What do you see the threat? We heard I think Secretary Hagel say this is a threat beyond anything we have ever seen.
STEVEN SIMON: Well, you know, look, there aren’t that many ISIS fighters. The numbers vary really widely depending upon who’s counted as being an ISIS and who isn’t. The initial ISIS attack in Iraq consisted of about 3,000 fighters.
OK, this is essentially a minuscule force. The Iraqi army consists of 900,000 individuals, 900,000 soldiers. The Pentagon says about a third of those are workable, you know, that the United States could help about a third of that army fight ISIS. That’s a huge advantage.
The Peshmerga, the Kurdish forces, they haven’t fired a shot in anger in a long time. They folded initially, but they have come back. Where is ISIS actually going to go is really the question? They can’t invade Iran. They’re not going to invade Saudi Arabia. They can’t invade Jordan. They’re not going to invade Turkey, and they can’t invade Israel.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So you see them as more contained than what…
STEVEN SIMON: I see them as fundamentally contained. I think their tactics will earn them a lot of enemies, and the tacit alliances that they formed in Iraq won’t last.
SHADI HAMID: But even if they don’t gain additional territory, what they control now is a very large swathe of territory in both Iraq and Syria. So there is an extremist so-called Islamic State in the middle of the Middle East.
And that destabilizes obviously Iraq and Syria, but also you see spillover effects in Jordan, in Lebanon. So, even if we contain it, it’s still a huge problem.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, they have certainly gotten a lot of people’s attention.
Shadi Hamid, Steven Simon, we thank you both.
SHADI HAMID: It’s good to be here.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, to the frontline of the fight to save Iraq.One
element of the U.S. effort to turn the situation around relies on
arming Kurdish security forces in their fight with militants from the
Islamic State group.
Our chief foreign affairs correspondent, Margaret Warner, just spent the day with Kurdish military leaders as they traveled to Jalawla, which is not that far from Baghdad.
Here’s her report.
MARGARET WARNER: Racing south on the highway between Iraq’s Kurdish capital, Irbil, and Baghdad, miles of open desert unfold, dotted by villages and towns. But just a quarter of the way down, Iraq’s most vital commercial lifeline becomes the frontline.
The Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has advanced to within 650 yards of the road. Kurdish forces Colonel Wria Hasan took us to one of many well-manned Kurdish Peshmerga outposts guarding the new frontier to show us just how close the militants’ forbidding flag flew.
What keeps the ISIS forces from just moving across this road?
COL. WRIA HASAN, Peshmerga (through interpreter): If they came closer, we could stop them, and we could move their way, but there are a lot Arabs living there.
MARGARET WARNER: So you’re saying it will be a very bloody battle if you tried to advance that way?
COL. WRIA HASAN (through interpreter): Yes it would be bloody, and many civilians would die.
MARGARET WARNER: Colonel Hasan was escorting us in his armored SUV to the town of Jalawla, 100 miles northeast of Baghdad, in southern Diyala Province. The province is now partly controlled by the Kurds since the Iraqi army collapsed before the Islamic extremists’ onslaught in mid-June.
We’d come to explore why, over the past month, the famed Peshmerga army, considered one of the best in the region, had also fallen back at several points along its internal frontier against the Islamist group.
General Mahmoud Sengawi commands this southern region, and on our way to the front, I asked him why he was now fighting to take back the strategically located town of Jalawla.
How did the Peshmerga forces lose Jalawla on August 11?
GEN. MAHMOUD SENGAWI, Peshmerga (through interpreter): Because there were civilians inside the town, and because we couldn’t distinguish those who are ISIS with those who are not. There were snipers among them, and our Peshmerga were getting killed. This is why I decided to retreat from Jalawla.
MARGARET WARNER: We continued talking behind the shelter of a Peshmerga outpost overlooking a two-mile stretch of no-man’s land east of Jalawla.
How different are these fighters from Islamic State than other forces you have ever faced?
GEN. MAHMOUD SENGAWI (through interpreter): ISIS is essentially fighting the way Islamic fighters did in early centuries, when they spilled a lot of blood to occupy other countries. We have never fought anyone like that.
MARGARET WARNER: So, how are you going to have to adjust your tactics and your strategy?
GEN. MAHMOUD SENGAWI (through interpreter): Yes, of course we need to change strategy. These fighters came straight from the streets, and we need to learn to fight them in the streets.
MARGARET WARNER: Street fighting training is key, says military analyst Michael Stephens, who lives part-time in Irbil. I spoke with him today via Skype from London.
MICHAEL STEPHENS, Royal United Services Institute: But the general rank-and-file Peshmerga are not able to do this. In fact, they have almost been turned into a checkpoint army, where they’re basically responsible for static security protection, and not the kind of dynamic advanced tactics that ISIS are using the ground.
MARGARET WARNER: But that’s not the only change they need, Stephens says.
MICHAEL STEPHENS: The other thing, of course, is that ISIS are almost fighting a new type of warfare that the Kurds are not used to. A tank is no good against mobile units of independently working armored Humvees that are very able to move quickly. And the Peshmerga just simply aren’t trained for that sort of combat.
MARGARET WARNER: The Kurdish forces blame their problems on the lack of the sort of advanced weapons they need to combat the modern American-made items captured by Islamic State forces from Iraqi army bases in Mosul and elsewhere.
General Hussein Mansour, who runs the weapons supply unit for the south, took us to see just how old fashioned their weapons are.
GEN. HUSSEIN MANSOUR, Peshmerga: It was made in 1955.
MARGARET WARNER: No.
MARGARET WARNER: Really, 1955?
GEN. HUSSEIN MANSOUR: Fifty-five or ’50.
MARGARET WARNER: And you keep it running.
GEN. HUSSEIN MANSOUR: We have no options, so…
MARGARET WARNER: Yes.
The general’s phone rang constantly with requests from commanders in the field, demanding more weapons.
GEN. HUSSEIN MANSOUR: Peshmerga, this is what is has, no armor, and here is what ISIS has, armored Humvees.
MARGARET WARNER: Inside his operations center, Mansour explained further.
GEN. HUSSEIN MANSOUR (through interpreter): Unfortunately, our weapons are very old, left over from Saddam’s regime, and we do not have sufficient ammunition. We are supporting our Peshmerga fighters as much as we can. But we really need help to acquire modern weapons, because we think this fight is a long-term war, and it will not end easily.
MARGARET WARNER: Can you retake Jalawla without better weapons?
GEN. HUSSEIN MANSOUR (through interpreter): There, we have problems larger than weapons. Arabs in those towns support ISIS. Jalawla has always been a bastion of Baathist support. There are 1,200 former high-ranking Baathist officers there. It’s always been a bastion of terrorists, even when the Americans were here.
MARGARET WARNER: To test that notion, we had Mohammed Mala Hassan, mayor of Khanaqin, where the Peshmerga are based, take us in his convoy of heavily armed men to meet one of the many Sunni Arabs he said have fled to Khanaqin from Jalawla.
Amer Yusef, a successful contractor, left with his family of 13 in June as the Islamic State began infiltrating Jalawla. He has a decidedly negative view of the Islamist group.
He said it’s true some Sunnis are with them, but often the extremists are more brutal with Sunnis.
AMER YUSEF, Contractor: (through interpreter): They are a terrorist organization that wants to harm us. They have harmed most of the families who have stayed in the town.
MARGARET WARNER: Many people say all Arabs here support the Islamic State. Is that true?
AMER YUSEF (through interpreter): I have a close friend who was a member of the municipality, my neighbor, and he is a Sunni Arab. They killed him few days ago. After taking him and his brother to their Sharia court, his brother said they killed them.
MARGARET WARNER: The Islamic State says they’re doing all of this in the name of pure Islam.
AMER YUSEF (through interpreter): No. They everyone’s enemy. Who are they killing the most? Christians or Muslims? They have killed mostly Muslims, both Sunnis and Shiites.
MARGARET WARNER: To halt the Islamic State’s onslaught here and throughout Iraq, the Kurdish commanders say they need more American help, including the weapons they say they have not received.
Back at our spot overlooking Jalawla, General Sengawi had an ominous warning.
GEN. MAHMOUD SENGAWI (through interpreter): They should help us. I tell you, if they succeed in occupying our country, they next will take the battle to America.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And Margaret joins me now from Irbil.
Hello, Margaret. That was quite a report.
Now, we are hearing that there is fresh fighting today in the same place where you were yesterday between Kurdish fighters and these Islamic extremists.
MARGARET WARNER: Well, Judy, certainly Kurdish and British Web sites are reporting that the Peshmerga forces launched a new assault against Jalawla today and, in fact, took an eastern district, which is exactly where we were, I was, in that crow’s nest outpost at the end with that general.
And a senior Kurdish military official confirmed that to me tonight. What is more, The Guardian’s reporting is that this action was supported by U.S. airstrikes. And, meanwhile, CENTCOM put out a report saying they had launched U.S. airstrikes, but in the vicinity of Mosul dam. We were not able to get confirmation from the Pentagon tonight as to whether the two were related.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, Margaret, one other thing. What can you tell us about whether the Kurds have been receiving weapons from the U.S.? We know U.S. officials are saying they have. The Kurdish commanders were telling you they haven’t.
MARGARET WARNER: Well, Judy, on the way home, the long drive home from this shoot yesterday I did call a senior Kurdish military — Kurdish political official and reported what the commanders had said to me when he asked me. And he said, take that with a grain of salt. Commanders always like to say if things aren’t going too well that, well, they didn’t have the right weapons.
He said U.S. and allied weapons are getting through, though many may be directed at areas of higher priority for the U.S., like the Peshmerga forces’ assault to retake the Mosul dam. Separately, a military analyst here told me that part of the problem is distribution among the two different political factions of the Kurdish forces, and that since the weapons are being funneled — and they are being funneled, but it’s through the political party of the president, President Barzani of the so-called KDP, and that the other political party who makes up part of the government called the PUK is getting the short end of the stick.
And the forces we were with yesterday were with the PUK. So, basically, Judy, this country is not only divided among Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and Kurds, but, in fact, even within each ethnic or sectarian group, which gives you an idea of how complicated it is, I think, to put this country back together.
JUDY WOODRUFF: A lot of complexity to pull apart.
Margaret Warner reporting from Irbil, we thank you, and stay safe.
MARGARET WARNER: Thank you, Judy.
Tonight,
chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner takes a close look
at these newly internally displaced persons, or IDPs, and efforts to
contain their suffering.MARGARET WARNER: A Boeing 747
touched down in the afternoon heat of Irbil today, carrying 100 tons of
United Nations Refugee Agency aid, the first wave of fresh supplies
since the U.N. last week announced a heightened level of emergency for
Northeastern Iraq.
NED COLT, Spokesman, UN High Commissioner for Refugees: It can’t be done overnight. No one would suggest otherwise. But now the system is up and running in a major way. So, we’re not just getting materials in that we already have in stock, but we are bringing them in from around the world.
MARGARET WARNER: The tents in this shipment will shelter at least 20,000 people, but that’s just a fraction of the estimated 1.25 million Iraqis who have fled into the country’s Kurdish region since the self-proclaimed Islamic State began its onslaught here eight months ago.
Yesterday, a brutal wind whipped through the U.N.’s Bajet Kandela camp near Iraqi Kurdistan’s border with Syria. This camp was empty two weeks ago, but that was before I.S. attacked members of the minority Yazidi religious community in the town of Sinjar, forcing them to race for refuge on Sinjar Mountain. U.S. airstrikes and Kurdish forces helped thousands escape to sanctuary here.
We accompanied Dr. Syed Jaffar Hussain, Iraq country director for the U.N.’s World Health Organization, as he made his rounds through the camp.
DR. SYED JAFFER HUSSEIN, Iraq Country Director, World Health Organization: I think this is one of the extremely complex IDP crises at least I have witnessed, not only in the region, but beyond, not only the numbers, but also with the fast pace it happened, taking U.N. and the government unaware and unprepared for such a huge number of IDPs.
MARGARET WARNER: How does the psychological condition in which these Yazidis have arrived compare to other refugees and other displaced people?
DR. SYED JAFFER HUSSEIN: The interviews we have conducted with many of them seem to be extremely — what we call the post-traumatic stress disorder. You can see the gloom in their eyes, like a person who doesn’t know what will happen to him.
MARGARET WARNER: He stopped to see a family that had been in the camp more than two weeks.
DR. SYED JAFFER HUSSEIN: Can you ask him, the last few days, any of these children have gone to the clinic?
MAN (through interpreter): No, we haven’t, but they got here and did vaccinations. But we lack food. We only get some soup and some bad-quality rice.
MARGARET WARNER: We were invited by 19-year-old Fuad Hassan to the tent he shares with his parents and eight siblings. They fled Sinjar when they heard Islamic State forces were nearby, but one night on the mountain was enough.
FUAD HASSAN, (through interpreter): It was very bad on the mountain. We saw people being eaten by insects.
MARGARET WARNER: They were fortunate to find an escape route into Syria opened up by Syrian Kurdish fighters and made their way on foot to this camp.
So, Fuad, what comes next for you?
FUAD HASSAN (through interpreter): My grades were high. I would have entered medical college, but now everything is ruined. We want to go back to the homeland of our forefathers, but if we can find a country that welcomes us, we may leave here.
MARGARET WARNER: His 37-year-old mother, Zaineb Yusuf Asim, was overcome by feelings of betrayal.
ZAINEB YUSUF ASIM (through interpreter): We don’t cry only for ourselves, but for all Yazidis. They tortured us, attacked our honor, our religion. We have lived together with our Muslim Arab neighbors during the Iran-Iraq War, during the first Gulf War. We protected each other. Now they became our enemies.
MARGARET WARNER: This camp for 15,000 people originally built for Syrian refugees was the first place Yazidis found shelter when they escaped from Sinjar Mountain. As hot, dusty, windblown and under-supplied as this camp is, it’s far better than what others fleeing the mountain found when they arrived.
Forty miles east, in Dohuk, capital of Iraq’s northwestern-most province, we found what’s far more typical here, thousands of Yazidis living in half-constructed buildings. Khuduid Hussein, a construction worker, says the 150 people in his group are subsisting on private donations from local citizens. They have received no government help so far.
KHUDUID HUSSEIN (through interpreter): People in Dohuk are very welcoming. They have helped us. They give us bread, water and food.
MARGARET WARNER: You have all these beautiful children around you. What future do you see for these children?
KHUDUID HUSSEIN (through interpreter): If this situation remains like this, I don’t see that they will have any future. Soon, it will be winter here and many of them will die of cold.
MARGARET WARNER: His relative, 20-year-old Afra Hassan, is seven months pregnant.
AFRA HASSAN (through interpreter): I tried to go to the hospital here, but they wouldn’t give me any medicine because I didn’t have any money. It’s such a miserable situation. I wish I had died in my home.
HAVAL AMEDI, Deputy Director, Emergency Response Program, Dohuk, Iraq: Dohuk is the smallest governorate, with the smallest resources, with the highest intensity of IDP and refugees.
MARGARET WARNER: Yes.
Haval Amedi is deputy director of a committee set up by the provincial government just last week to try to coordinate the local response. He admits they are overwhelmed.
HAVAL AMEDI: Now the problem becoming more and more, it’s beyond the capacity of a small governorate to host all those people together to the here, because of the limitation of the resources.
MARGARET WARNER: He explained the waves of Syrians and Iraqis fleeing Islamic State extremists have doubled the population of his tiny province. But he said most Kurds had generous feelings toward the new arrivals.
HAVAL AMEDI: One day, each of us was a refugee or an IDP somewhere. And, mainly, they believe on helping the people. There are people who are hosting them, receiving them at the border, at the schools, at the public buildings and everything.
MARGARET WARNER: Yet no amount of aid or kindness is likely to heal the deep psychic wounds cut here.
Back at the camp, the man of the Hassan house, Walid Hassan, stopped us before we left. He had something to say.
WALID HASSAN (through interpreter): What was our fault? What wrong have we done? We are peaceful human beings. What is the fault of those kids who died? They have killed so many kids. They shot them in their heads. I want to deliver this letter to anyone who cares about humanity: Help us. Humanity in Iraq is just gone. Iraq has become the country of monsters.
JUDY WOODRUFF: I spoke to Margaret earlier this afternoon.
Margaret, thanks for joining us.
First of all, what’s the reaction of where you are in Irbil to the beheading of the American journalist James Foley?
MARGARET WARNER: Well, Judy, it is a big story here. It is leading a lot of media Web sites. President Obama’s remarks just now recently led the Web site, and it’s being interpreted or described as the president vowing to crush the Islamic State forces.
I, frankly, was surprised. I thought the attitude here would be, we have had thousands of our own people kill, one American killed, what’s the big deal? But not at all.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, we just saw the report you did on the situation that the Iraqi minorities are facing. You have reported on many other refugee displaced populations. What’s different about the Yazidis and the Christians you have been speaking to there?
MARGARET WARNER: I think it’s the shock, the surprise at being suddenly uprooted from their lives, given 24 hours or less to clear out or be killed.
All refugees are traumatized, of course, Afghanistan, Pakistan, refugees I have talked to from Syria who’ve fled to Turkey and Lebanon. But the difference is that most of them made a collective decision or a family decision that the fighting had become too intense, they were being shelled by one side or the other, and they decided to flee together. And they could take things with them.
These people here feel to me as if — you know, completely shell-shocked at being individually targeted, hunted, really, because of their religion.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, finally, Margaret, yesterday, we know the Iraqi army launched a new offensive to try to recapture the city of Tikrit from the Islamic State force, this just one day after the Mosul dam was retaken. They failed. They abandoned the fight. What are you hearing there as to why?
MARGARET WARNER: Judy, the analysis here that there were two missing ingredients in the assault on Tikrit. One, of course, is coordination with American airstrikes. The retaking of the Mosul dam was a collective effort of Kurdish fighters, Iraqi army fighters and American airstrikes, very clearly targeted, strategically targeted out of a joint operations center up here in Irbil.
The second thing that was missing, Judy, was a cohesive Iraqi force. This time, the Iraqis were fighting entirely on their own. And according to a senior Kurdish military official here, it was a hodgepodge of regular Iraqi army and Shiite militia. He said they had great weapons, but they’re very poorly led by commanders who are appointed on sectarian grounds.
He said — and they were not really committed to the fight. And he said that — essentially, he described the same kind of Iraqi army that fled from Northern Iraq in June, when the Islamic State attacked Mosul and all these other outposts up here near the Kurdish region. And that’s a bad sign. If that’s true, that’s a bad sign for the test that President Obama has set for greater U.S. military involvement. That is that you have a cohesive and united — politically united and militarily united Iraq.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Margaret Warner reporting from Irbil, thank you.
MARGARET WARNER: Thanks, Judy.
Smuggling of Syrian and Iraqi oil earns the Al-Qaeda-inspired insurgents up to $2M per day, but operation is primitive
With up to $2 million in daily revenue from black market oil, the
Islamic State insurgency not only holds sway over swathes of Syria and
Iraq but has also begun to lay the foundations to become a small petro-state.
Such is the extent of the threat posed by the network that Defense
Secretary Chuck Hagel on Thursday called the group “as sophisticated and
well-funded as any group that we’ve seen” and “beyond just a terrorist
group.”
But even as Western military leaders ratchet up rhetoric about the Islamic State, considered to be the world's wealthiest extremist network, analysts say the fledgling petro-state is already running into problems.
Though details of the group’s oil smuggling operations are murky, the Islamic State and its Sunni allies are known to have dominion over extensive smuggling routes into Jordan, Turkey and Iran, which some experts believe have been turning a blind eye to the group's illicit tankers and makeshift pipelines. There are also unconfirmed reports of the Islamic State bribing the Syrian regime with oil to avert airstrikes — even as the group counts itself among Syria’s anti-Assad rebellion. “We’re talking about a regional black market extending from Syria to Iraq, from Jordan to the southern part of Turkey,” said Luay al-Khatteeb, director of the Iraq Energy Institute.
In contrast with similarly minded extremist groups in Libya and Nigeria, who have periodically raided oil tankers and pipelines and seriously disrupted state oil production, the Islamic State has actually coerced employees of oil facilities in Syria and Iraq to keep working, stabilizing oil production to an unprecedented degree for a non-state actor. It’s an approach that reflects the Islamic State’s emphasis on governance and self-sufficiency in land it seizes — a departure from the practices of the Al-Qaeda movement from which it drew inspiration — as well as its immediate need for cash to bankroll ambitious plans of regional expansion.
But, as is the nature of an illicit oil smuggling operation, the Islamic State's black market trade is hugely inefficient, hindered by its illegality at every leg of the production and distribution chain.
At the extraction stage, the insurgents will never be able to match maximum flow rates without the investment and expertise of private oil companies, who of course won’t want to do business with a feared extremist group. Then, once it’s out of the ground, Islamic State oil needs to be pawned off to middlemen at rates discounted by up to 75 percent, according to some estimates, because a fixed distribution network — pipelines and the like — would be easy pickings for U.S. and Iraqi missiles.
According to Richard Mallinson, a geopolitical analyst at London-based consultancy Energy Aspects, these middlemen, who vary from corrupt businessmen to more organized smuggling operations, “capture a lot of the value, offering one price to whoever controls the fields and then caging quite a high mark-up, which will still be well below the local market price.”
But even as Western military leaders ratchet up rhetoric about the Islamic State, considered to be the world's wealthiest extremist network, analysts say the fledgling petro-state is already running into problems.
Though details of the group’s oil smuggling operations are murky, the Islamic State and its Sunni allies are known to have dominion over extensive smuggling routes into Jordan, Turkey and Iran, which some experts believe have been turning a blind eye to the group's illicit tankers and makeshift pipelines. There are also unconfirmed reports of the Islamic State bribing the Syrian regime with oil to avert airstrikes — even as the group counts itself among Syria’s anti-Assad rebellion. “We’re talking about a regional black market extending from Syria to Iraq, from Jordan to the southern part of Turkey,” said Luay al-Khatteeb, director of the Iraq Energy Institute.
In contrast with similarly minded extremist groups in Libya and Nigeria, who have periodically raided oil tankers and pipelines and seriously disrupted state oil production, the Islamic State has actually coerced employees of oil facilities in Syria and Iraq to keep working, stabilizing oil production to an unprecedented degree for a non-state actor. It’s an approach that reflects the Islamic State’s emphasis on governance and self-sufficiency in land it seizes — a departure from the practices of the Al-Qaeda movement from which it drew inspiration — as well as its immediate need for cash to bankroll ambitious plans of regional expansion.
But, as is the nature of an illicit oil smuggling operation, the Islamic State's black market trade is hugely inefficient, hindered by its illegality at every leg of the production and distribution chain.
At the extraction stage, the insurgents will never be able to match maximum flow rates without the investment and expertise of private oil companies, who of course won’t want to do business with a feared extremist group. Then, once it’s out of the ground, Islamic State oil needs to be pawned off to middlemen at rates discounted by up to 75 percent, according to some estimates, because a fixed distribution network — pipelines and the like — would be easy pickings for U.S. and Iraqi missiles.
According to Richard Mallinson, a geopolitical analyst at London-based consultancy Energy Aspects, these middlemen, who vary from corrupt businessmen to more organized smuggling operations, “capture a lot of the value, offering one price to whoever controls the fields and then caging quite a high mark-up, which will still be well below the local market price.”
Finding a buyer willing to purchase oil, even indirectly, from an
armed network reviled for its brutality is not easy, even if it comes
with a drastically reduced price tag. According to Mallinson, “This
really restricts the scale of operations. There’s always a market for
smuggled oil at that low price, but not one that will simply expand and
expand.”
Through a combination of smuggling crude oil and refining smaller quantities itself at its refineries in Syria, the Sunni Islamic State is still projected by some experts to pull in over $700 million in a year (though many feel that estimate is generous) if they can manage to hang on to their vast but fragile holdings. After leading an astonishing takeover of Sunni lands in Iraq in June, the Islamic State is now fighting tooth and nail to wrest control of the Baiji oil refinery, outside the IS-held city of Mosul, from Iraqi forces, which would allow the group expand refining operations into Iraq. The Kurdish-majority city of Kirkuk looms as another lucrative oil-rich target for the Islamic State.
But they have been pushed back on several fronts by U.S. air strikes, which began earlier this month, and recently U.S. military officials have begun to suggest that wider intervention in Iraq and perhaps even Syria could be on the horizon. Many suspect the caliphate could still be wiped out in its infancy.
There are further questions about just how long Iraq’s Sunnis will continue to tolerate the extremist takeover of their lands, support that has been critical to the group’s astonishing surge this summer. The Islamic State has piggybacked on popular resentment of the Shia-led Baghdad government, which among other things stands accused of failing to share Iraq’s considerable oil revenues with Sunnis and Kurds, and have thusly framed their black market operation as a means of returning oil wealth to the people.
But as Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy put it in an interview with Foreign Policy, in declaring their caliphate the Islamic State has “gone from being the world's richest terrorist organization to the world's poorest state,” propped up mainly by extortion and oil smuggling.
That revenue stream has become ever vulnerable as the Obama administration takes aim at the extremists. “Now that Western forces are operating more surveillance on Islamic State terrorists, I’m sure they can better identify where trucks are being filled, what routes they’re taking, what borders they’re crossing,” said Mallinson.
It is just as important to ensure that adequate supplies reach Iraqi Kurdistan, which is suffering from considerable fuel shortages due to an influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees, as well as other places where the Islamic State’s oil is smuggled. “If you have shortages, it creates an environment where black market oil proliferates," Mallinson said. "If the price is low enough, someone will always buy it.”
A more robust embargo on the oil trade in Iraq and better enforcement along Iraq’s borders are essential to stifling the illicit flow of oil and suffocating the insurgency, al-Khatteeb added. “It is stoppable, but it needs very serious measures. Regional nations really need to put their political differences aside and unite in this war on terror.”
Through a combination of smuggling crude oil and refining smaller quantities itself at its refineries in Syria, the Sunni Islamic State is still projected by some experts to pull in over $700 million in a year (though many feel that estimate is generous) if they can manage to hang on to their vast but fragile holdings. After leading an astonishing takeover of Sunni lands in Iraq in June, the Islamic State is now fighting tooth and nail to wrest control of the Baiji oil refinery, outside the IS-held city of Mosul, from Iraqi forces, which would allow the group expand refining operations into Iraq. The Kurdish-majority city of Kirkuk looms as another lucrative oil-rich target for the Islamic State.
But they have been pushed back on several fronts by U.S. air strikes, which began earlier this month, and recently U.S. military officials have begun to suggest that wider intervention in Iraq and perhaps even Syria could be on the horizon. Many suspect the caliphate could still be wiped out in its infancy.
There are further questions about just how long Iraq’s Sunnis will continue to tolerate the extremist takeover of their lands, support that has been critical to the group’s astonishing surge this summer. The Islamic State has piggybacked on popular resentment of the Shia-led Baghdad government, which among other things stands accused of failing to share Iraq’s considerable oil revenues with Sunnis and Kurds, and have thusly framed their black market operation as a means of returning oil wealth to the people.
But as Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy put it in an interview with Foreign Policy, in declaring their caliphate the Islamic State has “gone from being the world's richest terrorist organization to the world's poorest state,” propped up mainly by extortion and oil smuggling.
That revenue stream has become ever vulnerable as the Obama administration takes aim at the extremists. “Now that Western forces are operating more surveillance on Islamic State terrorists, I’m sure they can better identify where trucks are being filled, what routes they’re taking, what borders they’re crossing,” said Mallinson.
It is just as important to ensure that adequate supplies reach Iraqi Kurdistan, which is suffering from considerable fuel shortages due to an influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees, as well as other places where the Islamic State’s oil is smuggled. “If you have shortages, it creates an environment where black market oil proliferates," Mallinson said. "If the price is low enough, someone will always buy it.”
A more robust embargo on the oil trade in Iraq and better enforcement along Iraq’s borders are essential to stifling the illicit flow of oil and suffocating the insurgency, al-Khatteeb added. “It is stoppable, but it needs very serious measures. Regional nations really need to put their political differences aside and unite in this war on terror.”
How is the Islamic State different from other extremist groups?
Shadi
Hamid of the Brookings Institution and Steven Simon of the Middle East
Institute join Judy Woodruff to discuss the threat the Islamic State
poses and how they’re recruiting members, including westerners.
TRANSCRIPT
JUDY WOODRUFF: And now we learn more about the threat the Islamic State poses and how they’re recruiting Westerners.
Steven Simon, I will just start with you. How — we have been reading so much about ISIS, ISIL, Islamic State, recently. How are they different from these other extreme groups, and particularly al-Qaida?
STEVEN SIMON, Middle East Institute: Well, they’re different in terms of their tactics, and I think in terms of their overall strategy. Their tactics, as we have seen, are savage.
They deploy savagery as a tactic. This is a tactic that has been repudiated by core al-Qaida. You know, the al-Qaida leadership in South Asia, Ayman al-Zawahri, the current leader of al-Qaida and the replacement for bin Laden, he has specifically enjoined al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, from doing the kinds of things that he is doing, because, from an al-Qaida point of view, it alienates most Muslims. And that’s a serious defect in the strategy.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So, Shadi Hamid, is that the main difference, that this is just a more extreme — a group that is just far more willing to take extreme actions?
SHADI HAMID, Brookings Institution: That’s a key difference, but it goes well beyond that.
They’re not your terrorists of early to mid 2000s that were blowing things up and just killing innocent civilians without any kind of vision of how to build something. What’s really scary about ISIS is that they actually have a governing program. They actually control and hold territory. They provide social services. They run local government. They provide some modicum of law and order.
So they are actually able to obtain some local support in Iraq and Syria precisely for those reasons. So it’s the viciousness along with governing.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, Steven Simon, is that one of the reasons they have been able to attract the supporters, the members, the young men who have come not only from the Middle East, from that part of the world, but we also know Westerners from Europe, even from the United States?
STEVEN SIMON: Well, this side of the successful Muslim movement challenging the West in particular, challenging those who want — who are perceived to want to kill Muslims is a galvanizing thing, I think, for Muslim young men in many places, including Europe.
In Iraq, in particular, though, ISIS is benefiting from the mismanagement of Iraqi affairs by the Iraqi government, the exclusion of Sunnis from public goods, the disregard for Sunni interests, in the wake of the massive dislocation that followed the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
There’s a lot of unhappiness among the Sunni majority population, especially those Sunnis who are concentrated in the areas where ISIS has gotten a foothold. So ISIS is able — has been able to join forces with the Baathists, former Saddam people, and other disaffected individuals to gain a pretty serious grip.
JUDY WOODRUFF: What about in Syria, Shadi Hamid? I mean, they were clearly able to swell their forces, draw more adherents in Syria, and, again, from the West, from Europe, from the United States. What’s the appeal? And we just — we saw in the video, the terrible video with James Foley, the man who was there with him had a British accent.
SHADI HAMID: This actually worries me that we’re focusing so much on Iraq, and senior administration officials focus on that part of it. They barely even mention Syria. Obama clearly doesn’t even want to talk about that.
But the rise of ISIS is more directly tied to Syria than it is to Iraq. And Syria experts were warning this administration a year-and-a-half ago, saying that if there is more — this power vacuum continues and we can’t support the more mainstream rebel forces, extremist groups like ISIS are going to gain ground.
So I think that we have been kind of asleep at the wheel. Americans are waking up to the threat right now, but ISIS has been beheading Arabs and Muslims for over the past year.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So why is that an appeal? What’s the appeal to young people to join?
SHADI HAMID: Well, I think part of the problem with the kind of Arab spring is that peaceful protest didn’t work, working within the democratic process didn’t work, so we had peaceful protesters in Syria, but they were being shot down and slaughtered by the Assad regime.
We had mainstream Islamic movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, which were trying to work within the democratic process. Yes, they had — we, as Americans, don’t share their values. They were deeply conservative and illiberal, but at least they were saying that there has to be a process.
ISIS is saying that you can have an Islamic state through brute force, that you don’t have to wait, you don’t have to be gradualist about it. And there’s a kind of appeal, the kind of — I think for radicals and for radicalized Europeans, they see a kind of purity to their vision.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And let’s pick up on that, Steven Simon.
What is it — for young men living — who are Muslim living in Europe, living in the United States, I mean, what is the draw?
STEVEN SIMON: Well, I think they see themselves engaged in a noble and virtuous endeavor. They’re doing something that they feel is a fight for a really good cause.
And it’s interesting, because they don’t see themselves as going to join a terrorist movement. They see themselves going to join liberators. And, for this reason, for example, they tweet and Facebook their way to the battlefield, to the delight, I have to say, of law enforcement and intelligence officials in Western Europe and the United States.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So I guess the — you know, stepping back, the question on everyone’s mind, Shadi Hamid, is, what is the threat here, both to the region, the wider region beyond Syria and Iraq, and then ultimately to Europe and then to the United States?
SHADI HAMID: Yes.
So we shouldn’t underestimate ISIS. And I worry that with all this rhetoric about ISIS being inexplicably evil, to use John Kerry’s words, that we will just look at them as these kind of fringe extremists, but we have to understand the root causes of their rise and also their staying power.
If we don’t have any plan to understand the Syrian roots of the conflict, ISIS is probably going to be with us for the foreseeable future, three years, five years, 10 years, God knows how long. So that’s what’s so scary about this is that they are a reality on the ground. In some ways, they’re the most successful extremist group in modern history.
So there isn’t an easy solution, unless there is a coherent vision that addresses both Iraq and Syria.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, I mean, what would you add to that, Steven Simon? What do you see the threat? We heard I think Secretary Hagel say this is a threat beyond anything we have ever seen.
STEVEN SIMON: Well, you know, look, there aren’t that many ISIS fighters. The numbers vary really widely depending upon who’s counted as being an ISIS and who isn’t. The initial ISIS attack in Iraq consisted of about 3,000 fighters.
OK, this is essentially a minuscule force. The Iraqi army consists of 900,000 individuals, 900,000 soldiers. The Pentagon says about a third of those are workable, you know, that the United States could help about a third of that army fight ISIS. That’s a huge advantage.
The Peshmerga, the Kurdish forces, they haven’t fired a shot in anger in a long time. They folded initially, but they have come back. Where is ISIS actually going to go is really the question? They can’t invade Iran. They’re not going to invade Saudi Arabia. They can’t invade Jordan. They’re not going to invade Turkey, and they can’t invade Israel.
JUDY WOODRUFF: So you see them as more contained than what…
STEVEN SIMON: I see them as fundamentally contained. I think their tactics will earn them a lot of enemies, and the tacit alliances that they formed in Iraq won’t last.
SHADI HAMID: But even if they don’t gain additional territory, what they control now is a very large swathe of territory in both Iraq and Syria. So there is an extremist so-called Islamic State in the middle of the Middle East.
And that destabilizes obviously Iraq and Syria, but also you see spillover effects in Jordan, in Lebanon. So, even if we contain it, it’s still a huge problem.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, they have certainly gotten a lot of people’s attention.
Shadi Hamid, Steven Simon, we thank you both.
SHADI HAMID: It’s good to be here.
Why Kurdish fighters lack the military might to thwart the Islamic State
Why
has the famed Peshmerga army in Iraq, considered one of the best in the
region, fallen back at several points along its internal frontier
against the Islamic State? To investigate, chief foreign affairs
correspondent Margaret Warner spent the day with Kurdish military
leaders as they traveled to the town of Jalawla. She joins Judy Woodruff
for an update.
Our chief foreign affairs correspondent, Margaret Warner, just spent the day with Kurdish military leaders as they traveled to Jalawla, which is not that far from Baghdad.
Here’s her report.
MARGARET WARNER: Racing south on the highway between Iraq’s Kurdish capital, Irbil, and Baghdad, miles of open desert unfold, dotted by villages and towns. But just a quarter of the way down, Iraq’s most vital commercial lifeline becomes the frontline.
The Islamic State group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has advanced to within 650 yards of the road. Kurdish forces Colonel Wria Hasan took us to one of many well-manned Kurdish Peshmerga outposts guarding the new frontier to show us just how close the militants’ forbidding flag flew.
What keeps the ISIS forces from just moving across this road?
COL. WRIA HASAN, Peshmerga (through interpreter): If they came closer, we could stop them, and we could move their way, but there are a lot Arabs living there.
MARGARET WARNER: So you’re saying it will be a very bloody battle if you tried to advance that way?
COL. WRIA HASAN (through interpreter): Yes it would be bloody, and many civilians would die.
MARGARET WARNER: Colonel Hasan was escorting us in his armored SUV to the town of Jalawla, 100 miles northeast of Baghdad, in southern Diyala Province. The province is now partly controlled by the Kurds since the Iraqi army collapsed before the Islamic extremists’ onslaught in mid-June.
We’d come to explore why, over the past month, the famed Peshmerga army, considered one of the best in the region, had also fallen back at several points along its internal frontier against the Islamist group.
General Mahmoud Sengawi commands this southern region, and on our way to the front, I asked him why he was now fighting to take back the strategically located town of Jalawla.
How did the Peshmerga forces lose Jalawla on August 11?
GEN. MAHMOUD SENGAWI, Peshmerga (through interpreter): Because there were civilians inside the town, and because we couldn’t distinguish those who are ISIS with those who are not. There were snipers among them, and our Peshmerga were getting killed. This is why I decided to retreat from Jalawla.
MARGARET WARNER: We continued talking behind the shelter of a Peshmerga outpost overlooking a two-mile stretch of no-man’s land east of Jalawla.
How different are these fighters from Islamic State than other forces you have ever faced?
GEN. MAHMOUD SENGAWI (through interpreter): ISIS is essentially fighting the way Islamic fighters did in early centuries, when they spilled a lot of blood to occupy other countries. We have never fought anyone like that.
MARGARET WARNER: So, how are you going to have to adjust your tactics and your strategy?
GEN. MAHMOUD SENGAWI (through interpreter): Yes, of course we need to change strategy. These fighters came straight from the streets, and we need to learn to fight them in the streets.
MARGARET WARNER: Street fighting training is key, says military analyst Michael Stephens, who lives part-time in Irbil. I spoke with him today via Skype from London.
MICHAEL STEPHENS, Royal United Services Institute: But the general rank-and-file Peshmerga are not able to do this. In fact, they have almost been turned into a checkpoint army, where they’re basically responsible for static security protection, and not the kind of dynamic advanced tactics that ISIS are using the ground.
MARGARET WARNER: But that’s not the only change they need, Stephens says.
MICHAEL STEPHENS: The other thing, of course, is that ISIS are almost fighting a new type of warfare that the Kurds are not used to. A tank is no good against mobile units of independently working armored Humvees that are very able to move quickly. And the Peshmerga just simply aren’t trained for that sort of combat.
MARGARET WARNER: The Kurdish forces blame their problems on the lack of the sort of advanced weapons they need to combat the modern American-made items captured by Islamic State forces from Iraqi army bases in Mosul and elsewhere.
General Hussein Mansour, who runs the weapons supply unit for the south, took us to see just how old fashioned their weapons are.
GEN. HUSSEIN MANSOUR, Peshmerga: It was made in 1955.
MARGARET WARNER: No.
MARGARET WARNER: Really, 1955?
GEN. HUSSEIN MANSOUR: Fifty-five or ’50.
MARGARET WARNER: And you keep it running.
GEN. HUSSEIN MANSOUR: We have no options, so…
MARGARET WARNER: Yes.
The general’s phone rang constantly with requests from commanders in the field, demanding more weapons.
GEN. HUSSEIN MANSOUR: Peshmerga, this is what is has, no armor, and here is what ISIS has, armored Humvees.
MARGARET WARNER: Inside his operations center, Mansour explained further.
GEN. HUSSEIN MANSOUR (through interpreter): Unfortunately, our weapons are very old, left over from Saddam’s regime, and we do not have sufficient ammunition. We are supporting our Peshmerga fighters as much as we can. But we really need help to acquire modern weapons, because we think this fight is a long-term war, and it will not end easily.
MARGARET WARNER: Can you retake Jalawla without better weapons?
GEN. HUSSEIN MANSOUR (through interpreter): There, we have problems larger than weapons. Arabs in those towns support ISIS. Jalawla has always been a bastion of Baathist support. There are 1,200 former high-ranking Baathist officers there. It’s always been a bastion of terrorists, even when the Americans were here.
MARGARET WARNER: To test that notion, we had Mohammed Mala Hassan, mayor of Khanaqin, where the Peshmerga are based, take us in his convoy of heavily armed men to meet one of the many Sunni Arabs he said have fled to Khanaqin from Jalawla.
Amer Yusef, a successful contractor, left with his family of 13 in June as the Islamic State began infiltrating Jalawla. He has a decidedly negative view of the Islamist group.
He said it’s true some Sunnis are with them, but often the extremists are more brutal with Sunnis.
AMER YUSEF, Contractor: (through interpreter): They are a terrorist organization that wants to harm us. They have harmed most of the families who have stayed in the town.
MARGARET WARNER: Many people say all Arabs here support the Islamic State. Is that true?
AMER YUSEF (through interpreter): I have a close friend who was a member of the municipality, my neighbor, and he is a Sunni Arab. They killed him few days ago. After taking him and his brother to their Sharia court, his brother said they killed them.
MARGARET WARNER: The Islamic State says they’re doing all of this in the name of pure Islam.
AMER YUSEF (through interpreter): No. They everyone’s enemy. Who are they killing the most? Christians or Muslims? They have killed mostly Muslims, both Sunnis and Shiites.
MARGARET WARNER: To halt the Islamic State’s onslaught here and throughout Iraq, the Kurdish commanders say they need more American help, including the weapons they say they have not received.
Back at our spot overlooking Jalawla, General Sengawi had an ominous warning.
GEN. MAHMOUD SENGAWI (through interpreter): They should help us. I tell you, if they succeed in occupying our country, they next will take the battle to America.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And Margaret joins me now from Irbil.
Hello, Margaret. That was quite a report.
Now, we are hearing that there is fresh fighting today in the same place where you were yesterday between Kurdish fighters and these Islamic extremists.
MARGARET WARNER: Well, Judy, certainly Kurdish and British Web sites are reporting that the Peshmerga forces launched a new assault against Jalawla today and, in fact, took an eastern district, which is exactly where we were, I was, in that crow’s nest outpost at the end with that general.
And a senior Kurdish military official confirmed that to me tonight. What is more, The Guardian’s reporting is that this action was supported by U.S. airstrikes. And, meanwhile, CENTCOM put out a report saying they had launched U.S. airstrikes, but in the vicinity of Mosul dam. We were not able to get confirmation from the Pentagon tonight as to whether the two were related.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, Margaret, one other thing. What can you tell us about whether the Kurds have been receiving weapons from the U.S.? We know U.S. officials are saying they have. The Kurdish commanders were telling you they haven’t.
MARGARET WARNER: Well, Judy, on the way home, the long drive home from this shoot yesterday I did call a senior Kurdish military — Kurdish political official and reported what the commanders had said to me when he asked me. And he said, take that with a grain of salt. Commanders always like to say if things aren’t going too well that, well, they didn’t have the right weapons.
He said U.S. and allied weapons are getting through, though many may be directed at areas of higher priority for the U.S., like the Peshmerga forces’ assault to retake the Mosul dam. Separately, a military analyst here told me that part of the problem is distribution among the two different political factions of the Kurdish forces, and that since the weapons are being funneled — and they are being funneled, but it’s through the political party of the president, President Barzani of the so-called KDP, and that the other political party who makes up part of the government called the PUK is getting the short end of the stick.
And the forces we were with yesterday were with the PUK. So, basically, Judy, this country is not only divided among Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and Kurds, but, in fact, even within each ethnic or sectarian group, which gives you an idea of how complicated it is, I think, to put this country back together.
JUDY WOODRUFF: A lot of complexity to pull apart.
Margaret Warner reporting from Irbil, we thank you, and stay safe.
MARGARET WARNER: Thank you, Judy.
Displaced Iraqis traumatized by Islamic State, betrayed by neighbors
The
humanitarian crisis in Iraq is taking its toll on displaced Christians
and those in the minority Yazidi community. As brutal attacks from the
Sunni militant group known as the Islamic State continue, hundreds of
thousands have fled to the country’s Kurdish region. Margaret Warner
toured one refugee camp near the Syrian border to find Iraqis in a state
of shock and desperation.
TRANSCRIPT
JUDY WOODRUFF: Other victims of the Islamic State in recent weeks include Christians and members of the Yazidi minority. Most who were lucky enough to escape have flooded the Kurdish -controlled region in Northern Iraq with nothing but the clothes on their backs.NED COLT, Spokesman, UN High Commissioner for Refugees: It can’t be done overnight. No one would suggest otherwise. But now the system is up and running in a major way. So, we’re not just getting materials in that we already have in stock, but we are bringing them in from around the world.
MARGARET WARNER: The tents in this shipment will shelter at least 20,000 people, but that’s just a fraction of the estimated 1.25 million Iraqis who have fled into the country’s Kurdish region since the self-proclaimed Islamic State began its onslaught here eight months ago.
Yesterday, a brutal wind whipped through the U.N.’s Bajet Kandela camp near Iraqi Kurdistan’s border with Syria. This camp was empty two weeks ago, but that was before I.S. attacked members of the minority Yazidi religious community in the town of Sinjar, forcing them to race for refuge on Sinjar Mountain. U.S. airstrikes and Kurdish forces helped thousands escape to sanctuary here.
We accompanied Dr. Syed Jaffar Hussain, Iraq country director for the U.N.’s World Health Organization, as he made his rounds through the camp.
DR. SYED JAFFER HUSSEIN, Iraq Country Director, World Health Organization: I think this is one of the extremely complex IDP crises at least I have witnessed, not only in the region, but beyond, not only the numbers, but also with the fast pace it happened, taking U.N. and the government unaware and unprepared for such a huge number of IDPs.
MARGARET WARNER: How does the psychological condition in which these Yazidis have arrived compare to other refugees and other displaced people?
DR. SYED JAFFER HUSSEIN: The interviews we have conducted with many of them seem to be extremely — what we call the post-traumatic stress disorder. You can see the gloom in their eyes, like a person who doesn’t know what will happen to him.
MARGARET WARNER: He stopped to see a family that had been in the camp more than two weeks.
DR. SYED JAFFER HUSSEIN: Can you ask him, the last few days, any of these children have gone to the clinic?
MAN (through interpreter): No, we haven’t, but they got here and did vaccinations. But we lack food. We only get some soup and some bad-quality rice.
MARGARET WARNER: We were invited by 19-year-old Fuad Hassan to the tent he shares with his parents and eight siblings. They fled Sinjar when they heard Islamic State forces were nearby, but one night on the mountain was enough.
FUAD HASSAN, (through interpreter): It was very bad on the mountain. We saw people being eaten by insects.
MARGARET WARNER: They were fortunate to find an escape route into Syria opened up by Syrian Kurdish fighters and made their way on foot to this camp.
So, Fuad, what comes next for you?
FUAD HASSAN (through interpreter): My grades were high. I would have entered medical college, but now everything is ruined. We want to go back to the homeland of our forefathers, but if we can find a country that welcomes us, we may leave here.
MARGARET WARNER: His 37-year-old mother, Zaineb Yusuf Asim, was overcome by feelings of betrayal.
ZAINEB YUSUF ASIM (through interpreter): We don’t cry only for ourselves, but for all Yazidis. They tortured us, attacked our honor, our religion. We have lived together with our Muslim Arab neighbors during the Iran-Iraq War, during the first Gulf War. We protected each other. Now they became our enemies.
MARGARET WARNER: This camp for 15,000 people originally built for Syrian refugees was the first place Yazidis found shelter when they escaped from Sinjar Mountain. As hot, dusty, windblown and under-supplied as this camp is, it’s far better than what others fleeing the mountain found when they arrived.
Forty miles east, in Dohuk, capital of Iraq’s northwestern-most province, we found what’s far more typical here, thousands of Yazidis living in half-constructed buildings. Khuduid Hussein, a construction worker, says the 150 people in his group are subsisting on private donations from local citizens. They have received no government help so far.
KHUDUID HUSSEIN (through interpreter): People in Dohuk are very welcoming. They have helped us. They give us bread, water and food.
MARGARET WARNER: You have all these beautiful children around you. What future do you see for these children?
KHUDUID HUSSEIN (through interpreter): If this situation remains like this, I don’t see that they will have any future. Soon, it will be winter here and many of them will die of cold.
MARGARET WARNER: His relative, 20-year-old Afra Hassan, is seven months pregnant.
AFRA HASSAN (through interpreter): I tried to go to the hospital here, but they wouldn’t give me any medicine because I didn’t have any money. It’s such a miserable situation. I wish I had died in my home.
HAVAL AMEDI, Deputy Director, Emergency Response Program, Dohuk, Iraq: Dohuk is the smallest governorate, with the smallest resources, with the highest intensity of IDP and refugees.
MARGARET WARNER: Yes.
Haval Amedi is deputy director of a committee set up by the provincial government just last week to try to coordinate the local response. He admits they are overwhelmed.
HAVAL AMEDI: Now the problem becoming more and more, it’s beyond the capacity of a small governorate to host all those people together to the here, because of the limitation of the resources.
MARGARET WARNER: He explained the waves of Syrians and Iraqis fleeing Islamic State extremists have doubled the population of his tiny province. But he said most Kurds had generous feelings toward the new arrivals.
HAVAL AMEDI: One day, each of us was a refugee or an IDP somewhere. And, mainly, they believe on helping the people. There are people who are hosting them, receiving them at the border, at the schools, at the public buildings and everything.
MARGARET WARNER: Yet no amount of aid or kindness is likely to heal the deep psychic wounds cut here.
Back at the camp, the man of the Hassan house, Walid Hassan, stopped us before we left. He had something to say.
WALID HASSAN (through interpreter): What was our fault? What wrong have we done? We are peaceful human beings. What is the fault of those kids who died? They have killed so many kids. They shot them in their heads. I want to deliver this letter to anyone who cares about humanity: Help us. Humanity in Iraq is just gone. Iraq has become the country of monsters.
JUDY WOODRUFF: I spoke to Margaret earlier this afternoon.
Margaret, thanks for joining us.
First of all, what’s the reaction of where you are in Irbil to the beheading of the American journalist James Foley?
MARGARET WARNER: Well, Judy, it is a big story here. It is leading a lot of media Web sites. President Obama’s remarks just now recently led the Web site, and it’s being interpreted or described as the president vowing to crush the Islamic State forces.
I, frankly, was surprised. I thought the attitude here would be, we have had thousands of our own people kill, one American killed, what’s the big deal? But not at all.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, we just saw the report you did on the situation that the Iraqi minorities are facing. You have reported on many other refugee displaced populations. What’s different about the Yazidis and the Christians you have been speaking to there?
MARGARET WARNER: I think it’s the shock, the surprise at being suddenly uprooted from their lives, given 24 hours or less to clear out or be killed.
All refugees are traumatized, of course, Afghanistan, Pakistan, refugees I have talked to from Syria who’ve fled to Turkey and Lebanon. But the difference is that most of them made a collective decision or a family decision that the fighting had become too intense, they were being shelled by one side or the other, and they decided to flee together. And they could take things with them.
These people here feel to me as if — you know, completely shell-shocked at being individually targeted, hunted, really, because of their religion.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, finally, Margaret, yesterday, we know the Iraqi army launched a new offensive to try to recapture the city of Tikrit from the Islamic State force, this just one day after the Mosul dam was retaken. They failed. They abandoned the fight. What are you hearing there as to why?
MARGARET WARNER: Judy, the analysis here that there were two missing ingredients in the assault on Tikrit. One, of course, is coordination with American airstrikes. The retaking of the Mosul dam was a collective effort of Kurdish fighters, Iraqi army fighters and American airstrikes, very clearly targeted, strategically targeted out of a joint operations center up here in Irbil.
The second thing that was missing, Judy, was a cohesive Iraqi force. This time, the Iraqis were fighting entirely on their own. And according to a senior Kurdish military official here, it was a hodgepodge of regular Iraqi army and Shiite militia. He said they had great weapons, but they’re very poorly led by commanders who are appointed on sectarian grounds.
He said — and they were not really committed to the fight. And he said that — essentially, he described the same kind of Iraqi army that fled from Northern Iraq in June, when the Islamic State attacked Mosul and all these other outposts up here near the Kurdish region. And that’s a bad sign. If that’s true, that’s a bad sign for the test that President Obama has set for greater U.S. military involvement. That is that you have a cohesive and united — politically united and militarily united Iraq.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Margaret Warner reporting from Irbil, thank you.
MARGARET WARNER: Thanks, Judy.
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