KRISTEN STILT: I'm Kristen
Stilt, professor of law here at the Law
School and co-director of the Islamic Legal
Studies Program. And I'll be moderating
our session on ISIS today with two very
distinguished guests. And providing deep and
thoughtful commentary on current events is one of
our goals at the Islamic Legal Studies Program. And today we have
the perfect pair to offer just this kind
of insightful analysis on what is currently,
and I suspect will be for some
time to come, one of the most pressing
problems worldwide today. I want to thank our
co-sponsors, listed behind me on the
electronic poster. And before we get started,
a brief introduction of our guests, although they're
well-known to everyone here. Deborah Amos covers the
Middle East for NPR News. You can hear her on
Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. And her Facebook
page is a wealth of information about ISIS. Many awards for reporting,
which I won't go through here. But apropos our
location, I will mention that she was a Nieman fellow
at Harvard University, 1991 to '92. And then returned to Harvard
in 2010 as a Shorenstein fellow at the Kennedy School. She's a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations and author of several
books, including Eclipse of the Sunnis--
Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East; and Lines
in the Sand-- Desert Storm and the Remaking
of the Arab World. She spends a substantial
amount of time reporting from the Middle East
and recently returned from a long period reporting
from southern Turkey, where her focus was ISIS. And many of you have
heard her reports. Our own Noah Feldman, the Felix
Frankfurter Professor of Law and a senior fellow of the
Society of Fellows at Harvard University, is
also with us today. He's a contributing writer
for The New York Times Magazine and the Bloomberg View. He served as Senior
Constitutional Adviser to the Coalition Provisional
Authority in Iraq and advised members of the
Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of the
interim constitution. He's the author of many
books, three of which are directly pertinent to our
conversation today-- The Rise and Fall of the Islamic
State, What We Owe Iraq-- War and the Ethics of
Nation Building, and After Jihad--
America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy. Thank you very much
to both of you. So a quick note about format. We'll talk with our two
panelists for about an hour, with me moderating. And then we'll have
time for your questions. So keep track of
what you want to ask. So let's just begin. We have a map behind us
from The New York Times, a week or so ago, showing
ISIS strongholds-- territories they hold and
contested territories. That's just for geographical
reference for all of us. But estimates have been made
that about 8 million people are living under partial
or full ISIS control. And we could talk
about the name ISIS at some point, which
itself is contested. But for now, let's
jump right in. Our attention began
in earnest in August, when we saw the Yazidis,
a minority group, trapped on Mount Sinjar. But obviously, ISIS has been
around for a much longer time. Let's start with a general
question-- what is ISIS? Where did it come from? It's a book-length topic,
but give us some background. It's to both of you. DEBORAH AMOS: Our
attention to ISIS was much earlier than August. For those of us who were
covering the Syrian uprising-- AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
microphone. DEBORAH AMOS: I'm sorry. KRISTEN STILT: Yeah,
let's get it closer. Sorry. DEBORAH AMOS: For
those of us who were covering the
Syrian uprising, ISIS was a phenomenon
long before August. You could see them
rolling into areas, becoming stronger in
the chaos of Syria. They were well armed. They were well funded. And in particular,
they were well focused. They knew what they
wanted when they came. And what they wanted was
to establish territory that they controlled. They came from Iraq. The leadership is Iraqi. And they changed their name
to reflect their new territory when they crossed the border. And now they've
shortened it, which is a blessing for
all of us who have to actually report on the radio. ISIS/ISIL was always confusing. Now we just call them the
so-called Islamic State, which makes us all very happy. I got an email from
a woman who said, my daughter's name is Isis. Will you please stop calling
them ISIS on the radio? I think that the
name is instructive. It tells you what
their goals are. And they aim to create
an Islamic state. They are creating an
Islamic state in the areas that they control. They tax. They police. They run the education system. They have a Minister of Oil. They have a Minister
of Telecommunications. They are self-financed. They are wealthy. They are working on an
ideological revolution in the places that they control. They focus on
teenagers and children. They understand that they
have to break loyalties to family and in
some cases, to tribe. They have Saudi clerics who
are skilled at doing that. They have just, for the
first time this week, laid out their education
plan for Raqqa. We were just talking
about this before. They are using Saudi Arabia's
curriculum in their schools, in Raqqa in particular, on
their religious instruction. And so where they
come from is Iraq. They come out of
Sunni disenchantment with the government in Baghdad. They crossed the
border into Syria, because they are picking up
on the same disenchantment of a Sunni population who--
while a majority in Syria, a minority in Iraq-- feel
that they have been dealt out of the regional game,
and feel that they have no other alternative to get
their message across, which is, we do not like the
deal that we have. KRISTEN STILT: Want
to add in, Noah? NOAH FELDMAN: Yeah. Let me say, perhaps, just a
word about the geopolitics that help explain
where they come from. Before I do, though,
first of all, it's thrilling to have
you here, Deborah. Thank you for coming here. And it's also thrilling
to have Kristen running the Islamic Legal Studies
Program with Intisar Rabb. It's a very exciting
moment in the history of the Islamic Legal
Studies Program. And as a member of
the faculty here, I'm thrilled that programs
are up and running. It's really great. That's the only optimistic
thing I will say all day. The geopolitical context in
which the Islamic State arises has to do, in large part, with
the relationship between events in Iraq, and the end of the US
presence as occupier in Iraq, and the subsequent
events that took place in Syria in the kind
of quasi-uprising that began, roughly, in the
aftermath of the Arab Spring and then quickly morphed
into a much more complex, stalemated civil war. What I have just said
is obvious to everybody. But let me be a
little more specific in ways that may be a
little bit less obvious. The historical origins of
the organization that we're calling Islamic State
now, or ISIS, or ISIL, is that it grew out of
Al Qaeda in Iraq, which was called Al Qaeda
in Mesopotamia. Now, the names that the Al
Qaeda affiliates typically, historically used
were connected, very self-consciously, to
regions, geographical regions. They were not named
primarily for states. In fact, there was a
self-conscious effort in the naming process not to
use the name of the state, but to use some geographical
feature that was more connected in some way to some
aspect of Islamic history. One striking thing about the
hyphenation or complexity of ISIS-- the Islamic
State in Iraq and Syria, or the Islamic State
in Iraq and al-Sham, the Levant, which
gives you the L, is that it
self-consciously merged two different
geographical locations. It merged Iraq with Syria. And in historical terms, those
are, to a certain extent, distinct geographical areas. They were certainly
distinct, for example, just to use a simple
case, in distinct Ottoman sanjaks, distinct
Ottoman provinces. The combination
is itself a step. Now, that veers into ideology. But just to go back
to the geopolitics for a moment, the success
and then eventually the defeat of Al
Qaeda in Mesopotamia was a product of the US invasion
and occupation, followed by the Sunni uprising,
followed by the US surge, which gambled that it would
be possible to put down Al Qaeda and its
affiliates in the region, primarily by building
ties between local Sunnis and in theory, the
Iraqi government. But in fact, the US
government, trying to push the Iraqi government
to make that deal. That was enough to
defeat Al Qaeda. But it wasn't enough to
eliminate the interest set in which it had
come into existence. Now shift attention to the
context now with Syria. US policy in the aftermath of
the uprising against Bashar al-Assad was
neither to try to do as it had done with
Britain and France in Libya, to take out Assad. Nor was it to step aside and
let Assad utterly destroy all resistance against him. Instead, the US
policy, if it can be dignified with
that name, has been to try to maintain
some balance, such that the uprising
would continue to exist and would not be able
to succeed in toto. And similarly, that Bashar
would not utterly fall. But neither would he be able
to regain effective control. In that environment,
a kind of-- vacuum is not quite the right word. But a vacuum-like state arose,
in which large parts of Syria were not under the control
of any sovereign entity. That was an ideal condition
for this follow-on group, which is exactly as Debra
described, and moves across the border
from Iraq into Syria to begin to grab territory. And so the grabbing
of territory, which I'm going to argue later
on, if we get a chance to talk about this, turns
out, in my view, to be the most distinctive
feature of the Islamic State, is a product of this confluence
of these geopolitical events. It's also the reason, just
to close on this thought, that ISIL could rename
itself the Islamic State. It didn't have to be so
geographically specific, because suddenly,
they had something that looked a lot like a state. And that was, for the most part,
not true of any of the Al Qaeda affiliates, even
though there were moments when they were aspiring
to that in places-- in Yemen, for example. KRISTEN STILT: Great. We'll definitely
talk about their state-like characteristics. But one more question,
by way of background. What do they believe? And how do their beliefs relate
to other movements we've seen, such as Al Qaeda or
other Islamist movements of the past years,
or even decades? DEBORAH AMOS: I think that
they, unlike Al Qaeda, have been more bold in
outlining a much larger goal. They do aim to create a state. And you can see what they
believe in their statements. They issue a yearly report,
like any corporation, where they're fairly
transparent about what they've accomplished, where
the money goes. It doesn't exactly say
where the money comes from. But it does say
where the money goes. They have set themselves
up with regional governors. They're called princes. They are fairly international. Their leadership is composed
of former Ba'athists, who work on their military strategy. They have an Egyptian who
runs their oil policy. They are using Jordanian
clerics and Saudi clerics to run their Sharia courts
and to work on their ideology and how they propagate
that ideology. They are expansionist. They intend to take
over more territory than the territory they have. They are clearly
anti-minorities. Anyone who is not
a Muslim in the way that they define Muslims
either has to be eliminated, as we saw with the
Yazidis, or taxed, which is what they offer to
the Christians in Mosul, who decided not to take the deal. Although, in Raqqa, they do. There are still
Christians in Raqqa who actually pay tax
to the Islamic State to be able to survive. So I think they've
been very clear. You can read online
what their ideology is. They have no trouble
talking about it. KRISTEN STILT: Noah,
give us a sense on the spectrum, where are they? NOAH FELDMAN: Yeah,
I think everything that Deborah said is true. And I agree with it. But I think it's
too soon to talk about a distinctive ideology,
especially with respect to Al Qaeda, when you figure
that less than a year ago, they were happy to affect a
merger with the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria,
the Nusra Front. So the ideological developments
of the last year, I think, are interesting to watch. But it's, I think, much too
soon to say definitively that we can identify
the ideology. That said, I think it
is certainly the case that they fit squarely
into a particular brand of expansionist
jihadi Salafism, which is very familiar to
anybody who watches the region at this point,
and familiar to anybody who goes on the internet and reads
about it, either as a person interested in finding
out more about it out of criticism or someone
interested in finding out more about it because he
or she would like to join. I don't think there's anything
really remarkably distinctive here. Again, we're speaking
about ideology, rather than practice on the ground. The idea that non-Muslim
minorities may be tolerated, provided that they
are not heretics-- and the Yazidis, in their view,
are heretics and are therefore not to be tolerated. By virtue of their
paying a tax, is just a standard piece of classical
Islamic legal ideology. There's nothing shocking or
unusual about that perspective. And if you asked
other Salafi thinkers, they would probably agree
with that in principle. So I don't think that-- the
radicalism, I don't think, can be defined
ideologically at this point. It would have to be defined in
terms of actions on the ground. KRISTEN STILT: Would you
say, though, on a spectrum, they are on the far end
on the radical side? NOAH FELDMAN: Well, that, I
think, is certainly the case. Ideologically, I think
that's got to be true. But I also-- I don't want
to de-emphasize too much the continuity of their
ideology with views that would be held by Al Qaeda
or by other jihadi Salafis. They're obviously in a
radically different position from an organization like
the International Muslim Brotherhood. This is for clarity. I think probably almost
everybody in the room already knows this. But it's just important
to put it on the record, because there is a tendency to
say, oh, Islamic radicalism, as though it's all
the same thing. So the International
Muslim Brotherhood, with its particular
branches, believes formally and officially, through the
opinions of its leadership and also the actions of
its members, in democracy. It is committed, at
least in principle, to the total compatibility
of Islam and democracy. And the Islamic State is
totally different from that. It clearly rejects democracy
and wants a form of government that is, in its view, much
more purely Islamic and that, therefore, is structured
around a particular person who has now, in fact, declared
himself to be caliph. And maybe that's the
other point in which ideological radicalism
is to be mentioned. Many, many very seriously
committed traditional Muslims, including many who would
describe themselves as Salafis, which is a
large number of Muslims. In the West, we tend
to use the word Salafi as though it meant a radical. That's not the case at all. Would believe that in principle
there could be a caliphate, but would not believe that
either the present purported caliph or those around him
are even vaguely qualified for that position. So in Saudi Arabia, for example,
the ulama, the scholars, would clearly reject any
claim that this person counts as the caliph. So that is, I guess,
a form of radicalism. And I guess, to be totally
fair, although Al Qaeda talked about the possibility
of a caliphate, nobody actually-- I
think to my knowledge, Bin Laden never formally
declared himself to be the caliph
nor did they ever acknowledge any particular
person as the caliph. So that actually is
an ideological step that goes further. DEBORAH AMOS: Let me just make
one more point about them. I think in some
ways their ideology is evolving as we watch them. Yes, they did cooperate with
Nusra when they first arrived. But it was a cooperation
of convenience. And as they grew,
they understood that they were Al Qaeda 2.0. And they could shed their
associations with Nusra. And now they're, in some
places, at war with Nusra. And it's not
necessarily ideological. But it is really about power. And so I do think,
in some ways, you can't say that they have a fixed
ideology, because I don't even think they understand
all the parameters. They are, in some ways,
making it up as they go along. NOAH FELDMAN: And
the caliphate-- I mean, now that we're
talking about this, I realize it's probably a bigger
deal than I made it out to be, initially. It's connected to
the sovereignty. You can't really claim to
have a caliphate unless you have sovereign control over some
territory and the aspiration to control all of it. I mean, to be the
caliph is not to just be the ruler of a
particular location. To be the legitimate
caliph is to be the legitimate ruler
of all Muslims. That's the aspirational
claim that it entails. So you definitely can't
just be the Islamic State in this place, and this
place, and this place, if you're going
to be the caliph. That's why you have to be
the Islamic State, full stop. KRISTEN STILT: Which is why
they shortened their name, more recently, to the Islamic
State, period, with that claim. Great. OK, that's really helpful
by way of background. So we know that they've
taken over a lot of territory quite quickly, even though they
have this substantial history that-- it's great that
we brought that out. So how are they doing it? What's their strategy? What's their tactic? How do they move into towns? How do they recruit members? How do they conquer territory? How much resistance
do they face? How are they doing
it, strategically? DEBORAH AMOS: I can
tell you how they do it in Syria, because I
watched it happen. And in some ways, they
were the better alternative in some towns. The Free Syrian Army,
that umbrella term that we use that
really describes all kinds of different
brigades who are all across the ideological
spectrum, were bad governance. They were brigands. They raped. They stole stuff, when
they were no longer busy fighting the regime. And that happened in a
lot of towns across Syria. And what ISIS offered was order. And people were
craving order in Syria. And the second thing
that ISIS offered was a respite from the bombing. The regime didn't bomb
ISIS-held territory. They didn't bomb Raqqa. They did occasionally, but
not with any persistence. And so if you were
a Syrian and you'd been through two years
of complete chaos in Northern Syria, ISIS
looked pretty good. We saw the same thing
happen in Mosul. Although, I was in Mosul
maybe five days after ISIS swept through town. And I think that it was pretty
common opinion, certainly among the Kurds and even the
people in Mosul that we spoke to, they never expected
the Iraqi army to collapse. That wasn't the point. They had come to Mosul to
liberate a prison, which is one of the things that
they had done before in Iraq. So you get another 500,
600 fighters if you do it. I think the second reason that
they came to Iraq on June 10th was because they were
coming for oil fields. And we saw them do that
almost immediately. Once they left Mosul, they
went to Baiji, to the refinery. They went to four
oil fields in Iraq. So they were coming for money. Iraq, for them, was their bank. They had been involved in
shakedown operations in Mosul for the past three
or four years, reaping millions of dollars
by extortion and kidnapping plots in Mosul. However, once they
got there, they found a population that,
by and large, welcomed them into Mosul. The Iraqi Army had so enraged
the population of Mosul that they were-- in those
first couple of weeks, they were happy
that ISIS was there. They really were. And they would say it to us. The Christians weren't so happy. Although, they
left the Christians alone in the beginning. But by and large, the Iraqi Army
had behaved so badly in Mosul that they were welcomed
when they first arrived. So that is how they do it. They find places
where there is chaos. People don't know
how to survive. They have no way
to make a living. And ISIS brings order. NOAH FELDMAN: And again, just to
emphasize the geopolitical side of that same account,
they're exploiting, basically, security vacuums. And you would have thought there
was no security vacuum actually within sovereign Iraq. But that, it turned
out, was not the case. Because the Shia-dominated
government has never really followed
through on its promise to share power in any meaningful
way with local Sunnis, the consequence is that
the local population felt no buy-in, really, in
the government institutions, and certainly not in the army. In fact, they felt,
in some sense, they were still under
occupation by the army. And so it was a
good alternative. Similarly, when they've taken
on Kurdish towns and villages, for the most part,
they've managed to pick relatively
poorly defended ones. And among other
things, they've shown that the stereotypical view
advocated, to a large extent, by the Kurdish
government, that Peshmerga fighters, Kurdish fighters,
are somehow unbeatable was just not the case. If not well armed, and
not well trained, and not in large numbers,
they turned out to be very much like
all other human beings and were not able to mount
a successful defense. And of course, this is very
much true within Syria. In places where they've
advanced have mostly been places where the regime was not. Aleppo was a great example. So ISIS has been on the
outskirts of Aleppo. But it's not like inside
Aleppo is the Syrian regime. No, the Syrian regime's on
the other side of Aleppo. In fact, it's the Free Syrian
Army-- which, as Deborah said, is probably neither
free, nor Syrian, nor an army--
that's in the town. So again, it's a
relatively soft target. So that's been good
strategy on their part. And they've been
able to do the thing that, ironically, the
counterinsurgency manuals tell any actor to do, which
is to form an inkblot. Do you all know this metaphor? You put down the
ink on one spot. You protect that spot. And then you
gradually spread out. And you establish order. So this is often
described as a lesson for the counter-insurgent. But of course, it's
also exactly what the insurgent force should do. Anybody who wants to create a
functioning form of sovereignty should engage in this. And that's exactly what
they're at least trying to do. KRISTEN STILT: But
obviously, they do encounter some
resistance, and they have to keep bringing new
recruits into their armies. Where do these
recruits come from? Are they people they've
recruited from local areas? We hear reports of people
coming from England, Tunisia. Where is the
staffing coming from? DEBORAH AMOS: After
they took Mosul, their numbers, according to the
CIA, jumped to somewhere close to 30,000. I think there's two
ways that they do that. They are very good
in social media, reaching out to a population of
somehow angry young Muslims who see that their future is
with the Islamic State. And those numbers aren't large,
but still, people are coming. And they come through Turkey. And they found smuggling
routes to do so. In Mosul, we heard stories that
ISIS would come house to house and ask for a son. And if the answer was
no, then they said, well, then we'll
take the daughter. And so a lot of
families felt that it was wiser to give a son. In some towns, that wasn't
a hard bargain to strike. In Tikrit, ISIS was able to take
over Tikrit within 24 hours, because most of the Sunni tribes
in Tikrit joined the uprising. And that has been true
all the way through Anbar, that there is a
population who is angry, who feels that there
is no possibility to have a dialogue with
the government in Baghdad. And if you don't
think that there is a possibility for dialogue,
which has been shown again and again in Iraq--
if you remember, it was only about two
years ago that there was a rather large
Arab Spring-like demonstration in
Anbar that the Maliki government eventually shut down. And that was the last time,
I think, that Sunnis in Anbar felt that there was a dialogue
possible with the Baghdad government. And so ISIS offered a
way to feel powerful, to feel that you could talk
to the Baghdad government in a different way. And so you have two kinds of
recruits-- those families who feel that they are
obliged to give their sons and those families
who support ISIS because it makes
them feel empowered. NOAH FELDMAN: Yeah, nothing
succeeds like success. And it's a three-part strategy. There are external
recruits, who are ideological recruits
for the most part. They're not very useful
right when they arrive. I spent a lot of time in Tunisia
over the last couple of years, and Tunisian teenagers are
much like teenagers everywhere else in the world. If suddenly you had 2,000
Tunisian teenagers-- and I'm not saying there
are 2,000 Tunisians, although that number
is regularly repeated. I have no evidence to support
it, but it might be true. But if we had 2,000
Tunisian teenagers outside, it would be like having
2,000 Cambridge teenagers outside-- very good for
some purposes, not so useful if you wanted to fight
an organized battle. You have to train people. And so useful as cannon
fodder, potentially. DEBORAH AMOS: Suicide bombers. NOAH FELDMAN: Suicide bombers,
but not yet hardened forces. And then the two
strategies that Deborah was describing, internally. Obviously, the far
superior one is people who want to
fight on your side, because they think
you're likely to win, or because they think
the going is good. Much less good to have people
who are coerced into fighting for you. But you'll take them, if
they're likely to be loyal. So those are all
reasonable strategies to build up manpower
and do it quickly. DEBORAH AMOS: And there's one
other simple recruiting tool. And that's money. They are a wealthy organization. And across Syria, we hear
this report over and over, and the figure is always the
same-- $600 a month on time every month. And three years of war,
that really means something. When you are living in Deir
ez-Zor, that is a fortune. Now, that's just
the foot soldiers. So you move up in the
bureaucratic chain, and you're making more. You get free housing. It happens to belong to
somebody else, but never mind. You have the ability
to get a free wife. In Iraq, it's expensive
to get married. It is in Syria, too. A lot of people can't do it,
because they can't afford it. And now, you have everything
at your fingertips. And you are relatively safe. And you live in a
place that works. What's not to like? Your wife has to wear a
niqab, a small price to pay. If you stay on their side of
the law, life is not that bad. KRISTEN STILT: Deborah,
you've interviewed defectors. So it doesn't always work out. What happens when
people want out? DEBORAH AMOS: Those are the
most dangerous for ISIS. We did interview a
26-year-old defector who left, because in
some ways, the brutality, for him-- and he'd seen plenty. But the brutality
reached a level that he couldn't
tolerate, because it was against his own tribe. And that seemed to
have clicked him back into some kind of reality. But he explained to us that
defectors are always beheaded. They are hunted, including
in Southern Turkey. There are the version of
ISIS [? Mahabharat, ?] who tries to find the
defectors and drag them back, because one, they know too much. But two, ideologically, they
are worse than anybody else. It's because they were real
Muslims, and then they turned. And so they are the
[INAUDIBLE] of the [INAUDIBLE]. They are the worst of the worst,
rejectors of ISIS ideology. So if you actually get to cross
the border, then even then, you are not safe. And this kid was
really interesting, because-- I didn't
notice it at first, but I realized that
he was clean-shaven and he had short
hair that was gelled. And I said, why no beard? And he said, as soon as you
cross the border into Turkey, you have to shave it
off, because the Turks are looking for beards. In my part of the world,
beards are politics. And the length of the
beard is politics. So this is ISIS. This is Brotherhood. And to be a little shorter,
[? Rami-sized, ?] is moderate Syrian rebel. [LAUGHS] NOAH FELDMAN: And that's not
[? Rami, ?] just to be clear. DEBORAH AMOS: Yes, just to be
clear, just to give an example. And I was saying earlier
that you see rebels in Syria have face hair according
to their politics. And that changes. So when the money is coming in
for the more radical brigades, longer beards prevail. And when money is coming in
for more moderate brigades, then there is a celebration
of shaving all over Syria. I saw that just
as I was leaving. KRISTEN STILT: Before we
leave the topic of strategy and tactics, I think-- and
Deborah, you raised it. We have to talk
about beheadings, because that has been one
of the ways in which ISIS has captured world attention. What kind of a strategy is that? Is it foreigners, journalists? Is it defectors? To whom is this
strategy deployed? What does it do? NOAH FELDMAN: Well,
it's operating on a lot of different levels. And there may be a central
beheading strategy committee. But it's not obvious
that there is. So let's talk about its
different social meanings in different contexts. To start with the
West, not because it's the most important, but because
it's been very significant. Here, it has a dual effect. On the one hand, it
signals to anybody who might be a potential
recruit that this is a serious organization
that isn't afraid of anybody. It signals tremendous
confidence to do something that-- and the reason
it signals this, is that the effect
that it has on a more general Western
audience is shocking. And it galvanizes opposition. I think there's no question
that from the standpoint of ordinary military
strategy, if you had dropped a neutral military strategic
adviser, someone who makes his living going around doing
this-- it's usually his-- and had him have a conversation
with Caliph Ibrahim, and said, should you,
right around this time, start cutting off the heads
of American journalists, he would have said, that's the
worst thing you could possibly do, because it's going to get
the United States to start bombing you, which will be
strategically bad for you. And they didn't care. And the fact that
they didn't care about those inevitable
consequences is itself an extremely
powerful signal that they are acting as though
they were a sovereign state, that they're acting in
ways where they say, you want to stop us? OK, here we are. Come right ahead and stop us. So they were not being
strategic in the sense of trying to get the
Western countries not to be shocked by them. They were, in fact,
willing to pay the cost, in strategic terms,
of upsetting and alienating a Western public,
in order to get the benefits of communicating
their degree of confidence. So I think that's one
part of the strategy. KRISTEN STILT: Why did it start
at that time, do you think? Why the summer? DEBORAH AMOS: It didn't
start this summer. NOAH FELDMAN: It's been
going on all along. But it may not have been
of Western journalists. KRISTEN STILT: Well,
that's what I mean. Why did that start? NOAH FELDMAN: I think
that was probably-- it's very complicated calculus. But presumably, it precisely
had to do with the moment when the West was
probably going to do something interventive anyway. I mean, after the
fall of Mosul, I would say that it
was-- I held the view and said this to people,
or whoever cared to listen, that it was inevitable
that the United States would begin
a bombing campaign. I thought that,
because I just didn't think that any sitting
president, including Barack Obama, could tolerate
the existence of a sort of quasi-sovereign
entity in Iraq and do nothing. He had to be seen
to be taking action. I suspect that
ISIS knew the same. I suspect that was
their calculus as well. So once you're going
to be attacked anyway, you might as well
show that you're not afraid of being attacked. And you might as well
try to send a message. And maybe you'll even show
that you mean business, and maybe you'll
deter the attacks. They may have thought,
best case scenario, it would actually have
some deterrent effect, convincing people that it's--
but my guess is that it was primarily about knowing they
would be attacked anyway and producing a certain degree
of confidence in the aftermath. I know I haven't spoken at
all about the local effects of the beheadings. Maybe Deborah wants
to talk about that. DEBORAH AMOS: Well, two things
I will say is, you know, Saudi Arabia also
uses beheadings. And we are not
horrified by that. It is just that is what they do. And so-- NOAH FELDMAN: We
might be horrified, but it doesn't
affect our policy. DEBORAH AMOS: It doesn't
affect our policy. Human rights groups shout
about it, but it goes on. Two, they've been beheading
for quite some time. And we seem to not notice
that they have beheaded Lebanese soldiers,
Iraqi journalists. I agree with Noah that there is
a-- a British writer called it "horrorism"-- that
they like to engage in. And the one I thought
was most interesting was the Alan Henning beheading. Alan Henning had enormous
support in Britain from Muslims across the country. He even had a safe passage
letter that he had with him when he was taken from people
in London who were closely affiliated somehow to Al Qaeda. Still, he went. Those were his guys. Those were his protectors. And when it was
clear he was next up, there was just a
lot of work being done in Britain to try
to talk them out of it. What I thought was
very interesting, they killed him on a
Muslim holiday, Eid. And I think that the
message was, too bad. I don't care what you
people in Britain think. We are not of you. We are a completely
different organization. And we will show
you what we will do. Now, it's going to be
interesting to see what they do with the next guy up,
who has converted to Islam. He now has support from a
Nusra commander who said, this guy worked on me. I thought he was jihadi. I had no idea he
was an American. They are about due
for another one. It's pretty much
been on schedule. However, they're running out. They don't have very
many more, which is why everybody's a little
worried in Southern Turkey that there's going
to be another snatch. KRISTEN STILT: Running
out of hostages. DEBORAH AMOS: Yeah, they
are running-- they are. NOAH FELDMAN: Western. DEBORAH AMOS: Western
hostages, yeah. Journalist hostages, because
the Europeans buy theirs out. And the next one after
Kassig is a woman. That also gives them a problem. I don't know if they
would go that far. I don't. What do you think? NOAH FELDMAN: I mean, we'll see. I don't think it would be an
impediment to them, ultimately. DEBORAH AMOS: To kill a woman? Maybe not. KRISTEN STILT: So let's talk
a little more about life under ISIS. What is it like in these towns? Deborah, you've already
hinted a little bit at it. But they're running towns. They're providing food, water,
social services, education, health care. What are they doing? How are they doing it? How are they paying for it? Give us some texture of what
it's like in these towns. DEBORAH AMOS: I'll start
with the paying part, which is what we know the most about. They are excellent
smugglers of oil. They've tapped in to a black
market that has been around since Saddam Hussein and the
Oil-for-Food Program, which was a giant smuggling
organization out of Iraq. And even to this day,
the Iraqi government will tell you that they lose $6
million a day in smuggled oil from somebody-- Kurds,
Arab tribes, Northerners. And so ISIS was able to tap
in to this huge smuggling network at the same time
that they took over the oil fields, paltry as they
are, in Eastern Syria. So they've got oil. They deal in antiquities, and
hostage-taking, and extortion. So that's how they pay
for what they're doing. They're also very strategic
in the towns that they go to. One of the reasons that Raqqa
was a focus for them is-- KRISTEN STILT: Is everyone
following the map? Can you see it from here? DEBORAH AMOS: --is Raqqa
had one of the last and biggest grain
silos in Syria. And they needed
that, because they do promise to provide services. And they did it in Mosul. And they did it in Raqqa. Within days of
coming into Mosul, they were bringing cooking
gas around to families. They'd lower the prices on
the produce in the markets. They did the same
thing in Raqqa. They take over the bakeries. They take over the food
distribution, the bread distribution. We spent a couple
of days in Urfa, which is on the
Turkish side, talking to people who were
coming out of Raqqa, to find out what life was like. The bureaucracy in
Raqqa is essentially the one that was there when
the Assad regime was in charge. There's a lot of people
who stayed in their jobs. Some of them were
even being paid by the regime as
late as this summer. You had to go to Deir
ez-Zor to pick up the check or to pick up the cash. And over time, I was told,
ISIS didn't really like that. So they shut that down, and they
were picking up those salaries. So you had an existing
bureaucracy already in Raqqa. But in some ways, these guys
are like free-marketeers. They're kind of
Republican-ish in the way that they run their economies. You can rent a
space in the market, and you are free to
sell whatever you want. You get in a little
trouble when it's clothing, especially when
it's women's clothing and you're not allowed to
have it in the windows. But they do you know how
to run a bureaucracy. So the people that
they have attracted have obviously worked
in government before. What I thought
was interesting is after Caliph Baghdadi
announced his new position, two days later, he issued
another proclamation, which was, engineers, doctors,
architects, come now, we need you. And they have been asking
for technical people to come to the caliphate. And they've been
getting answered. There are people
from Saudi coming. There are people
from Jordan coming. People who knew how
to run hospitals, who knew how to run
offices have been arriving to essentially
help them run their state. NOAH FELDMAN: I just want to--
I haven't been on the ground, and Deborah has. So this is not intended in
any way as a disagreement. I just want to sound a note of
caution about how bureaucratic, actually, they are thus far. They haven't engaged
in de-Ba'athification. So that was smart of them. Using your local people
is the right way-- the people who are
already in power-- is the right way to
organize something. And some of the
sources of income are, more or less, sustainable--
tax from what little economy there is on the ground. And there is some taxation. Some are less sustainable,
like the big theft from Mosul, which was who knows how much
money-- somewhere between $350 million and $600 million
worth of usable currency. That may not run out
for a very long time. But that will run
out, eventually. That's not ultimately
sustainable. And they're not operating
a market economy, insofar as that a market economy
extends beyond the territory that they control. That said, neither
are the governments around them drawing a strict
cordon sanitaire around them, such that goods can't get in. So to some extent, there is
some trade going in and out. So that's a possible
ongoing source of function. One example that was just
in the news recently, there was a report-- I don't know
whether it was properly confirmed-- that Islamic
State forces entered a power plant near the Mosul dam and
ordered the dam workers who had not been operating the
dam-- because they didn't have the right kind of fuel-- to
use the wrong kind of fuel just to get the thing up
and running to restore power and water to Mosul. Now, that's, on the one
hand, clever, and smart, and a good thing to have done. On the other hand, it suggests
that, up to that moment, there was neither power
nor water in Mosul. So that was also true under long
periods of American occupation. So I'm not saying
that's as if to say that it's such a failing
to not have produced that. I just want to say
that it remains to be seen-- this is
very new for them. It remains to be seen just
how effectively they'll be able to govern
it in a longer term sort of way in these places. We just don't know yet. DEBORAH AMOS: I
think you're right. I think we don't know. But what's interesting
about them is it is part of their strategy
to deliver services. And they do it almost
as soon as they arrive. And so the fact
that they thought they needed to go to Mosul--
because the problem for them in Mosul is Baghdad
controls just about everything, both
water and electricity. And Baghdad shut them off. So they were a bit stuck. But you can buy fuel
for your generators. It's not that there's
no power in Mosul. There is. And if you bring the
prices down of fuel, then most people tell me they
have power for 12 hours a day. NOAH FELDMAN: Which
is pretty good. DEBORAH AMOS: Which
is pretty good. KRISTEN STILT: Well,
their economic base has been referred to as a
Ponzi scheme of looting. I don't know if that's
what you were alluding to, Noah, that there's a
limit to how much you can-- NOAH FELDMAN: Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't have
called it a Ponzi scheme, because it's not a Ponzi scheme. It's just outright theft. There's no faking
in the process. But you can keep on expanding. As long as you expand,
there'll be more loot to have. KRISTEN STILT: Anything
else you want add, Deborah, from your interviews
about what it's like to live in these areas? The legal system. How is criminal
justice dispensed? Education? DEBORAH AMOS: I think the
most interesting thing is over time, how people
adjust to the brutalities. And that is probably worrying. I had a young activist
who had to leave, because she was on a list. And she was being
hunted by ISIS. It was easier for her
to survive for a while, because when you're in niqab,
it's harder to see who you are. But she said they were trying
to mount campaigns in Raqqa to say to people,
beheadings-- it's not cool what's happening here. And she said there were times on
the central square where there would just be heads,
maybe 15, 17 heads. After ISIS took over one of
the military bases in Raqqa, they beheaded many of
the Syrian regime forces. And they brought those
heads to the central square as a demonstration project
and just set them out. And she said people would come
and have lunch on the square. They'd bring their
kids on the square. And she said that it is a
way to desensitize people to this kind of violence. Between that and this
obsession that ISIS has with ideological
camps for teenagers-- I think both of
those things tell us that it is going to be very hard
to unravel a generation that's lived under ISIS, even if it's
just for a couple of years. They are really seeping
into people's heads in the places
where they control. NOAH FELDMAN: I'm
sure that that's true. I guess I would just say,
under Saddam's regime, probably a quarter of a
million Iraqis were killed. Under the decade of de facto
US occupation, probably roughly the same
number of Iraqis died, maybe a little bit more,
depending on how you measure. Beheading is a terrible,
terrible thing. And it's a terrible
form of death. And it's shocking. But it's still death. And we're talking
about places where the amount of damage
that has been done has been so great that I
think-- I wouldn't blame-- I think it would be
too quick to blame the Islamic State for
desensitizing people. DEBORAH AMOS: Sure. I can see-- NOAH FELDMAN: A
lot of things have happened in which a
lot of other actors, including the United States,
have been indirectly complicit or in some cases,
directly complicit. DEBORAH AMOS: Sure. KRISTEN STILT: Before we move
on to who's fighting ISIS and how that strategy
is working, Deborah, you had mentioned to
me something earlier about the polio
eradication campaign that I thought was
quite interesting. Do you want to say
something about that? DEBORAH AMOS: Yeah, I do. Look, when you're on
the ground, it all looks a little greyer
than the black and white when I come back here. And one of the UN
officials in Gaziantep explained to me that they are
beginning to open channels with what he called "the
pragmatic wing" of ISIS. And I think that
there are pragmatists within ISIS who probably
had a sip of Johnnie Walker somewhere in their past
and for convenience's sake, now belongs to
this group and are running some of these provinces. And the UN's explanation
is, we talked to the Taliban, so why not? There are practical
reasons to do so. For example, the relatively
successful polio eradication campaign in Northern Syria,
which was quietly carried out-- if you remember, we don't
really hear much about polio after there were reports
of cases in Deir ez-Zor. And the reason for
that is that ISIS cooperated with a
rather large effort. The drugs were brought
in by the WHO, delivered to the Turkish government, who
delivered them to Syrian NGOs on the border. And they have carried out more
than one eradication campaign. ISIS has children. And they wanted this
campaign to succeed. And they made it happen. They even invited
reporters, with some sort of protection clause, to come
and report on this campaign, because they were
very interested in it being a success. Nobody really talks about that,
because you can't actually get any official to admit
that that's how it happened. But it had to happen that way,
because in the places where these volunteers-- and there
were 7,000 of them that were trained on the Turkish
side of the border, all of them Syrians, to go in. They had to have the
permission of ISIS to be able to carry out
those campaigns in the places that they did. NOAH FELDMAN: Acting
like a sovereign state. KRISTEN STILT: Yes. Right. Well, that goes back to your
territory grabbing, Noah. Do you want to jump in on that? Is this a segue for that? NOAH FELDMAN: I
guess I would just say that the most distinctive
thing about ISIS thus far-- about the Islamic State thus
far is how successful it's so far been in
holding territory. The United States
has been bombing now for more than 50 days. Right? There have not been very
many bombing sorties measured by, say, the campaign against
the Taliban, in which I think I read that something like
17,500 individual strikes occurred in the six weeks. I think there have been
about 375, roughly, targets struck by the
US in the last 50 days. So the scale is very different. But the fact remains that,
notwithstanding the scale, if you look up at the
map, there hasn't really been very substantial change. This is not an overstatement. There hasn't been very
substantial change on that map since the president
went on television and announced that he
was going to, quote, "substantially
degrade the capacities of the Islamic State." So what does that tell you? Well, it tells you that the
strategy of holding territory has been fairly
effective thus far. It makes it very difficult
to use bombing against you. If you don't have a lot
of big military machinery, then it's difficult to bomb you. If you're mostly made up
of soldiers who can just go and live among civilians, you
can make it hard to find you. The alternatives, from
the US standpoint, if it wants to reverse this
map or change this map, really, are probably,
realistically, A, to step up the quantity of
the bombing very substantially; B, to take steps to motivate
on-the-ground Iraqi forces other than Iranian-guided,
Shia-dominated militias. And to do that probably
would require some commitment of US ground forces,
probably special forces in advisory capacities. Now, if that sounds
familiar, it should. And it's rather obvious why this
is a big issue for the Obama administration,
which they're really internally struggling with. On the one hand,
if they're seen not to have had any impact--
and the administration's year and a half in
office continues. And at the end of that
period-- my math is off there. It's longer than that. It's two and a half years. But if that continues and no
substantial change occurs, it'll be very costly
to the administration, to the Democratic Party, and
to the president's legacy. So that is reason to
think he will act. On the other hand, there's the
understandable deep opposition, domestically, to the putting
in of any ground forces. So this is a real puzzle. If I had to bet, I
would bet that we would see a significant
stepping up of air attacks, coupled with this limited,
very limited commitment of a very small number
of special forces to see if that makes a
difference, experimentally. It may. But my guess is it
probably wouldn't make a very significant
difference, in which case there's going to be a real
crisis point, I would say, in the policy-making process. DEBORAH AMOS: I think
we're on our way to that. Because stepping up
the bombing steps up the number of
civilian casualties. There's almost no
way around that. Two, the contradictions
in the policy is becoming clearer
almost every day. For the first time,
CENTCOM announced-- I think it was today-- that they
will not tell us who's flying. In the beginning-- the first
day, it was the Saudis. It was the UAE. I take that as trouble. And I think because different
actors want different things. Certainly, the Saudis,
the UAE want clarity on where we're going with Syria. Already, we see that
the bombing in Kobani, which has been the focus so far,
has allowed the Assad regime to step up its bombing campaigns
against the very rebels that the CIA has vetted. 200 sorties in
the last 48 hours, where it's usually 30 to 40. People on the
ground notice this. They notice that the
Kurds are the focus. They notice that those
battalions who have been vetted are under attack. Saudis say to me, we're
watching Syrian television, and Bashar is saying he's
part of this coalition? Yesterday, Damascus
announced that they were helping the
Kurds of Kobani. Of course, they're not. But they know where to
put the knife in and turn it to make all
those contradictions of American policy more
obvious than they have been. Although, I think
for the actors, they are pretty obvious. And I think people are
beginning to respond. KRISTEN STILT: Yeah. So let's pull this apart. The anti-ISIS community is large
and heterogeneous, with lots of diverse interests. And you've already
started to hint at that. You want to go further
with that, Noah? NOAH FELDMAN:
Well, I mean, yeah. But that's a very polite
way of putting it, Kristen. The most significant
anti-ISIS community consists of the
government of Iraq, which is still
Shia-dominated, even after the US pushed
a new prime minister. We still don't have
a substantial Sunni buy-in to that government. It's Bashar al-Assad. And it's necessarily Iran, which
is the most significant backer both of the Iraqi government
and of Bashar al-Assad. The only really reliable
Levantine resource they've had on their
hands is Hezbollah, which is a political
party and militia that operates, more or less, as its
own quasi-state within Lebanon, when it doesn't co-opt
the Lebanese state. Oh, and there's also
the United States. We're on the same side. Oh, and there's also Al Qaeda,
at least Jabhat al-Nusra. But they're also
on the same side, because they're in a fight. So yeah, that's a diverse
set of interests, I suppose. KRISTEN STILT: Where do you want
to put Saudi, Qatar, Turkey? NOAH FELDMAN: So right. So the Gulf, I left out. How could I have left out
the oil-rich Gulf Emirates and the Saudis, who are very
worried that further success by the Islamic State would
be de-legitimate them and would like to do
something about it. Though they would not like
to do so much about it that it generated domestic
anger against them. And that's probably
the real reason they don't want to be
mentioned in the same sentence as any bombing attacks anymore. And of course,
there's also Turkey, which is worried primarily
about destabilization, but secondarily about the
fact that Iraqi Kurdistan has exploited the rise of the
Islamic State very brilliantly. And in the process,
took over Kirkuk, which had been the desideratum
of Iraqi Kurdish foreign policy for the previous decade. And they were successful
in accomplishing it. And it's very
clear that no one's going to do anything about it. Their presence there
is now permanent. And that, of course,
worries Turkey, because they're worried
about Kurdish rise. So it's pretty much
everybody, right? It sounds like
everybody's against them. And there's an
important lesson here. The fact that everybody is
against the Islamic State suggests that in the longer
term, as a geopolitical matter, the Islamic State
won't be there. I'm not saying that's
going to happen in six months, or a
year, or even two years. But the odds, to my
mind, that something like the Islamic State
will still exist two and a half or three years from
now seem extraordinarily low. There are just too many strong
interests allied around them, and there aren't enough domestic
interests favoring them. So then you may say, well, why
hasn't it happened already? And the answer there is that
all of these groups that I mentioned, all of their
interests are fairly mild. They have a mild
desire for this regime not to exist, or this
entity not to exist. They have a mild desire
for them not to grow, a mild desire for them
not to de-legitimate. Maybe the Iraqi government
is the one exception, and the fall of Baghdad is maybe
the greatest threat to them. And make no mistake about it,
this slow progress of ISIS remains in the
direction of Baghdad. That's the general direction
where they're headed here. But short of the
fall of Baghdad, I think these other
countries can tolerate it. And they're sort of
feeling it out and trying to figure out how
they're going to operate. So if that sounds incredibly
cynical, what I just said, it was intended to be
incredibly cynical, because I'm trying to describe to you
the actual foreign policies of actual countries. And those are made
in an atmosphere of the utmost cynicism. It's just the way the
world actually is. Maybe it's a terrible thing
that the world is like that. But that is the way
the world, in fact, is. So that's my take on that. And the big winner when
ISIS is gone-- just to be really clear here--
will certainly be Iran. Because at least for
the moment, the position of the United States
is that we would like-- it's not the official
position of the United States. But the president--
let's see how he put it. He said he acknowledged
the inevitable fact that air strikes
on ISIS would be helpful to Bashar al-Assad,
which in Washington-speak is almost like saying, OK, we're
ready to take Bashar back. Better him-- better
increased Iranian dominance in the region, better fuller,
greater power for Hezbollah in Lebanon. Anything's better
than more of this. KRISTEN STILT: Well, can
we be even further cynical and think about shifting
alliances, shifting allegiances, shifting
ideology of ISIS that ends up collaborating with
any of the anti-ISIS elements right now that you've
just spoken about? DEBORAH AMOS: I have a-- KRISTEN STILT: I don't see that. NOAH FELDMAN: Go ahead. I have a view about it. But go ahead. DEBORAH AMOS: I have
a friend who will soon come to this town,
Nadim Shehadi. And he explains the
rise of ISIS by using a Turkish historical moment. He said, under the Ottomans,
you couldn't build a new church, but you couldn't
destroy an old one. And so there is a split in
the Christian community. And so what they decided
to do was build a barn. And inside the barn,
they build a church. And one day they burn down the
barn, and there's the church. And they get to keep it. And he said, that kind
of explains ISIS in Iraq. ISIS is the barn, and the
church is ex-Baathist officers, Sunni tribes, the
Naqshbandis, all these groups who want a new church. They want a split. They want autonomy. They want to be on their own. They want a reasonable
way to take the oil funds. They want what the Kurds have. But they couldn't ask
for it under those names. So ISIS is their
way of speaking. And one day they'll
burn down the barn, and they will be
the heroes in Iraq. The problem with looking at it
this way is as time goes on, the barn and the church
are merging, in some ways. That the guys in
the church don't see how they get there yet. And they're not willing
to burn down the barn. And it's unclear to me
when that will happen. NOAH FELDMAN: It's a
brilliant metaphor. I see what the argument is. It's closely related
to the argument that people made during
the Sunni uprising against the Baghdad government
and against the US occupation. So the argument was
something like this. It's a real domestic uprising
of disenfranchised Sunnis who want their fair shake in
Iraq and aren't getting it. And Al Qaeda is just
along for the ride and is affiliated with them. And people said at the
time, too, quite correctly-- but wait a minute,
they're merging. And in fact, that was the
core of the US strategy. The core of the US
strategy was not just to fight against
the insurgents, but to buy them off
by promising them that they would have a
share in the new Iraq. And it worked. So this is sort of
consistent with the theory. They burned away Al
Qaeda in Mesopotamia and left behind the
Sunni tribes who said they were
entering into a deal, did enter a deal with
the Iraqi government. And the United
States then withdrew. Obama became president of
the United States-- withdrew. And then what happened? Then the Shia government
reneged on the deal. In some way, that's the
opening scene of this movie. The opening scene is that
that deal is reneged upon. Now, it's totally credible
to say that this is just a re-manifestation
of the same thing, that what Sunni sympathy there
is for the Islamic State, especially within Iraq,
is the same people trying to replay the tape,
and this time, do it a little bit better,
and get a more firm promise. It's conceivable. They would then, at
that point, instead of being opposed by the
Saudis and the Gulf states, would be supported by
the Saudis and the Gulf states to counterbalance
the influence of Iran through the Shia
regime in Baghdad. So it's a brilliant theory. And it has some basis
in historical reality. And I think there's
something to it. I don't think it's
right, however. I think that basically,
in this instance, the bus-- I'm going to
switch from your barn to a different metaphor. But the people who
are driving the bus are actually the
Islamic State activists. And there certainly are
some Sunnis living in Anbar who are thinking,
hey, maybe we can use them the way we
used the last insurgency and just get a better
deal this time. I'm sure there are
people who are rationally thinking that way. DEBORAH AMOS: There are. NOAH FELDMAN: Those are
probably the pragmatists who people are talking to. But it's not at all clear
that they have the capacity, actually, to step up and
take those actions here. And the declaration
of a caliphate, and the sovereign-like
behavior, and the trans-border, quasi-sovereign
governance structures will all make it very
difficult for them to pull that off this time. So that's the optimistic story. The story of the barn and the
church is the optimistic story. And it would offer
a plausible story of how this could all end
in a good way, "good way." But it's entirely possible,
and in my view, probable, that it won't be that simple. DEBORAH AMOS: And
ISIS knows very well about the barn and the church. NOAH FELDMAN: Because
they've seen the movie, too. DEBORAH AMOS: Because
they've been in the movie. They were just younger. And they were all
in Camp Cropper and learned all those lessons. It gets harder when you take
the same analogy into Syria. There's only a barn. And it's not clear who
gets to build the church. And that's why everybody is
hesitating, because everybody in the coalition wants to
know who builds the church. Are you going to
let Bashar do it? And if you are, we're out. And that question,
I don't think, has been answered
in Washington yet, about who gets to build it. Because you can
see them hesitating on training the rebels. They've essentially given
up on their program that's been going on for
the last two years, where the CIA vetted
something like 2,000 rebels. That whole program seems to
be in disarray right now, as we're waiting
for the Pentagon. When I was there, everybody
thought, they're coming. We're all going to switch over. It's going to be guys
with shorter hair, but it's going to
be the same idea. And we already know
how to do this. We're getting our TOW missiles. And this is kind
of working for us. But it looks like the
progress towards that strategy has been delayed somehow. NOAH FELDMAN: I completely agree
with you that if right now, we just traded out half
the people in this room with Washington policymakers
and got those people to have a debate about what our policy
should be with respect to who gets to build whatever
the future of Syria's going to look like, I agree
they wouldn't be able to reach consensus, as a subjective,
descriptive matter right now. Nevertheless, it's
my view that-- this is just a
probabilistic judgment. Because as I just
said, the people themselves don't hold this view. I think the decision's
already structurally been made for them. I think the United
States has to opt for Bashar, as a
descriptive matter. I'm not embracing this
as a normative matter. I think it has to happen,
because there's no way that the US government
can tolerate the alternatives
who will be there. We know we can tolerate Bashar. The United States
knows it can tolerate Bashar, because it
has tolerated him. And it tolerated his
father before him. In the same way,
the United States knows that it can tolerate
Iran with respect to Iraq. In the early days of
the US occupation, the idea was that there would
not be an Iraqi-dominated Iraq. That wore off in about
six or eight months. And then it became a plank
of US foreign policy, the acceptance of the reality. So that is something the
United States can accept. It cannot accept, for complex,
political, ideological reasons, and also for pragmatic reasons--
it can't accept the long-range capacities of a state like
the Islamic State to function, not in Iraq, not in Syria. So that means, in my
mind, that de facto, the United States has
already decided for Bashar, though we don't
know we've done it. KRISTEN STILT: And there's no
third alternative in Syria. DEBORAH AMOS:
Which means we will have instability for
the next 20 years. NOAH FELDMAN: That depends. It depends on how violently the
United States responds to this and whether the United States,
in effect, destroys not just the Islamic State but
other rebel groups, or turns off the plug and
allows Bashar to do it. KRISTEN STILT: To take over. All right. We have to take some questions. DEBORAH AMOS: That's cynical. NOAH FELDMAN: Questions. KRISTEN STILT: We have
to take some questions. Do we have a plan? Or shall I just--
let's just start-- we'll just go back and forth. Let's start over here. And can you use the microphone
on your seat, please? AUDIENCE: Thank you,
guys, for presenting. Our question is regarding the
Free and [INAUDIBLE] Coalition. You guys mentioned
that [INAUDIBLE] the Free Syrian Army
[INAUDIBLE] ISIS. And my question's
regarding that. Essentially, what would
it take to empower them, to legitimize them? What would be the turning
point for a Syrian army? AUDIENCE: Please
repeat the question. NOAH FELDMAN: The
question was, what would be the turning point
for the Free Syrian Army in the good sense? What could make them into an
effective and organized force? Well, in the past,
before the summer, basically, it
would have required substantial coordination among
the leadership of the groups and the exclusion of
Jabhat al-Nusra, the Nusra Front, which is the
Al Qaeda affiliate. At which point,
there would have been some chance for significant
foreign military assistance. And that was close to happening. And I'm not sure whether the
blame should be put entirely on the Free Syrian
Army's disorganization or entirely on the Obama
administration's unwillingness, ultimately, to take the risk
of using the Free Syrian Army. Because the worry
was-- let's say we back the Free Syrian Army
and we bring down Bashar. And then we get the Islamic
State or Jabhat al-Nusra. That was the worry, of
a two-stage process. So arguably, no matter how
organized they had been, the US still wouldn't have
intervened on their behalf. That said, they were
not very well organized and didn't do a good job of
sending a unified image that excluded the people
the US wanted excluded. So I'm not blaming
them, but I'm also not giving them a free pass. Now I don't see a route
for them, to be honest. And what's more, they're
feeling-- they get it. And so first of all, they see
the bombing as pro-Bashar, which in effect, even
if not in intent, it is. And they're not happy about it. And they also see the
US support evaporating. So I mean, I think
they know the score. And so they're going to be
yet another group of people in the region who are
convinced that the United States backs you and
then lets you go. Big shock. I mean, what's amazing
is that anyone ever thinks we're not
going to do that. DEBORAH AMOS: I would
argue that there is a Free Syrian Army,
battalion by battalion. They're the people who have
stood in the way of the Assad regime completely
taking over in Aleppo. And in fact, in the
last six to nine months, they have done relatively well. They have made gains
in Deraa, in the south. They have held on to some
of the suburban cities around Damascus. They've managed to hang on
to Aleppo against all odds. And part of the reason
they were able to do that is because they were
getting TOW missiles. And they had figured
out how to do it. And they were under
enormous stress, because they were
fighting on two fronts. They were fighting
ISIS at the same time they were fighting the regime. That was not easy. NOAH FELDMAN: As they
still are in Aleppo. DEBORAH AMOS: As they
still are in Aleppo. And they have moved ISIS out of
a town called [? Ma'arrat, ?] which is on the way in to-- that
was very strategic for them. And they beat ISIS there, who
brought in American tanks. So for the first time,
we have American weapons on the FSA side hitting American
weapons on the ISIS side. And that happened,
like, six weeks ago. I agree with Noah. I think they understand
that they are just not going to be
in this equation. And they can't
understand why not. We're the guys who started
the fight with ISIS. We did it last year. We said directly that we're
going to take them on. And still, they got no help. And they got no
help, because I think that the American strategy is
even a little bit more cynical. And that is, the
American strategy always was, we will help the
rebels just enough to force Bashar to
the negotiating table. That is such an impossible
strategy to calibrate. And they didn't get it right. They never got it right,
because they never could give them just
enough to frighten Bashar. Because he always had
something in his pocket-- first Hezbollah, the
Iranians, the Russians. Then we saw Iraqi Shiite
militias coming in. There was always a
new thing that he could do to sort of
keep that balance, where he wasn't frightened. He wasn't forced
to go to Geneva. NOAH FELDMAN: Don't forget
the chemical weapons, too. DEBORAH AMOS: Yes. And so you could never support
them enough and make sure they didn't win. They were not allowed to win. And I really don't
know what happens now. I think that Noah's right. This is another moment of deep
cynicism from those people who have lost so much, hoping
they would get what Kobani-- those people
weren't even vetted. We dropped weapons on them. That must be amazing
for them to watch. NOAH FELDMAN: Can I just add
one very quick point on this? Because we haven't talked about
Kobani very much, and maybe we shouldn't spend
too much time on it. But just to mention one fact. The US approach now seems
to be very crisis-driven. It's very news
cycle crisis-driven. So in tactical, military
terms, what you would say is that the initiative
is still with ISIS. Despite 50 days of US
bombing, the initiative is still on the ISIS side. And Kobani is just
an example of that. Suddenly, you have a town that
looks like it's going to fall, a lot of people might die. Boom, global attention. Boom, weapons. Boom, literal bombing. It's not the way you want to
fight a war in a perfect world. Believe me, the US
military doesn't want to be fighting
the war in this way. DEBORAH AMOS: And
I also would argue it's the power of
the telephoto lens. If Kobani was 25 miles
further inside Syria, we wouldn't be having
this discussion about it. And I saw it. NOAH FELDMAN: Yup. We wouldn't be seeing it. Very true. That's true. That's a great point. DEBORAH AMOS: I remember
sitting, watching CNN, and calling my
office, and saying, I can see the ISIS guys climbing
up the hill on live television. It was extraordinary. KRISTEN STILT: The luck
of geography on that one. DEBORAH AMOS: You bet. KRISTEN STILT: What else? Yeah, way in the back, please. AUDIENCE: I have a
comment and a question. So the comment's
on the relationship between ISIS and
Iraqi Ba'athists. I think there's a real
tendency to see it as a marriage of convenience. And that was reflected
in your comments. But I think we're
underestimating the extent to which a younger
generation of Ba'athist officers have fully
integrated into ISIS. And there's two points to this. A lot of different lists of
who the cabinets are in ISIS-- but you look at
that one list, those captured in the home in Mosul. 19 of the 20 of those
guys were Iraqi. And I think they were-- almost
every single last one of them, a former Baathist. Second, those
officers that people talk about, like Izzat
al-Douri and JRTN, those guys are in their 70s. They're an older generation. These guys who are joining
ISIS from the Ba'athists, they're people in their 50s now. They were 35 when the
Saddam regime fell. They're not trying
to seize power again, because they were
never in power. They had careers interrupted. And I think in 10 years,
we're going to look back, and we're going to understand
Saddam's faith campaign, that went on in the '90s,
in much more detail, and see how there was a
generation of younger Ba'athist officers who weren't the
secular Ba'athists of the '50s and '60s, but a different sort
of Ba'athist who probably fits in with more general
currents in the region. But I think the Ba'athist,
that younger officer corps, is much more integrated
into ISIS than we and the US government is
giving them credit for. NOAH FELDMAN: Can I just say,
that's a totally plausible-- oh, sorry, you had
a question, too. Sorry. AUDIENCE: My question
is different. There's this young Saudi who
I talk to online sometimes. And about two months
ago, he told me, you need to understand
that me and everyone who I know in my
neighborhood, we love what ISIS is
doing in Iraq, and we hate what they're
doing in Syria. In Iraq, they're taking the
country back from the Safavids. In Syria, they're causing fitna. Is the bombing that
the US is doing, the strategy that
you're suggesting is going to develop--
is that going to erase, in his mind,
any idea that there's a difference between
these two fronts and it's really a unified
effort now against the West? DEBORAH AMOS: Interesting. NOAH FELDMAN: I just want
to say on the first point that it's a
plausible hypothesis. It's important to know
when you say "Ba'athist," that, as I'm sure you know, 99%
of officers in the Iraqi army were members of the Baath party. You had to be a member of
the party to be an officer. Literally, you had to
get the piece of paper. So you're right. But all you're really saying--
I don't mean this in a bad way-- is that young, Iraqi,
Sunni army officers may be more
ideologically sympathetic to the position of
the Islamic State. And we just don't know
the answer to that. But I think it's a
plausible hypothesis. With respect to the second
point, to ask the question is to answer it. Yes, even people who are
deeply at war with ISIS are unsympathetic
to bombing efforts by the United
States against ISIS. That's been reported
extensively. So yeah, make yourself the
enemy of the United States. And then make our attacks
on you ineffectual, which is where we
presently stand. That's a recipe for generating
substantial sympathy. And the concern that young
Saudis who are online might eventually
feel this sympathy is very worrisome
to the Saudi regime. And that is what
ultimately will lead them to put pressure
on the United States to do something more. And eventually--
it will take time, perhaps-- but eventually,
I don't really believe that the
Islamic State is going to be permitted to
continue to exist in this form. DEBORAH AMOS: Although his
point about the young Saudi is also reflected in
the Saudi government. They certainly
have-- they wouldn't couch it in those terms. And they don't like what
they're doing in Iraq. But they certainly
are disturbed, would never support Bashar
being the church builder once ISIS goes. And so I don't know how the US
government squares that circle. Turkey has the same problem. Turkey is not going to
join this coalition. They're just not, until America
answers the question, what are you going to
do about Bashar? And if they get
the wrong answer, I really don't know where
their politics goes. KRISTEN STILT: Great. Sorry. Please, go ahead. MIKE: Thank you very much. My name is Mike, from China. And I'm very concerned about
these foreign fighter issues, because fact one,
Resolution 2178 criminalized the
foreign fighters coming from different
parts of the world. Fact two, Canadian Parliament
has been recently attacked. So my question is threefold. What is actually the role
played by foreign fighters from Canada, from European
countries, in this fight? Second, what is the
deep root for that? Why are young Muslims
coming from different parts of the world coming
to this battlefield? And third, what is our strategy
towards the foreign fighters? Thank you. NOAH FELDMAN: Well,
it's a little soon to know what practical, tactical
role the foreign fighters are playing. They're bodies. And over time, they
could learn to fight. And there's no better
way to learn combat than by being in combat. So they may turn into
an important part of the fighting force. We just don't know that yet. On the ideology point, this is
in some way one of the biggest questions you
could possibly ask. And it's a hugely
important question. Why are the foreign
fighters coming? And I don't want to offer some
universal mono-causal answer, because it would be too simple. But I do want to say
that a factor that doesn't get enough
emphasis, I think, in our discussions of this
topic, especially in the West, is that there is a
powerful human impulse to want to be an
agent of history and not just an object
of historical forces. And one of the appeals of
ISIS, of the Islamic State, is that it is
presenting itself as one of those agents of history. It's doing stuff. It's taking territory. It's forming an entity, or
trying to form an entity. And that's
tremendously attractive if one has a feeling
in one's own life that one isn't affecting
the course of history, but one is merely being
acted upon by other forces. And that, I think--
of course, that's complexly intermingled
with religion. And it's complexly intermingled
with senses of alienation, perhaps, in some cases. I don't mean to undercut
the other factors or forces. But I just want to
emphasize that element is one we don't
hear enough about. DEBORAH AMOS: I agree. I talked to a guy that I
met a number of years ago, who was at a future
Muslim leaders-- he was an imam in
a London mosque. He now is working for
the British government to interview Brits who come
back from Syria, to try to figure out, are
you a terrorist? Or do we let you out, because
they can arrest everybody. And he said to me, look, in the
1990s, I went to Afghanistan. He's a Salafist. Went to Cambridge. He's a scientist,
very honorable guy. He said it was a romance. I grew up my whole life
knowing about jihad. And that was a pursuit that I
could carry out in Afghanistan. And in 1990, the
British government was perfectly fine with that. And he came home and
went about his life. And he said, I would
have gone to Bosnia, except I was getting
married that year. But all of my friends did. Yet again, it was fine with
the British government. Many, many people
went and came home, integrated back
into their lives. And it was a pursuit of
this romantic notion, a religious obligation of going. And you already are seeing
stories of some British Muslims who arrive, don't
like what they see, are trying to get back out. So I agree with Noah. I think this is a whole
new phase of study for all of you in
the universities to figure this out,
on what is the appeal and how has social media
changed all of that. And I think that we really
need to know the answers of why do two Somali girls from
the middle of America get on a plane and get
stopped in Germany? How did that happen? KRISTEN STILT: Great. Another question. Yes, right here. AUDIENCE: Do you think
that the beheadings of American
journalists could have been a provocation,
that they wanted [? to bring them ?]
to the United States, to be seen as the defending
Islam against the United States and using our involvement
as a recruiting tool? DEBORAH AMOS: There are
some people who think that. There apparently is-- and
you may know much more about this than I do, Noah. But there are prophecies. There is a town that ISIS
has taken quite recently. I think it's called Dabiq. It's in Syria. It is where the final
battle is to take place. They named their online
magazine for the town. And there are people in
the jihadi business who argue that that
is what they want. They want the final showdown. They want it to
happen in that town, because they think
they cannot lose. And they are trying
to draw us in. KRISTEN STILT: Someone else? Yes, in the green back there? AUDIENCE: I just have a question
about the future of ISIS and its effect on
the global field. I was just wondering if
it would have any relation to other terrorists,
like the Boko Haram. Would there be a possibility
of an international coalition? Or would this kind of situation
be happening somewhere else in the globe, as more and more
of these [? ideas ?] come out of this country and
as with social media, we view them more and more? NOAH FELDMAN: Well, as
we know from the '90s, you could be groups
far away geographically without much common
interest, the way Al Qaeda and the Taliban were. And you could find
yourselves in bed together. There are circumstances where
cooperation can be useful. So it's not inconceivable that
if ISIS remains functioning for a while, they
might develop ties. The most common way
for that to happen is people come and
fight with ISIS. And then they go home. And then you have
human connections, which are obviously, by far,
the best form of connections to develop. So that's conceivable. It's one of the main reasons
why US foreign policy won't ultimately be able to
tolerate the presence of a state-like entity with
this functioning ideology. The Taliban were similar. The US was completely able
to tolerate the Taliban. In fact, the US played a role,
through the Pakistani ISI in the creation of the
Taliban, until Bin Laden was there and then acted
on the United States. Until that point, the
US was more or less OK with the Taliban. And post-that
situation, it becomes very difficult for the
US to tolerate this, partly because of
its capacity to build ties and make connections. KRISTEN STILT: Yes, please. AUDIENCE: Can you comment on
the ideological purity of ISIS and whether it's a
false front, or if it's like other organizations,
like Boko Haram, where it's more of just a front to actually
go and do whatever they want, and how that's going to affect
everything in the long run? Thank you. NOAH FELDMAN: Well, look,
ideological purity-- it's a great idea in theory. I've just never actually
seen it in practice. Human beings are complicated. And we're motivated by
lots of different factors-- psychological factors,
ideological factors, economic factors, you name it. So there is a question
of, to what extent people in a movement
are aware of the content of the ideology they're
supposed to hold. So the early Taliban
were an example of this. If you asked them
what they were, they thought that they
were acting as Islamists. But a lot of the time, they
were acting on ideology that you could
describe sociologically as really Pashtunwali,
Pashtun local culture and tribal society. They didn't know that. Boko Haram is not a totally
dis-analogous situation, where just the level
of Islamic knowledge is very low among most of
the Boko Haram participants. That's probably less true,
to a broad extent, of ISIS. I'm not saying that
there any prominent ulama in the leadership. So far we don't know of any. But it's probably
only a matter of time until some important
ulama who have scholarly and ideological
qualifications attach themselves
to the movement. They might be better,
not more knowledgeable, about the content
of Islamic teaching. But I'm not sure that
one could describe their ideology as
more or less pure. Now, we heard
earlier about people who might not have
been attracted to the organization for
ideological reasons. And those people will
also join an organization when it gets big. So the bigger an organization
is, the less made up of a narrow group of
ideologically pure people it can realistically be. Until ultimately, you rise
to being, actually, a state. And at that point, people
have a huge range of beliefs. But they participate,
because it's the state and you don't have much choice. KRISTEN STILT: Well,
Deb, earlier, you had hinted-- maybe it was just
to me before we met here-- that the school curriculum
had come in, and a lot of it was from Saudi, borrowed either
in thought or the textbooks themselves. I'm not sure if you
know the details. To what extent is this a
borrowing of a doctrine? DEBORAH AMOS: Well, this
is the religious teaching, is taken a whole cloth
from the Saudi curriculum. And it is minority-intolerant. It is Salafi. So that shouldn't be a surprise. They have jettisoned
all art and music. It is not that dissimilar from
the Saudi education system. NOAH FELDMAN: With the
all-important element that, at least in the
Saudi ideological picture, in the Wahhabi ideological
picture, all acts of jihad must be authorized by
the legitimate ruler. Now, maybe they're going
to say the same and just that they have the
legitimate ruler. They might be able to do that. If so, that would be
an interesting twist. KRISTEN STILT: Do
you know if they've thought this out, if their
online magazine, which, yes, anyone can go and download
them, PDFs in English. Is that something that
they've worked out or tried to talk about in those
kind of publications? DEBORAH AMOS: I don't think so. NOAH FELDMAN: If so,
I haven't seen it. DEBORAH AMOS: I haven't seen it. NOAH FELDMAN: Kristen,
how are we for time? KRISTEN STILT: Yeah,
I think we have time for one last question. And that'll be it. Strangely enough, all
the hands are men. It's not a gendered topic. All right. Back here. NOAH FELDMAN: No, there's
a woman right there. KRISTEN STILT: Yeah, we got one. Dorothy, please go ahead. DOROTHY: I was wondering if you
guys could speak a little bit more about the military
strategy of ISIS. I mean, is the assessment and
exploitation of the security vacuums done on an ad hoc basis? Or is there some
larger strategic vision that we can see
or-- and especially moving into the future,
is there some way that we can make predictions
about where ISIS will move in terms of their
territorial takeovers? DEBORAH AMOS: I'll speak
just more specifically to their strategy,
which moves them out of the sort of terrorist
category and into insurgents. They have perfected
this swarming strategy. And that is how they
take over towns. So when they wanted to
take over Tal Afar, which is in Northern
Iraq-- actually, it is true that in Mosul, the army
[? threw ?] down tools and ran. But in Tal Afar, they had
one of the best commanders that works in the Iraqi Army. And he did hold
for about six days. But what happens is
they surround the town. And they just come
from all sides. They have perfected the swarming
technique and suicide bombing attacks. So when we talk to the
military people in Mosul, they said, oh, man,
they were brilliant. That first day, there was
just a string of car bombs all over Mosul. And that's what scared the army. They kind of went, whoa, we
haven't seen this before. And of course, their
leadership ran away. So these conscript
guys said, we're just not really doing this. The second thing that I
know about their strategy is it is not centralized. So if a local commander says,
Kobani, OK, let's all go do that. And somebody else says,
yeah, but you know what? We want to do Anbar. They can manage, not
only two, but think about all the fronts
they're fighting on. They're fighting
the FSA in Aleppo. They're fighting in Kobani. They're fighting in Anbar. They're fighting
all over the place. And except for Kobani,
because America tipped the balance
a bit, they're winning in every place
they're fighting. NOAH FELDMAN: So what Deborah's
describing is tactics. Their strategy is
targets of opportunity. That is the strategy
at this point. And it's hold. They have not yet had to
concede substantial pieces of territory. My guess is if they
were forced to, they would fall back
rather than stand and lose a huge number of
fighters in a fight, because that would be consistent
with the target of opportunity strategy. But that remains to be seen. But that would be the rational
strategy for them to follow. And they've been pretty rational
so far, with respect to that. The one thing I
will say is if you look at the map, again,
what makes it consistent is targets of opportunity. And it's also mostly
not densely settled. There are bits and part of this,
if they expand within Iraq, which will become
more densely settled. And as they go down in
Anbar on that line that runs from Haditha to
Fallujah to Baghdad, that's a very
densely settled area. That's going to require
different tactics. And it's also going to
require different thinking about their strategy. The biggest question
facing them is, do they make a play for Baghdad? My guess is not right
now, because there's too much to be lost. And the odds of success
are still relatively low. DEBORAH AMOS: But they
can menace the airport. NOAH FELDMAN: But they
can menace the airport, and that's a good strategy. Good tactics. KRISTEN STILT: All right,
we're just at time right now. So thank you, Deb. Thank you, Noah, very much. Thank you, everyone, for coming. DEBORAH AMOS: Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
