Blowback - S1 Bonus - "Our Man In Baghdad feat. Dahr Jamail"

Episode Date: August 18, 2020

In this first bonus episode, Noah talks to author and journalist Dahr Jamail, one of the few journalists who covered the occupation of Iraq, on the ground, without being embedded with the US military or its allies. Dahr is the author of “Beyond the Green Zone,” “The Will To Resist,” and “The Mass Destruction of Iraq.”Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It's a disaster. It is not a disaster. Oh, okay. It's not a disaster, all right? She's not going to the cop. She's not going to tell a living soul. You want to know why? One word.

Blow back. Welcome to Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And I guess I should say welcome back to Blowback, because this is the first of several bonus episodes we're going to be putting out. Yeah, we've been blown away by the response to the show. You people really seem to like it.

So we've actually been able to make bonus episodes that we're going to be releasing over the next few weeks. Yeah, we were genuinely pleasantly surprised at how many people have listened to the show, how many people have signed up to listen to the show. And so we thought, you know, we should give something back to the fans with these bonuses. So the first episode that we're going to be releasing as a bonus is a conversation that I had with the journalist Dar Jamal. Dar was one of the few reporters on the ground in Iraq at the time of the invasion in 2003 and for a little bit afterwards who was not embedded in the military, meaning that he was not embedded with the troops. He had an independent perspective and insight

into what was happening on the ground and the chaos that was unfolding. Dar's work offered a poignant contrast to the kinds of perspectives that people were getting. getting piped in through corporate media during the time of the war. He's written multiple books on Iraq, including titles like Beyond the Green Zone, the Will to Resist, Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the mass destruction of Iraq, the disintegration of a nation. His latest book is called The End of Ice, and it's about climate catastrophe. All right, let's go.

So what's your news? My news. What is my news? My news is that I've just got this hunch that everything's going to turn out okay in Iraq. Iraq? Yeah, well, obviously everyone seems to have this massive downer on the whole thing, but I say it ain't over till it's over, baby.

I guess the first question that I would want to ask then, just to sort of start this off, was, you know, how did you come to report on Iraq? And what were your first set of experiences on the ground there? I had a rather unconventional way of coming into being a war reporter in that I was actually living in Alaska and working on Denali first as a mountain guide and then by the time the Iraq War was gearing up,

I was working as a volunteer with the National Park Service doing rescues on Denali. And I had done a little bit of freelance journalism but didn't characterize myself as a journalist at all, but was like so many other Americans, was rather horrified during the buildup to the war, watching the propaganda by the U.S. government, the selling of the war under the false pretenses of Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, which, you know, if you were reading any

independent media or alternative media or international media, you knew that this was just flat out lies in addition to what the UN weapons inspectors were showing, which was there was nothing to corroborate these lies. It was just utter propaganda used to justify a war for oil and I was completely outraged and I realized that well this was a information crisis that people in the United States needed access to better information and I was in my 20s I was very outraged and had a lot of fire in my belly and just decided well I'm going to go over there and write about it myself because I was so outraged and so angry at the abject failure of the mainstream media in the U.S. And so I basically figured out how to get into Baghdad and I flew into Jordan

and then got a ride in a car into Baghdad and found a hotel where a lot of internationals were staying. And then basically just started riding, just literally going out into the streets each day and chasing stories and listening to what people were saying. And I started blogging basically. I didn't even call it that at the time. I was literally just crafting dispatches and then sending them out each night to about 130 people, mostly friends back in Alaska. About two weeks into it, someone at the hotel I was staying at said, hey, well, they saw what I was doing and suggested, why don't you start posting on this website called Electronicirac.net, which is a sister site to Electronic Intifada, the site started by Ali Abunima.

And it was basically just people writing from on the ground in Iraq, not even journalists, just people writing about what was actually happening. And so I started posting my material there, at which point then I started to get picked up by BBC World Service to start doing some radio work. And then that's how I started to work as a journalist. And when did you get to Iraq? It was November of 2003. So it was about seven months after the fall of Baghdad. So if this is after, this is months into the invasion, you're really into, well into the occupation, and I guess Jerry Bremer's term there, correct? Exactly.

So what was it like when you hit the ground? What did you see? It was chaos. You know, the first thing that struck me going in is we crossed the border from Jordan into Iraq and there was technically a border station you did technically have to go in and have somebody stamp your passport but it was utter chaos it was just this crowded scene of a building everybody in there crowding up towards these counters smoking trying to get stamps but there was no rhyme or reason to anything and there was like one or two guys back there stamping passports there

was no visas required there was no anything required It was just chaos. And we went in and we got our visa stamped and then we got back in the car and drove the rest of the way into Baghdad. And we got into the city and, you know, there was hardly any electricity. So most of the traffic lights weren't working. The streets were horribly congested, just heinous traffic jams. The occasional U.S. military patrol going by, tanks, humvies, what have you, just rolling down the streets. and just utter chaos.

There was almost no functional infrastructure because essentially what the U.S. did was come in, completely take out the government and replace it with, they call it the Coalition Provisional Authority, the CPA, which was basically a bunch of expat Iraqis. Most of them hadn't lived in Iraq for decades. Some had never lived in Iraq.

So they were not well loved or respected by the Iraqi people. putting that extremely diplomatically. Right, yeah. We, the CPA and its many blunders and missteps and total inexperience and lack of expertise on Iraq is something that we actually talk about in our episode, Year Zero. When you describe, I guess, you know, the way that this chaos kind of manifested, I mean, what were some, you know, specific encounters or experiences that you had towards the beginning

of your time there, something that could, I guess, describe like the just state of chaos in Baghdad at that moment and in Iraq more widely? like I had mentioned, there was very, very little electricity and what they did have was very sporadic. So imagine us, you know, trying to do guys like you and me are a lot of people listening who are so heavily dependent upon electricity and the internet. So imagine if there's no rhyme or reason to our power situation, you're going to have maybe four to six hours a day, but it might come 30 minutes at 2 p.m. and then 15 minutes at 3 p.m. and then and then nothing for six hours and then two hours in the middle of the night.

I mean, that's what it was literally like. So how do you work? How do you keep your food in a refrigerator or a freezer? So just really basic things that those of us that haven't had to live with that type of situation, but then think about how do you live in that situation, let alone if you have, if there's someone with a medical condition or elderly who are really dependent upon some consistent electricity for medical purposes, how to hospitals function.

So this was a big problem. And then, of course, the same with water, that people couldn't get big parts of even the capital city of Baghdad couldn't get regular potable, safe water to drink. So that was a huge issue too. Like I said, there was already a security problem where, you know, it was November, December, 2003, So things haven't really started to get violent in a widespread way yet, but you could kind of feel the bottom starting to drop out. They were already increasing numbers of attacks on the U.S. military, and there was already a pretty large presence of different Iraqi militias starting to assert themselves across different parts of Baghdad. So there was already a certain amount of that tension in the air.

And then the other thing that was immediately apparent was, which was pretty amazing in that Sy Hirsch's big story breaking about the torture happening in Abu Ghrae prison, one of the first things I ran into on the streets of Baghdad was people talking about, hey, my brother just got detained and he's in this U.S. military camp and he's being tortured. Or we know already they're putting people in Abu Ghraib prison and very bad things are happening there. So one of the first stories I came across on the ground, and this was in late November 2003, was a pretty widespread knowledge that the U.S. military was capturing and torturing Iraqis. Right. Yeah. So the Syhurst story for the New Yorker revealing those

horrors came out. I think it was the end of March, beginning of April 2004. So you were on the ground in November 2003, and you already had some idea of the kind of atrocities, I guess, being committed in prisons and just the torture that American authorities and their allies were committing. I'm also kind of curious, I guess, more generally about the kinds of the relationship between American soldiers and the American authorities themselves and everyday Iraqis. Could you say a little bit about that? Yeah, there really was already a pretty standoffish relationship, we could say. You know, the general sentiment, you know, again, this was like seven months into the occupation, things hadn't completely gone off the rails yet as far as violence.

And most Iraqis were very clear, like, look, we know that this is a war for oil. We, we, but we were hopeful that the Americans would fulfill even a little bit of their promises of better infrastructure, a better lifestyle, because we don't really have anything to lose. Look, we just suffered years of a dictatorship. the harshest economic sanctions in modern history, what do we have to lose? I mean, if the Americans even just fulfill a quarter of their promises, most of us are going to come out of this, the better for it. So there was still at least that hope, a remnant of that in the air,

but that was quickly going away where, you know, the, you know, people were saying, look, America's this hyper-advanced, extremely rich country with this very advanced military, and they made a lot of, all these big promises, why can't they even keep the lights on here? I mean, even Saddam did a better job of that for us. And that's what we, that's what was already sort of the discussion on the street was this really pretty widespread frustration that, hey, America, like if, why can't they fulfill even a little bit of these promises to take care of us? And instead, they've just come in and literally destroyed the country. There's no jobs. Nothing's working. And things seems to

seem to just be getting worse by the day. And so that really set up this kind of oppositional attitude towards American, you know, then you'd see soldiers in patrols going down the streets, and then the green zone was already set up. And it was difficult, if not impossible, for Iraqis, most Iraqis, to get into the green zone. So there was already a very sort of standoffish relationship between Iraqis and the American military and the Americans in the green zone. I guess one of the other things that I'm also kind of, you know, you mentioned a little bit earlier

that I think I'd like to come back to is this, you know, the emerging role of militias. Because Americans at home didn't really have an idea or a really honest conception of what those were because the Americans were just insisting that, oh, no, these are just vestiges of Saddam's regime. What was the reality? Oh, the reality was that the militias started to step in and do things. for the Iraqi people that were filling a really large void that were left by, as I just described, the Americans doing nothing. So militias were coming in and starting to provide security and sometimes even basic needs in some infrastructure in places like Satter City, which was

the large section of Baghdad, which is essentially a Shia slum, that Mukdad al-Sadr, his Madi army came in and started to assert itself there. And then you had other parts of Baghdad where the Bada organization, with basically an Iranian-backed militia that was coming in and starting to assert itself. So these militias, because the Americans had this really abject failure in coming in and really providing real basic infrastructure services as well as fulfilling some of their promises, providing some jobs, let alone just basic water electricity security. That was the thing that I kept hearing over and over from people is like, look, we just want what everybody else wants, just basic infrastructure and especially security, and we don't have

it. So if there's this huge void, and then you have these militias coming in and starting to fill that void. And that's what I started to see. I mean, one of the things that occurs to me also at this moment is, you know, you're describing the way these militias stepped up and the sort of very clear and obvious role that they would come to fill as, you know, also sort of like, you know, civil society institutions, stepping up and filling the void that had been left in the wake of the American invasion. And American officials couldn't have been blind to this. They had to have seen in some fashion that this is what was taking shape. Based on what you saw are the conversations you had with those people. I mean, what was it that, like, what was their response to seeing

these kinds of groups emerge? Like, how did they articulate it to you? Yeah, it was, it was really mixed. A lot of people were, were very, very dismayed by it, that, you know, they, they didn't like the fact that all of a sudden, you know, Baghdad itself and then, you know, other parts of Iraq were literally becoming increasingly fragmented. I mean, there was some of that already at play. You know, Kurdistan, of course, already existed. and then it was already pretty clear that, you know, the Shia were largely in control of the South. But there wasn't really overt sectarianism that existed. And it was pretty well known even that early in the occupation that the Americans were really exploiting this as a divide and conquer strategy.

I literally let one man who was a religious sheikh in Bakuba, a smaller city just outside of Bagheaval. Baghdad to the northeast. And he said, look, one of the first things the Americans did when they came here in my town was they literally showed up and said, okay, we're going to have, we want all the tribal and religious sheiks to show up on this day. And so everybody showed up and they said, okay, we literally, the Americans literally set up two tents. And they said, we want all the Shia to go to this tent and all the Sunni to go to the other tent. So they literally started dividing people and then turning them against one another as a strategy early on in the occupation. And that started to make itself known across parts of Baghdad.

So on the one hand, you had some people who were very much ready to kind of fall into those lines and start supporting one particular militia or one particular sectarian leader over another. But then you had really a broader general swath of the population from what I saw that didn't want that at all that said, look, we're one country, we're one people. Like, I grew up on a street, I didn't know if my neighbor was Sunni or Shia, just like you wouldn't walk down your street and ask someone, hey, are you Catholic or Protestant or whatever. It just, you know, we're all from the same country. And but instead, you saw this narrative really inserted by the occupation forces where, are you Sunni or Shia? In Iraqis, most that I spoke with were pretty flabbergasted by that. Like, look, we didn't have this sectarianism. This sectarianism was brought in with the occupation. As these sectarian divides deepened, what were some of the notable ways in which you saw that? Well, another really influential person was the grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sastani, who was heavily Iranian-backed. And so the Bada organization, that militia, also heavily backed by Iran, they played a very, very large role.

And sometimes they were sort of, in affiliation with Mukdad al-Sadr and his Madi army, but other times they were in opposition that Mqtad al-Sadr was much more allied with the Iraqi people, didn't have nearly as much, sometimes not much at all Iranian influence on his thinking and his policies. So there was that happening as well, but really it was complicated at the same time Because I remember if we start getting into the spring of 2004 when Paul Brimmer, the head of the CPA, you know, basically puts out a hit on McDade al-Sadr, saying, look, we're going to come after him. He's an enemy of the occupation. And, of course, that ignited the battles between his militia, the Madi Army against American forces across Baghdad, but particularly in some of the areas south of Baghdad.

And then at the very end of March, when already things were tense in Fallujah, and then the attack was carried out, and the four Blackwater Security mercenaries were killed and hung from the bridge in Fallujah. And then, of course, the Americans started preparing to assault Fallujah. And so we get into April, and we literally have outright warfare happening between the Madi Army and the U.S. military down in Baghdad and south of Baghdad. And then in Fallujah, an outright assault by the U.S. military on a largely Sunni, very, very conservative city. And it gets complicated in that, I know for a fact that we had the Madi Army pledging solidarity with the people of Fallujah and the Mujahideen and Fallujah who were fighting against the Americans. And in some instances, even donating goods and services and weapons. And then vice versa, we had, we had. We had Mujahideen helping and training Madi army people in Baghdad and south of Baghdad

who were fighting against the U.S. forces. So we literally had solidarity happening between large swaths of the Sunni and Shia populations fighting against the Americans. So it was both of these, you know, on the one hand you had sectarianism that was being forced upon them by the occupation forces and then for a brief period there you have a really a unifying solidarity happening in opposition to the occupation forces. Right. And this is actually, it's actually that exact point is something that I do bring up in the main show and is something that I find like totally astonishing and really under discussed, which also makes me,

brings me to another question, which is, you know, at this moment, so let's say we're in mid to late 2004 and Jerry Bremer's time at the CPA is coming to a close or has already ended. what is the gulf like in what the american public knows and sees and what the government is telling them and what you were seeing on the ground in iraq like what was the distance between those two things at that time well uh i think you know at that point i think the bush administration up until spring 2004 for when violence really detonated across central and southern Iraq, there was really still the dominant narrative being pushed by the Bush administration that the Iraqi people were going to do better for this and the war was ended. Bush had done his ridiculous propaganda stint of lying

on the aircraft carrier anchored off the coast of San Diego declaring mission accomplished, right? And it was very shortly after that where things literally exploded across Iraq and then stayed that way for a significant period for years, basically. So that was one huge gap in the narrative being spun back here in the U.S. That things were somehow resolved and Iraqis were going to live happily ever after and things were stable. And in fact, the opposite was happening. Things were completely falling apart. And violence was escalating. dramatically and was was just about to completely detonate and then another thing was there was a pretty

well alongside that sort of a sub-narrative that there wasn't really that much violence and the reality is i remember attacks on u.s forces were happening dramatically they literally i think from if memory serves from like january 2004 there were somewhere between 40 and 60 attacks a day on occupation forces, by that March, it was two to three times that number. There were some days it was pushing 180 attacks a day on U.S. forces. And this is even up right until Fallujah detonated in early April of 2004. So those were, I think, really, really key differences of people back home here, literally having no idea how intense things were becoming in Iraq. I remember one experience where I had been in Iraq from April, May, June of 2004 was literally in Fallujah during part of that siege in April of 2004 and then went into Bakuba about six weeks after that during another siege and just open warfare, just wide scale war happening in parts of Iraq.

And then I remember coming back home and then flying into New York City and walking around and it was just business as usual. is people had no idea of just overt warfare that was happening that their military was engaged in. And I remember that was a dizzying experience for me as a reporter. And one of the things that, you know, I wanted to sort of ask about this also was that the military and the press had kind of a strange relationship at this moment that we didn't quite get into in the show, but where a lot of the reporters who were being sent over and who were covering the war were embedded reporters who kind of saw what the military wanted them to see and what the Pentagon would allow them to see. And you were not in such a position. And I wanted to know

what was the kind of distance between the story, you know, what was the difference between the kinds of stories you told and the kinds of stories they told and how the military played around in the middle there? That's, I'm really, that's a great question because I think that really gets down into the details of how this the narrative being spun by the military and by the corporate press and the U.S. government,

how there was such a giant gulf between that narrative and what was actually happening on the ground. I mean, that really gets into the quick of it, which is that most Americans aren't aware of the fact that the embed program that was really set up and

refined during this war in Iraq that started in 2003, that was set up as a means of information control by the U.S. government and the U.S. military, where they literally brought in reporters and had sort of a pseudo indoctrination process of we're going to bring you in, we're going to teach you basic safety stuff, we're going to put you in a flack jacket and a helmet, we're going to really help you identify with the troops here. P.S., you're going to also be dependent upon them for your safety and your very live. And then you're going to go out with them. Therefore, the military is going to have direct control over what you see, when you see it, and how you see it. And literally

going around with them, that means you're going to have extremely limited interaction with Iraqis. And, I mean, picture it this way. You're an Iraqi person whose country's completely occupied by this violent power. And then you see a patrol come up and there's some reporters there. And you're going to go up and talk, A, are you even going to go up and talk to them with all this military hardware around knowing full well that if we're talking about spring of 2004, there's upwards of 120 to 180 attacks a day on the U.S. military. Most Iraqis were avoiding these patrols like the plague because they didn't want to come into the line of fire from one of these attacks. It was also well known that the U.S. military was in a shoot first, ask questions later role to save their own lives. that they were scared, they were being attacked, they were completely lopping all Iraqis into the terrorist mindset of like, hey, well, they're Iraqi, therefore they're going to be a terrorist

and they're going to come attack us. So they're going to come attack us. So let's just shoot first and ask questions later. So all that is to say it does not predispose Iraqis to go give an honest reflection to a journalist for CNN who's embedded with the US military. with me and a few other of my colleagues who were running around independently on the ground with just an Iraqi interpreter, no helmet, no flackjack, talking directly to the Iraqi people, going into their homes, going into hospitals, going into morgue, seeing the bodies.

We were seeing a completely different story. I mean, literally these absolutely different narratives that were happening. And it's very clear and very easy to see why, because of the embed program, people back here in the U.S. were largely getting this hypersanitized, very pro-U.S. military meme and narrative of the occupation, and the reality was exactly the opposite. I mean, one of the things that really kind of offends me, I guess, in particular about this, when, you know, sort of examining it in retrospect is also the way in which these embeds treated these experiences as, you know, like, they also served the purpose of not just like obscuring or the real narrative, but manufacturing a new narrative. You know, it taps a bit into the Vietnam kind of

thing about, you know, well, these soldiers just aren't allowed to fight the way that they want to fight. And it's because Secretary Rumsfeld has a brand new plan for the Pentagon and there aren't enough troops and so on. And it leads into its own, like, you know, a pretty bad place. And actually, onto the question of, you know, more troops. Well, actually, before we get to this thing like the surge, I mean, one thing I did want to ask, though, is that at a certain point, though, the press and the embed program, you couldn't deny that Iraq was just descending into civil war. And so what for you was the moment? And how did you sort of detect or sense this kind of shift from, you know, the burgeoning insurgency fighting occupation forces to like just a full blown out

civil war that envelops the country in 2005 and 2006? Right. It was really, I think, once they had, the elections and I was there reporting on them in January 2005 and you know most Iraqis were aware that these were a sham they shouldn't have been taking place yet the country was completely unstable there was very little infrastructure violence was really out of control and yet we had the sham elections taking place and and to really kind of put a veneer on top of the occupation as though oh here's here's where the U.S. is pulling out out and really literally handing the country over to the Iraqi people.

And everyone knew in Iraq that this wasn't accurate. They knew that it wasn't the time to try to do that. They knew that things were totally unstable and that this was essentially a dividing up of the country handing different parts of it to different powers with different agendas. And I think that really set the stage then of along with the sectarian policy, the promotion of sectarianism that was really brought in as a divide and conquer strategy with the occupation forces, those two things really happening at the same time by January 2005 and then going forward from that point on, really the battle lines were drawn, the country was being divided up, and the sectarianism was really starting

to become effective because when so many people from both sides were already being killed than that bad blood was being sown, that that was now in play, and that was starting to really affect people's thinking and behavior. And so by then, I remember, Al-Odhemia, largely predominantly Sunni part of Baghdad, that was very pro-resistance and anti-occupation. It was divided up and had its own security, and people were often even afraid to leave that part of the city. Then you had a Sadr City, which was controlled by the Madi Army,

was the same thing there. It was divided up. Certain parts, you know, Kadamia, which was right across the river from Ottomia, a Shia area, and those areas started clashing in between them. So clearly the sectarianism and the divide and conquer strategy were at play. And then as we went forward from January 2005 onwards, those things only intensified and worsened. So I would say really it was early 2005 was when it was really clear, okay, this country's really divided up in a very violent way. And these fault lines are only expanding. Right. And one of the sort of things I think that also comes out of this moment is that the elections were also this kind of like surreal, you know, as we talk about in the main show, this kind of like surreal moment where everybody

knew that they would not work. And Bush, in fact, was told explicitly by the CIA that no, no, no, this won't do anything and may in fact make things worse. And they went ahead with it anyway. And then you see, obviously, like, things do get worse and worse and worse over, like, the next year to a year and a half or so. And I think at this moment is when, obviously, this is when Bush's approval ratings really begin to sink. And back home, like a sort of sense of malaise and understanding of the war as actually being awful start to sink in. And this is when it's this is uh this is sort of the i guess what people think of as the terminal period of the bush presidency that gets initiated and at the same time though the civil war like it's it's a conflagration

and and and suicide bombings and uh another fallujah battle um like a whole series of events happen and at the end of it there is this strategy of the surge and it's presented as the first big major strategic shift um big i mean it's the first it's the biggest strategic shift um in the course of the war up until that point and they bring out a whole new guy to sell it and david petraeus and so on and i was kind of curious i guess you know just how when it got to the point where they realized they needed something like this new strategy and they and they announced the the surge um which we do discuss more and more deal on the show but i'm sort of specifically curious about the way that they were selling it with Petraeus on the ground in Iraq? How did they make the case on the

ground that this would be an acceptable strategy, both to Iraqis and also to, you know, reporters like yourself? Well, it was, by then it was awash. Like you said, the cat was out of the bag as far. It was so clear that the occupation was really on its heels. It was a dismal failure. The Iraqi people were horrified. By then, you know, the first Lancet report had already come out showing well in excess of 100,000 Iraqi deaths. We knew that the figure was probably already far higher than that. There were mass graves that were dug in Fallujah during and after the November 2004 siege that literally killed more than 5,000 civilians. It was a really horrific situation, and they're bringing in this so-called surge. And on the ground, it was, you know, this was sold back home

here in the United States as, oh, this is going to, we're going to really get this security situation sorted out in Baghdad. And in the ground, it was, again, it was the opposite. You know, that was the narrative being spun back here. But in reality was, Iraqis were acutely aware that all the surge was, was a rehabilitation of a strategy used by Saddam Hussein, who could never himself pacify tribes in anti-regime sentiment. broader swaths of Al-Anbar province. And so what Saddam did was find different tribal leaders who would work with him, funnel them large amounts of cash, and then say, look, keep your guys standing down and let's just have this, maintain this detente. And that's what

he did and that it worked fairly well. And this is why, you know, people in Fallujah, they did not like Saddam Hussein. So, you know, the Bush administration spun Fallujah as being full of Saddam loyalists. In reality, that couldn't have been further from the truth. When U.S. forces rolled into Fallujah, they were actually welcomed. There was no fighting there when the invasion first took place because people were very happy to not have to deal with Saddam Hussein again. But the thing was, is people there and in other parts of Al-Anbar province, they didn't want any part of Saddam Hussein, and they didn't want any part of the occupation either. And so the U.S. employed, you know, rehabilitated this old strategy, found these tribal leaders and then paid them

off. And if they couldn't find someone, for example, like in Fallujah, they could not find anybody to work with them. So they brought in this guy named Sheikh Afan, had some Iraqi blood, but was literally living in Saudi Arabia. They literally brought this guy in, gave him in a ridiculous amount of money. He brought in his own private militia with him, which was a bunch of people, several hundred guys. And I went and interviewed this guy personally and stayed at his house and saw what was going on and was literally there. This is fast forwarding on now well into the surge. I was there in late 2008, early 2009. And this was a guy, I was there literally when a contingent of U.S. Marines showed up and made a very, very large cash payment to this guy.

So you guys have probably talked about on the show how literally tens of millions of dollars in U.S. cash stacks of pallets of $100 bills were being brought into the country to pay off these warlords. And this is one of those guys, and I was at his house when they made one of these payments. And this was a guy who had a $400,000 armored BMW driving around drinking alcohol, going and visiting his various warlord friends around other parts. parts of Al-Anbar. He had mistresses all over the place. I was at his house when they were torturing somebody. These are the types of people that the U.S. were paying off to try to maintain some semblance of so-called security where clearly this is a very tenuous, very temporary situation where you bring in these guys. They have hundreds of their own heavily armed militiamen. But then in time, of course, Iraqi forces, Iraqi resistance forces on the ground started fighting

directly against these guys. So literally it caused even a further fragmentation on the ground in the security situation rather than actually calming things down. I mean, there's another thing sort of embedded in there that I think is also kind of interesting and worth teasing out a bit, which is the same, you know, the Americans were paying off all these people, but these, you know, these warlords were not the only people that were in a sense American, you know, Patsy's clients, however you want to call him. You know, the provisional government of Iraq at that point is in a similar role, just in a bigger way and in a way that, you know, is arguably much more significant because it's obviously pretending to be a government.

And it was under the thumb of al-Maliki. That's right. Yeah. And later. And so I wanted to ask a little bit, you know, if this was the kind of American strategy through these, you know, like maintaining these sort of, you know, detaints with warlords, which obviously does not do much for improving the well-being of Iraq. Iraqis. You know, what was the average, you know, or what was the relationship that Iraqis were developing with this new provisional government that the Americans had set up? Right. It was, it was equally full of animosity. You know, Nuri al-Maliki was hated by most Iraqis, including people like Mqtad al-Sadr and his Madi army and his followers did not like him. Nouri al-Maliki He had stronger ties with Grand Ayatollah Sistani and his followers, but that was still

tenuous at times. I mean, Maliki was reviled, and yet he was essentially, we started calling him a Shia Saddam because he came in. He was using his various militiamen, who by then, another thing that happened was the Iraqi military essentially became populated with militiamen. men. And so if you saw Iraqi police or Iraqi military out on the streets, you didn't know who you're dealing with. And this was a very dangerous situation. This could be, these could be militiamen from any militia. And you didn't know what their allegiance was. Some of them were, you know,

if you had a U.S. passport, it was going to be okay to go through that checkpoint. If they had other affiliation, you might be at risk of being detained or even kidnapped. So it made it very, very hard to work on the streets. And then Iraqis had to deal with that situation too in that they would run into the same things. And they were very, very afraid to deal with any of the police or the military that, in theory, run by the government. In actuality, really had very, very little allegiance to the government whatsoever. So the Iraqi people did not trust the administration of Nureal Maliki, they saw him as yet another dictator this time of a different flavor, but with the same actions.

And then again, the gross unemployment, the disastrous situation of the infrastructure, the utter lack of security, people were more concerned with, look, when I send my kid off to school each day, I don't even know for sure if they're going to come home in one piece and I have no electricity. Unemployment is going out of control. These are our big concerns. And then you've got this Shia strongman completely backed by the Americans that nobody trusts presiding over this disaster zone that this country has become. And that was really the dominant sentiment going into 2005, 2006, and the surge. And then the surge, of course, was, as I just described earlier, was really just pouring fuel on top of that fire. Right. And it, you know, it's funny because a lot of people, I think, especially in the media as well,

they tend to buy the line that the surge worked and that the surge was some sort of effective, you know, like strategy and that we were able to thus move on from the Iraq war or whatever. And obviously, like the Great Recession and the financial crisis, kind of further occluded Iraq from American vision, or at least the American public's vision. And I was kind of curious though you know you've obviously been that you would have been there for a few years by this point um at what point did you leave well i was going in out of iraq extremely frequently from late 2003 to basically mid 2005 and then i i it got really really hard to work in there so i didn't work in inside iraq from mid 2005 until late 2008 during which time i was going in

to Jordan and Syria and covering the refugee crisis because there was millions of Iraqis who had to flee the country and were displaced by the war in occupation. So I was covering their plight in both Jordan and Syria and then I went back into Iraq in late 2008 and was covering kind of the tail end of the surge in early 2009 and then I went back in again in 2011 and 2013 when I was working for Al Jazeera. At this moment that the surge is being administered, do you say that it only added fuel to the fire? Could you explain that a little bit? Well, for example, again, using Fallujah's example, and the same thing was happening in Ramadi, which is the capital city of Al-Lambar province,

you bring in these people who are literally bought and paid for by the occupation forces, these warlords, and you prop them up, and each one of them had a several hundred man heavily armed militia, all of them being paid large amounts of money by the Americans, and everybody on the ground knew this, and they were holed up in these heavily armed compounds in their cities and surrounded by their militiamen. Meanwhile, the cities are like the wild west. There's very little electricity. There's almost no safe drinking water. Hospitals are barely functioning with minimal supplies they need to get the job done. Unemployment is through the roof. There's violence and chaos and insecurity everywhere. And that's the situation. I mean,

you literally have a warlord situation, these guys that were presiding over cities that they really didn't even have control over. So it was really the wild west in these situations. And that was largely the situation in all of these areas where the U.S. supposedly had the surge. And so there was a lot heavier troop presence. They did tick back up the number of troops, but there was still large attacks on them. But then the result of the surge on the ground was a further schism deepening amongst the Iraqi people. So you had some that were like, hey, look, we just want security. It's okay.

Let's bring these warlords in. We're going to just stand down and give them a chance. then you had others that were like literally actively picking up arms and fighting against them and being attacked by them. So you had, it really just created that many more fracture lines and fault lines across Iraqi society. And that was, it was around that time too that I'd go out and talk with Iraqis and they said, look, the Americans are literally shredding the fabric of our culture and society. They are literally turning all of us against each other.

all of these different ways. And it used to be we were one people, one country largely, and now look at us, you know, three years into the, three, four years into this occupation, we are a country divided into how many parts now, completely turned against each other along sectarian lines, class lines, financial lines, and it's all because of the occupation. Right. And one of the things that also sort of occurs to me at this moment is that, you know, as the surge is sort of, you know, being administered, but not really with the kind of like efficacy that it's being sold at home, you're also beginning to see the roots being laid ultimately for ISIS. And that's something that we obviously discuss in our show. But I wanted to just sort of pose the question more

generally as we sort of move toward tying this conversation up a bit. Basically, you know, like what were some of the, I guess, like, things that you saw and, you know, like the, the roots being laid down for when you were either on the ground in Baghdad or covering this, you know, the war at this time that you now see, you know, the direct consequences of? Like, what are some of the lines that, I guess, like, you've been connecting like that, or the dot, what are some of the dots that you've been connecting like that through the years? Well, it really, one of the, the big things that stands out to me in retrospect, uh, regarding that question was, you know, By the time the November 2004 siege of Fallujah happened, the Americans decimated the city,

destroyed 75% of the buildings, or damaged 75% of the buildings in that city and killed thousands of people. And then in the immediate wake of that siege, the American forces brought in members of the Bader organization, a Shia-Iranian-backed militia, to come in and help them do mopping up exercises in the city. So they literally brought in these people, like talk about overt sectarianism, divide and conquer, brought in Shia militia to further subjugate what was left of the people and the resistance of a Sunni city. And that was literally, and these people were, of course, backed by the, by 2005, the Noreal Maliki government. And so that really set the stage for you've got a completely disenfranchised Sunni population now that are a minority and being overtly physically attacked by the administration of Nureal Maliki

and various Shia militias that had the full backing of the Iraqi government. And then that started in 2004, carried on all the way through 2005, 6, all the way up, and then I went into Iraq again in 2013, and it was a powder keg. And I literally went to Fallujah and went to, by then, there were weekly demonstrations where the religious leaders in Fallujah were holding their Friday sermons out on the highway. They were literally blocking off the highway between Baghdad and Jordan that went right through Fallujah right on the outskirts of it. And they would go out there and completely block the highway in protest to the Iraqi government said, look, you need to give us services. You need to come

help us with electricity and jobs and help our hospitals. And you need to stop attacking us. And so they were desperate for security. They were desperate for some kind of help against the government in Baghdad. And I was literally on the stage covering for Al Jazeera these these these these talks being given by religious and tribal leaders of the city. They were trying to keep people down and said, look, no, don't start attacking yet. Give us some more time. We're trying to sort this out. And literally, the black flags of ISIS were in the crowd on the street. There were thousands of people. And it was a heavily energetically charged situation. These flags were waving. And while these tribal leaders were trying to dampen down the mood and tell these people,

look, please wait, just give us time. The crowd erupted in anger and said, you know, people were yelling. They started throwing shoes and rocks and water bottles. And we had to literally completely clear the stage, including all these tribal and religious leaders, because the crowd exploded and we're having none of it. And it was right around that time when attacks started and ISIS started to embed itself across Fallujah because they came in, they already had a presence in the city. And they brought in weapons and money and fighters and said, look, we will help you fight against the Iraqi government. And so, and that was the result of, you know, again, back up to what happened in the wake of 2004. When the Americans literally brought in the Bader organization, that literally

set the stage for ISIS to come in and step in and say, look, okay, we're going to help you fight back against the American-backed Shia militias. I guess another thing then that kind of comes to mind also is sort of the echoes that we kind of see in the rush for war against Iraq that we just saw a few months ago with the Trump administration's assassination of Omar Soleimani and the, or Qasem Soleimani, sorry, the Trump administration's assassination attempt. and I think that there is sort of a like obviously a lot of like very justified reason to sort of connect those dots and I was kind of curious I guess for your sort of perspective on the ways in which the kind of echoes of the Iraq war in 2004 or from the time that it was initiated in 2003-2004 until now you know I guess like what is it that you observe between those two moments well it's Iraq has become a failed state it went from being, you know, and again, not to glorify Saddam Hussein at all. He was a brutal dictator,

but there was security, there was stability. It was one of the best places for women and women's rights, interestingly enough, in the Middle East. Women were very predominant within the government and, you know, doctors, lawyers in academia to now it's a failed state where extremely conservative religious precepts reign women have to be covered up it's it's women's rights have regressed dramatically it's violent it's insecure it's a very very horrible place to live as far as human rights go as well as economically and and it's it's a survival situation for so many people and contrast that with what Iraq look like before the invasion and occupation where for so many Iraqis now, it's even worse today than it was underneath the sanctions.

And that's a really, really astounding thing, but it's a direct result of the U.S. imperialism. You know, they came in, it was all about the oil, the Bush administration couldn't give two shakes about the health and welfare of the Iraqi people. And that's really a situation now. When you look at Iraq today, there's ongoing protests just for basic jobs. and basic economic things to function so that people can literally eat, drink water, have electricity, and have basic security. And that's what people are protesting for regularly in Iraq.

And that's been the norm now for the last year and very, very large, sometimes even violent protests. And again, they see as a response to that the US who still has a military presence in Iraq, presence in Iraq of course coming in and with the government a government that's directly benefiting and linked to that in Iran and so again you see Iraqis still struggling underneath this forces from outside the country coming in still exploiting sectarianism and again all of this wouldn't have

been possible without the US coming in and laying the foundations for all of it throughout the entire occupation Yeah. It's, uh, I think that there are just some pretty straightforward, um, connections that we can make between then and now. Um, Dar, I wanted to thank you so much for talking with us. Well, it's a real pleasure to be with you and, and thanks for doing this program. All right. That was our first bonus episode, Noah's conversation with Dar Jamal. I hope you enjoyed that. We have more coming. So stay tuned. And we'll see you next time. Keep watching the sky. Bye.