How ISIS Returns

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Speaker 2 So it was the fall of 2013. I was in this very small town near the Turkish border with Syria.

Speaker 3 Atlantic staff writer, Mike Giglio.

Speaker 2 And the smuggler that I'd hired to take me into Syria met me at a hotel. A sketchy looking guy in a leather jacket.
just kind of like the cliche of what you would imagine as a smuggler.

Speaker 2 And he takes us outside, and there was a school bus standing in the parking lot. I followed the smuggler and I walked up onto the school bus with my rucksack and my body armor.

Speaker 2 And I was surprised because I saw school children sitting in the seats looking up at me. I had thought that the bus was just cover for the smuggler, but he also happened to be the bus driver.

Speaker 2 And it must have been the end of the school day. So on the way down to the border with Syria, we...

Speaker 2 made all the stops and the kids got off until we got to the place where they did nightly crossings into Syria through a minefield that they had actually cleared a small path through.

Speaker 2 And that's how we went to Syria.

Speaker 3 In 2012, Mike Giglio crossed the border into Syria.

Speaker 3 He spent the next five years in the region reporting on ISIS and spending time understanding the dynamics between the Kurds, Turkey, and the Islamic State.

Speaker 3 His new book about the reporting is called called Shatter the Nations, ISIS and the War for the Caliphate.

Speaker 3 So this week, I asked him to join me to explain how one phone call President Trump had has led to an abrupt 180 in U.S. Middle East policy, and now an invasion and humanitarian crisis.

Speaker 5 We begin tonight with the military operation underway right now. Just days after President Trump announced a withdrawal of U.S.

Speaker 5 troops from a key part of Syria after a phone call with Turkey's president, Turkey is now striking the very U.S. allies, the Kurds, who helped the U.S.
fight ISIS.

Speaker 5 Turkey's military first launching airstrikes on Kurdish targets, and tonight there are reports that civilian targets have been struck as well.

Speaker 3 This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Isaac Dover.

Speaker 3 Mike, thanks for being here.

Speaker 2 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 3 So let's just rewind a little bit. You are getting smuggled into Syria.
Why?

Speaker 2 So can we rewind a lot? Sure.

Speaker 2 So Barack Obama comes to office in 2008 and his signature campaign promise is end the Iraq war. And at the end of 2011, he does that.
And there's some resistance within the U.S.

Speaker 2 national security establishment saying, hey, Iraq's not ready. Al-Qaeda is not dead yet.
We need to stay there a little bit longer. But the troops come home.
War is done.

Speaker 2 America says, okay, we're done with the Middle East. You know, at the same time that this is happening, there is the Arab Spring in Egypt, in Syria, in Libya.

Speaker 2 and it seems to offer an entirely new way for the U.S. to relate to the Middle East.

Speaker 2 So you have pro-democracy protests in all of these traditionally authoritarian countries, and the protesters are expressing like an open kinship with American values.

Speaker 2 Americans like myself and others are sitting at their phones and liking the tweets of the protesters and sharing the news on Facebook.

Speaker 2 And it feels like this whole very like Obama late first term moment of, you know,

Speaker 2 now the Middle East has changed. You know, they're promoting American values on their own.

Speaker 2 They're using American tools like Google and smartphones and everything, you know, all the tools of the social media age.

Speaker 2 And we can sort of support them and like like our way to a better world together.

Speaker 2 And then that collapsed.

Speaker 3 And in the middle of it, ISIS starts to come together. Obama famously refers to them as the JV team at one point.
How did he miss it? How did we all miss what was coming together?

Speaker 2 I think we missed it because, you know, first of all, we were so caught on this earlier narrative of hope in the Arab Spring that when it crashed, you know, so there was a military coup and really bloody counter-revolution in Egypt, and then there was this brutal civil war in Syria.

Speaker 2 And by 2013, I think everyone in the U.S. foreign policy world just had had enough and wanted to tune out.

Speaker 2 So if you think about it, we were so heavily tuned in to the protests and it felt like everyone was connected in that moment. And then we just kind of cut the cord.

Speaker 2 Like we don't want to pay attention to this anymore.

Speaker 2 Meanwhile, though, al-Qaeda, America's old enemy from Iraq, had crossed the border into Syria and in the just absolute chaos and suffering of the war in Syria had started to regenerate.

Speaker 2 So Mike, who are the Kurds? So the Kurds are actually the world's largest ethnic population without their own state. So they make up an ethnic minority in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey.

Speaker 2 And in each of those four countries, they have been historically repressed, sometimes violently. And they've been looking for a way out of that situation for decades.

Speaker 3 Why should we care about them? It's the Kurds. They're there.
They've been doing some fighting for us.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 2 the U.S. has always struggled to find reliable allies in the Middle East, and the Kurds have been one of their most steadfast allies over the years.

Speaker 2 So in Iraq they helped with the war, the Persian Gulf War first and then were sort of betrayed by the Americans. And then in the Iraq war they helped with the war against Saddam Hussein.

Speaker 2 And in Syria when the US needed a partner force to do the actual ground fighting against ISIS, they ended up being the most reliable partners they could find.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, they've been fighting for years, generations of Kurds fighting and fighting as sort of adjunct U.S. allies.
Aaron Powell, yeah.

Speaker 2 And they had this up-and-down relationship with America that they look to America for support. America uses them to advance their aims, whatever they are at the time,

Speaker 2 and then often America abandons them to devastating results.

Speaker 3 And that seems to have happened again. Tell us about Syria.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 it was like the ultimate forgotten battle. America was not paying attention to the rise of ISIS in Syria in late 2013.
But one group that was was the Kurds.

Speaker 2 And so I'd gotten a call from an old friend to come to Syria saying, hey, there's another battle now. It's not just a civil war where it's the rebels versus the regime.

Speaker 2 It's now the Kurds versus the jihadis. And the Kurds traditionally are very skeptical of jihadis in this part of Syria.
So there was a local militia that controls this area.

Speaker 2 that eventually would become America's partner. And at the time, they were just sort of this offshoot of a terrorist group in Turkey, labeled a terrorist group by the United States.

Speaker 2 And they were controlling northeastern Syria, an area no one had paid attention to, except for ISIS, which was attacking them and trying to take over oil refineries, oil fields.

Speaker 2 And the Kurds were all of a sudden in this brand new fight.

Speaker 3 The difference between Iraq and Syria, among others, is that there is an active government in Iraq. The government in Syria is there is an official government.

Speaker 3 The president is still in charge, but but it's a civil war that's been going on for years. How does that play out on the ground?

Speaker 2 Aaron Ross Powell, so if you fast forward to the ISIS emergency, like you said, America had someone to work with in Iraq, the Iraqi government. In Syria, they were really looking for options.

Speaker 2 They can't work with Assad. The rebels were just...
too riven by infighting and infiltrated by extremists.

Speaker 2 But you have this Kurdish militia who's already fighting ISIS, who belong to, as I said, an offshoot of the PKK in Turkey that preaches militant secularism.

Speaker 2 So they're natural enemies, and they are cohesive. And so America decided, okay, these are the guys we'll work with.

Speaker 2 And they came to sort of an informal understanding with the Assad regime saying, we're going to partner with these guys.

Speaker 2 We're going to do airstrikes and they're going to be our ground troops and you're not going to bother them. And that's pretty much how it worked.

Speaker 3 And then that's how you end up having to go in on a school bus to try to figure out what's going on.

Speaker 2 Actually, the the school bus was before any of this ever happened. So this was actually the very beginning of their own fight.

Speaker 2 I think in more than a year before America sort of took notice of them.

Speaker 2 And at that time, it's just

Speaker 2 you know, this militia that had existed in Turkey sent some members across the border in Syria to help out, and then they were recruiting like literally farmers saying, you know, these extremists are going to take our territory and we need to fight them.

Speaker 2 And so I watched them. You know, they're they're outfitted with like

Speaker 2 hunting rifles sometimes, and they have these, they all tend to wear this same exact version of like knockoff Air Force Ones that are brown, same shoes. And so,

Speaker 2 this is what they were dealing with.

Speaker 2 And they were, at the time I was there, sort of just starting to push back the extremists who would later, you know, become ISIS, who at that point were still calling themselves just al-Qaeda.

Speaker 2 And they were subject to just daily attacks at checkpoints by car bombs and, you know, insurgent-style attacks across their territory.

Speaker 3 So they are our allies

Speaker 3 through the fight until it seems like this week. What changed here, aside from just the phone call,

Speaker 3 the reality of President Trump giving the Turkish President license to go in?

Speaker 2 You know, Trump likes to say he won the war against ISIS.

Speaker 2 And there are two things to point out with this. First of all, by the time Trump took office, he pretty much just followed the plan that had been set in motion by the Obama administration.

Speaker 2 And that plan is local forces do the groundfighting, and they're backed by U.S. airstrikes.
So it's actually local forces in Iraq and in Syria who won this war.

Speaker 2 And the war, from their perspective, is not really over.

Speaker 2 So the Syrian Kurds, with the United States support, took back Raqqa, which had been the ISIS capital in Syria, and took back the rest of their territory earlier this year. But ISIS,

Speaker 2 as we remember from the Iraq War, if you know anyone who followed that, they are rooted in the concept of being an underground insurgency. And so they have just returned back to that.

Speaker 2 And the Kurds are still battling them and trying to secure these areas and make it so that it's actually a lasting defeat of ISIS.

Speaker 3 And what's Turkey's problem with the Kurds?

Speaker 2 So Turkey... has also historically repressed its Kurdish population, just like Iraq and just like Syria.

Speaker 2 And there's a Kurdish insurgent group and separatist group that has been fighting an insurgency in Turkey on and off since the 1980s. And so Turkey considers them to be a terrorist organization.

Speaker 2 And actually the U.S. State Department officially labels the PKK, which is what they're called, a terrorist organization.
The Kurds in Syria are an offshoot of this group.

Speaker 2 And so from Turkey's perspective, these guys are the same guys that they're fighting, and they do not want them. on their border in Syria.

Speaker 2 And a big chunk of the territory that the Kurds have controlled in Syria is right against the Turkish Turkish border.

Speaker 3 Aaron Trevor Bowie, this is something that Erdogan, the Turkish president, has wanted for a while.

Speaker 2 The fact that the U.S. has been working with the Kurds in Syria has caused a strain on their relationships with Turkey, which is a NATO ally, for years now.

Speaker 2 And, you know, the argument from the U.S. is, well, Turkey has done an absolutely terrible job at combating ISIS, so they shouldn't have any say here.

Speaker 2 Erdogan has been pushing it for years, and he used to rant and rave about this on phone calls with Obama.

Speaker 2 someone told me once that Obama actually used to doodle during the phone calls with Erdogan while he ranted about this and other things and Apparently Trump is the president who actually listens to these rants and for some reason Trump agreed this actually happened in December if you remember another phone call with Erdogan another surprise decision by Trump to say, hey, we're going to abandon the Syrian Kurds and this is now Turkey's problem if they want it to be.

Speaker 2 Back then, the Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned. The guy who was overseeing the ISIS fight under Obama and Trump, Brett McGurk,

Speaker 2 he resigned.

Speaker 2 And there was this blowback that kind of put the brakes on that idea because people realized that this is going to be a massive problem with ISIS potentially mounting resurgence if we do this.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, I don't think anybody's really ready for this, but Sunday night, same thing. Trump's on a phone call, makes a snap decision.
Everyone is left scrambling to pick up the pieces.

Speaker 3 But it seems like this one, as opposed to the December one, had an effect.

Speaker 2 This time it happened. You know, Trump's the commander-in-chief at the end of the day.
And he said that the U.S. soldiers that were with the Kurds had to pull back.
And

Speaker 2 so Turkey could invade without harming any American troops. And that's essentially a green light to Erdogan.
And he invaded.

Speaker 2 And so now the same people that a few days ago were working alongside American troops and fighting ISIS.

Speaker 2 There was a suicide attack by ISIS in Raqqa that killed SDF soldiers, Kurdish soldiers, just the day before.

Speaker 2 Now they're getting bombed by Turkish airstrikes and they're battling Turkish troops.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, Jr.: And in Washington, one of the things that's striking about what happened here is that this has all happened against the backdrop of impeachment, which has locked everybody into the very partisan, either you're with Trump or against Trump lines.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 this issue, though, has led to a lot of people who are allies of the president and who are standing firmly with him on the question of impeachment on whether he was doing the appropriate thing by having these phone calls with Ukraine and China about politics, have been very critical of him.

Speaker 3 Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, John Shimkis, a congressman from Illinois, a Republican, said that after the decision to abandon the Kurds, he can't be supportive of Trump anymore.

Speaker 2 What

Speaker 3 happened here that is so different? for that to be going on. Again, it is so rare to see daylight between

Speaker 3 a lot of these Republicans and the president. But on this, there's a whole lot of daylight.

Speaker 2 We always wonder where is the red line for some of his Republican backers in the Senate? And maybe this is it.

Speaker 2 And I think you're seeing this reaction because it is considered to be such a bad idea.

Speaker 2 The risk of ISIS having a resurgence because of this is very real.

Speaker 2 The Kurdish forces have thousands of ISIS prisoners, and some of the most dangerous ones, including foreign fighters, European fighters,

Speaker 2 they could escape in this chaos. Trump acknowledged that.
A reporter asked him, well, what if these fighters, these European fighters escape? And he said, well, they'll go to Europe.

Speaker 2 Almost cavalier about it, because he's angry at Europe for not. repatriating them earlier.

Speaker 2 And he seems to be saying, well, if you don't want to repatriate them officially, they'll just make their way back as terrorists.

Speaker 2 It's,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 it's such a clear-cut counterterrorism concern that I think

Speaker 2 it's hard for anyone to say, you know, this is a good idea. I mean, you can argue that U.S.
troops should leave Syria, and I don't think anybody reasonable says they should stay forever.

Speaker 2 But the way that it's been done and the way it's just been outsourced to a really unpredictable, irresponsible leader like Erdogan is really scaring people.

Speaker 3 We're going to take a quick break and come back and talk about what this actually means on the ground for the people who are living through this.

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Speaker 8 Tonight, a catastrophe is looming in northern Syria. Civilians are frantically trying to escape Turkish airstrikes and artillery.

Speaker 9 What we saw was this just overwhelming wave of civilians trying desperately to get out of this town, fearful for their lives.

Speaker 9 The streets choked with traffic, cars with mattresses strapped to roofs, women, children in the back of flatbed trucks.

Speaker 9 I approached some of them and asked them where they were going, and they told me simply, Brianna, we don't know where we're going. We don't know where it's safe.

Speaker 3 You're not on the ground now, Mike, obviously, but you have spent time there.

Speaker 3 From what you saw, previous experiences, what you can see now from the footage, what is the experience like for these civilians? What's happening there?

Speaker 2 You know, some of these areas that the Kurds controlled in Syria were among the very few parts of the country that have not been bombarded by airstrikes.

Speaker 2 And to see that now, after all these years, they're getting bombed is heartbreaking.

Speaker 2 And so in a situation like this, I mean, you know,

Speaker 2 I mentioned earlier, Trump just making a snap decision to pull back the troops and green light the invasion means that the U.S. military can't properly respond.

Speaker 2 But civilians haven't had time to get out of these places. And so, you've seen reports of civilians in a panic.
You know,

Speaker 2 it's something I've seen on the ground where you just grab your car or whatever is available and you pack everything you can into it and you just start driving. And it's really just a scene of chaos.

Speaker 3 What is that like for people?

Speaker 2 You know, my experience is that it's really hard to accept what's happening to you. You know, to really imagine what it means to leave your home.

Speaker 2 And like, people don't, they never tell themselves this is for good. I remember just as an aside, like when I first started covering the Syrian Civil War, I met a guy.
He had just left Aleppo.

Speaker 2 He had a barbershop and he was in a

Speaker 2 hovel crowded with people on the Turkish side of the border. He'd just arrived with his wife and kids.
And he left his birds. He had canaries.
He left them in his barbershop.

Speaker 2 And he was calling, he left his keys to his barbershop with a rebel. And he asked the guy to feed his birds.
And he was calling every day to see how the birds were doing.

Speaker 2 And he just had this sort of heartbreaking hopefulness that, okay, this will all be over soon.

Speaker 2 I'll be able to go home. And, you know, the birds will be fine even.
And we'll be able to pick up where we left off.

Speaker 2 And that was in... 2012, summer.
And, you know, now it's 2019 and, you know, the Civil War is still the birds probably didn't make it, yeah, probably not.

Speaker 3 Um, and this rebel was in the between the fighting, was just picking up the phone and saying, Yeah, I dropped off some seed.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I actually asked if we can call the rebel. We did, and I interviewed him on phone, you know, and he's like, Yeah, this isn't the only guy that that did this.

Speaker 2 Like, I've got house keys, and I'm taking care of pets, and he was watering plants, you know.

Speaker 3 And you know, people people just want to go home-In your book, you talk a lot about

Speaker 3 the civilian casualties, trying to track down what's going on here.

Speaker 3 What we know of what's happening with the Kurds now is that there will be civilian casualties, but it's hard always to get a number on that and actually look at what we're talking about.

Speaker 3 It's hard enough to get a count of what happens to the troops.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 3 What is that experience like of trying to track down the civilian casualties? You've done some of that.

Speaker 2 You know, that was actually a big focus for me when I was based overseas and covering the U.S. war effort in Iraq and Syria.

Speaker 2 I think under both Obama and Trump, there's been this effort to tell Americans that we're at war with ISIS and at the same time tell us we don't need to worry about it really.

Speaker 2 We don't really have any responsibility here.

Speaker 2 And one of the easiest ways to see how untrue that is is civilian casualties, right? Thousands of civilians have died in American airstrikes in Syria and Iraq.

Speaker 2 And under both Obama and Trump, there has never really been a full accounting. So just to show you the disparity,

Speaker 2 there's a monitoring group that is very trusted called Air Wars, and they keep a tally based on their investigations of like an estimate of how many civilians have died in Iraq and Syria from U.S.

Speaker 2 airstrikes and the strikes of U.S. allies that are bombing in these countries.
Their number currently is between 8,000 and 13,000. And the number, official number from the U.S.
government, is 1,300.

Speaker 2 It shows you how little effort America is making to really account for what's happening.

Speaker 3 And you've done some of that yourself, of just trying to, in a very microcosmic way, trying to track down what the civilian casualties look like.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you know, I actually, according to Air Wars, I got the U.S. government to admit to more civilian casualties in Mosul than any other reporter.

Speaker 2 And I think if I tell the story of how I actually did that, it will show you how little is done by the government to investigate civilian deaths. So one day I decided, look, let's ditch the embed.

Speaker 2 Let's get this guy I know to drive us in his pickup. And he was, because they weren't allowing reporters to just kind of like wander around the city for a good reason, I guess.

Speaker 2 But I also thought, you know, if you go in with like a Humvee, which is how I normally went, people don't really give you the,

Speaker 2 you can't trust the information you're getting from civilians because like you're there with like the guys with the guns. Right.

Speaker 2 So instead, I had a soldier

Speaker 2 who who was like, he was like just amazing at getting around checkpoints. Like he could talk his way through anything.

Speaker 2 Like if a militiaman is suspicious of us, like one time he like gave him his sunglasses off his head. You know, he like, he always knew exactly what to do to get us out of trouble.

Speaker 2 And he took off his uniform. We didn't bring a gun.
And we, we literally just got around the checkpoints and we just drove around neighborhoods. And I, we literally just picked at random.

Speaker 2 So we went into like one neighborhood and we would, we'd get out at the local deli or fruit stand and we'd say, hey,

Speaker 2 were there any civilians killed by U.S. airstrikes here? And it was amazing how honest they were and clear-eyed about it.

Speaker 2 They would take us and say, this house is destroyed, but there were ISIS there. This house, though,

Speaker 2 women and children got killed. And then we'd call the person,

Speaker 2 inevitably there's a survivor from the family who has some horrible story to tell.

Speaker 2 And we would call the person on the cell phone because they'd usually be living nearby and get their account, geolocate it.

Speaker 2 Like I have a satellite phone, like here's the GPS coordinates of where we are, take photos and interview witnesses and take all their phone numbers and you know we did this in 30 minutes per site because we had like a timer like we have to leave an area in 30 minutes just for we don't want to like make our presence known for too long in case there's there were still ISIS cells in these places

Speaker 2 and I did that for two days and I documented like eight sites and the coalition admitted to almost all of them when I sent the information and It really struck me that

Speaker 2 I think it was more than 50.

Speaker 2 And what really struck me was first of all how they didn't bother to do this on their own like if i can do that in two days at random like just working with a driver who who you know let what what what could they have done if they had made any serious effort to investigate and also like what happened after they admitted it you know their the admission was they just put on their website that no one reads a coalition strike after media reports was determined to have killed civilians in this area.

Speaker 2 They didn't contact the families. They didn't contact the victims.
Nothing. Aaron Ross Powell.

Speaker 3 The thing about all of this to me is that I feel like you have to start the story of what's going on now with 2011, with the Arab Spring, but you actually have to start it with the 2008 election, with Obama winning, like you were saying, on the promise to get out of Iraq.

Speaker 3 But in order to do that, you actually have to start it with 2003, with the invasion of Iraq,

Speaker 3 which maybe starts at September 11th, maybe goes even further back than that. But it does feel like what we are living through as a country, as a planet, is

Speaker 3 very much,

Speaker 3 you can trace the line back to that invasion of Iraq in 2003. The refugees, everything that's going on.

Speaker 2 You know, in some ways, the protagonists of the book are a battalion of Iraqi special forces who have been fighting this war.

Speaker 2 against al-Qaeda and then ISIS and then whatever comes next since shortly after the U.S. invasion.
So the U.S.

Speaker 2 built this group after they invaded and Iraq fell into civil war as sort of a lifeline saying, oh man, we really messed up and we need locals to help us, you know, hunt down terrorists and insurgents.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 some of the same people that were on those first missions alongside the Americans in 2005 were the ones that I embedded with in 2016 and 2017 in the battle to take Mosul back from ISIS.

Speaker 2 It's almost 15 years of almost non-stop fighting of wars that, in one way or another, are America's wars as well.

Speaker 3 And that's happening, and it just seems with Obama, a big part of the reason why he didn't do more in Syria, and they said at the time, they've said since, is because he felt that the American public didn't have an appetite for another engagement in the Middle East.

Speaker 3 Didn't have an appetite because of

Speaker 3 what had happened in Iraq.

Speaker 3 And because America didn't get involved, Syria went the way that it would have.

Speaker 3 I don't know exactly what involvement would have led to other things, and that created a refugee crisis, which then led to refugees landing all over Europe and reverberating into politics, into Italian politics, into Brexit politics.

Speaker 3 The nationalism that's taken place there

Speaker 3 stems from that.

Speaker 2 I will say, you know, if I had to say an overarching reason why I wrote the book,

Speaker 2 it's because I want Americans to feel our involvement, not just in the Iraq war, but also in Syria and also in this entire crisis that you've laid out, that has sort of changed the world.

Speaker 2 You know, America did get involved in Syria. The Obama administration doesn't want to frame it that way.
But Obama backed the protesters. He called for Assad to step down.
The U.S.

Speaker 2 sent supplies to the opposition. It funded the opposition.
The CIA provided arms to the opposition. So we were involved.

Speaker 2 You You know, as much as Obama and Americans might want to say, we don't want more wars, I feel like the country still can't say to itself, well, we've got these people calling for democracy, they're on their own.

Speaker 2 And the outgrowth of that sort of conflict between not wanting to get involved, but still wanting to get involved,

Speaker 2 maybe not wanting to admit what kind of country we are right now, led to repercussions that, you know, as you said, just keep kind of compounding on one another and spreading out across the world.

Speaker 3 And it's part of American politics, too, and President Trump, who says that he was elected to end the endless wars, and that's what he's doing here. Right.

Speaker 2 But, you know, in the way he's doing it, could he be continuing the endless wars? So,

Speaker 2 you know, when I was watching the events fall out where Turkey is invading and all of a sudden all these very fragile gains that have been made against ISIS are up in the air again, and ISIS prisoners may be escaping and the ISIS insurgency may be taking hold again.

Speaker 2 I was reminded of something that an Iraqi soldier, one of these same soldiers who'd been fighting with the Americans back in 2005, 2006, and was still fighting now in 2017, he told me during the battle for Mosul, which he said, you know, and we all know this, when this movie ends, the next one just begins.

Speaker 2 And I can't help but wonder, you know, are we just continually starting up the next movie? And is that what we're seeing right now?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, and I, I, I

Speaker 3 As you're talking, I'm thinking about the 2016 election and like the pulse shooting, which was when

Speaker 3 the move from president then candidate Trump started to be towards the Muslim ban and talked about shutting things down until we could find out what the hell was going on. That's because of ISIS.

Speaker 3 That's because of all this.

Speaker 3 It's just all of our politics in America, in Europe, and in the Middle East, and all the things that flow from that politics are what we are just living through mushrooming in all these different ways.

Speaker 2 You know, it's amazing to hear you say that from your end, in that you were in the middle of the 2016 campaign here, you felt the connection to what was going on in Iraq and Syria.

Speaker 2 I was actually in Mosul during the battle when Trump won.

Speaker 2 And the entire buildup to that moment, so Mosul ended up being like the seminal battle for the caliphate. It was

Speaker 2 when ISIS took Mosul, this big, important Iraqi city in 2014, it announced the caliphate. It announced ISIS as this new global force as America's public enemy number one.

Speaker 2 And then when they lost it, it was the sign that the caliphate would start to crumble.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the stakes of that battle felt enormous because we had this climate of ISIS terrorist attacks in Europe and ISIS claimed terrorist attacks in America where these guys would, you know, there was the Orlando nightclub shooting, for example, and the San Bernardino shooter and all all of that.

Speaker 2 And you know, there were no real operational links to ISIS, but they were just claiming allegiance. And, you know, and then Trump himself was the one

Speaker 2 to seize on that and to make an issue out of it. And it was, you know, it was very clear that ISIS was trying with these attacks to meddle in Western politics.

Speaker 2 If you study their propaganda and their strategy, you know, they wanted to create a conflict in Western society. They wanted populists to take power.

Speaker 2 They wanted people who would demonize Muslims to do that because they want Muslims in the West to feel not welcome.

Speaker 2 They think that if they can isolate Muslims in the West, they will show them that, hey, this isn't actually a place where you can coexist.

Speaker 2 And the politicians in Europe and America were doing exactly that. I mean, the Muslim band did exactly that.

Speaker 2 And so when you would be on the front lines in Mosul, in Iraq, or in Syria, you know, with the Kurds, for example,

Speaker 2 the soldiers just naturally said, we are the world's front line against ISIS.

Speaker 2 They are definitely there for their own reasons, right? Like they're not these

Speaker 2 just doing this because America wants them to, right? They wanted America's support. They had their own reasons to fight ISIS.
But

Speaker 2 they also saw themselves as like the frontline soldiers in this global struggle. And they would say that often.

Speaker 3 I think that's what happens in America, in Europe, when we think in sort of liberal democracies, we think in these four or eight-year terms, because that's how our elections are built.

Speaker 3 But what's going on with the way ISIS thinks about things are not in four or eight-year segments, but much broader, longer struggles.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I mean, they have a long-term view about this.
And I think with any adversary, like even Russia, we see the limitations, not that we should change them, of the U.S.

Speaker 2 political system when it comes to long-term strategy, right? We're constantly changing course.

Speaker 2 And the polarization in America makes that much worse, right? Because Trump comes in, he wants to undo everything Obama did. And

Speaker 2 the swings of the pendulum, I think, make it hard to maintain a stable strategy. Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah.

Speaker 3 This definitely is a moment of instability. And I think what is surely the case is that if a Democrat is elected president in 2020, this policy will

Speaker 3 be changed, if not reversed, entirely. And that's one of the things that even the Republican critics have been saying here.

Speaker 3 We can't have a situation where we leave the Kurds, who have been our allies, abandoned because we have to have a consistent policy.

Speaker 2 Aaron Powell, I think one problem that Democrats have is that they have never grappled with the problem you laid out of what the Obama administration's failings were in Syria and what culpability America and Democrats, by extension, have for that.

Speaker 2 I actually did an interview recently with Tony Blinken, the national security advisor to Biden.

Speaker 3 Yeah, worked for Biden for a long time and is still advising him in the campaign.

Speaker 2 And was an advisor to Obama as well. And I asked him, you know, has the Democratic Party successfully grappled with Syria? And he said no.

Speaker 2 And he said something to the effect of all of us who were involved with Syria policy need to look ourselves in the mirror

Speaker 2 and ask us, you know, what went wrong. And I really don't know that the party has ever done that.

Speaker 2 And it's a tough question, right? There's not easy answers to it. But I think acknowledging the problem would be a really good first step.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, so is there a difference between that looking ourselves in the mirror from the Obama decisions on Syria versus looking ourselves in the mirror from the Trump decisions on Syria and the different kinds of chaos that are involved there?

Speaker 2 I mean, for Trump, I don't think he put much thought into what happens when I do this. Just you know what? Screw it.
That seems to be the decision, and we'll pick up the pieces from there.

Speaker 2 On the Obama end, that was definitely not the problem. The problem was they couldn't arrive at the right answer.

Speaker 3 You said the point earlier about the movie and that sort of repeating itself.

Speaker 3 I wonder what in this moment of instability we're talking about, you think, when we see the fighters who maybe, according to the president, will make their way to Europe.

Speaker 3 What is, if this is the prologue to the movie, what is the movie that is coming here?

Speaker 2 I mean, I think if you had said in 2011,

Speaker 2 what is the movie that comes from this prologue? There was a feeling when the U.S.

Speaker 2 left Iraq that, okay, this could be the prologue to something else because we don't know whether the Iraqi government without the Americans is going to be able to keep al-Qaeda down.

Speaker 2 I don't think anybody would have said, they're going to go to Syria and they're going to create a caliphate.

Speaker 2 So I think the answer to that is, you know, the best we can say is that ISIS will remain a threat and not defeated.

Speaker 2 You know, terrorism

Speaker 2 is still a problem. I don't think anyone thinks it's not.
And that will continue to be so.

Speaker 2 And for me, just the heartbreaking part of it is

Speaker 2 missing the chance to

Speaker 2 put some final end to this. So

Speaker 2 if America had found a way to build up its allies in Iraq and Syria to the point where they could keep ISIS defeated,

Speaker 2 you know, maybe we don't have to talk about it anymore in a year or two.

Speaker 2 But the fact that instead of doing that, Trump's just throwing chaos into the region again, which is what ISIS and al-Qaeda have used to gather strength before,

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 that's what gives this feeling that we're in another prologue.

Speaker 3 Well, that is a lot to get through, and I'm so glad we had you here to do it.

Speaker 3 It's Mike Giglio, staff writer here at The Atlantic and the author of the supremely well-timed book, Shatter the Nations, ISIS and the War for the Caliphate.

Speaker 2 Buy it.

Speaker 3 Have you bought it? Go online, go to your bookstore, and buy it. Thanks for being here, Mike.

Speaker 2 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 3 That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic. Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

Speaker 3 Our theme music is the Battle Hymn of the Republic, as interpreted by John Baptiste. You can find show notes and past episodes at theatlantic.com slash radio.

Speaker 3 If you like the show, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app. Thanks for listening.
Catch you next week.

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