 Hey, welcome. I'm David Sturman, senior policy analyst here at New America. Today, we have Mike Iglio, who's a staff writer at Atlantic, and author of the book we're going to talk about today, Shattered the Nations, which is also available outside. So we'll hear from him a bit about the book, and then we'll ask him some questions about the book, is reporting, which is in the book on the war on ISIS, the various US partners, and others who have been fighting that war, and also a little bit about what's happening today with those partners. So take it away. Thanks a lot. Thank you, everybody, for coming. So just a little bit more introduction about the book. As David mentioned, I'm currently a staff writer at the Atlantic, and based in Washington, DC. But before this, I was based for five years in Istanbul as a correspondent for Newsweek and BuzzFeed. And my work focused on the early part of the Arab Spring, and then in tracking the Arab Spring in Egypt and Syria, I sort of ended up covering the Syrian Civil War that came out of it, and then tracking the rise and fall of ISIS from there. My work overseas was based in two parts that are reflected in the book. I spent a lot of time doing investigative work on ISIS's criminal and financial networks. So from Istanbul, you can travel about two hours by plane south to southern Turkey, and that's where the border is with northern Syria, and that was sort of the gateway to the Civil War, and then to ISIS after that. And so I did a lot of work meeting with ISIS members and defectors and smugglers and traffickers trying to understand how ISIS was able to support itself with fighters from overseas, also with selling items in the black market like oil and antiquities, and understanding really like why people would join the group and why they would stay with it, and also trying to understand a bit about what could actually inspire somebody to leave. So I did a lot of work with ISIS defectors who had just really left and were kind of living and hiding in southern Turkey and explaining what led them down that path and also what helped them free themselves from it in the end. The second part of my work was as a war correspondent, and so I did embeds with all the various local forces that eventually came together to defeat ISIS, territorially at least. So I was with Iraqi commandos who were sort of the protagonists of the book that led the fight in Iraq and in Mosul, which was the central battle against ISIS, and Kurdish forces in Iraq, and then Kurdish forces in Syria who are the same forces that Trump has sort of abandoned in the last few weeks. The book starts with the Arab Spring because I think it's important for people to understand where this whole moment in history sort of came from, and if you just look at the Civil War, I think you sort of miss the point. In 2011, sometimes I speak at universities, and I remember that the students there were 11 and 12 when this happened, so I actually think it's worth for visiting a bit. In 2011, we had the Arab Spring where these countries, Egypt, and Syria, and Libya that had traditionally been some of the most repressive places in the world all of a sudden had these massive protest movements. And in the backdrop of this, the Obama administration was ending the war in Iraq and the US troop presence. And so as America was trying to end its military engagement that had been so problematic in the Middle East, the protests in Egypt and Syria seemed to offer a new way forward for America to have a relationship with the region because the protesters were out in the streets calling for what we understand as American ideals, so freedom, democracy, social justice. And what's more, they were organizing with the help of the new tools of American capitalism, so Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and androids and iPhones. And so there was this moment of connection that I certainly felt, and I was based in New York at the beginning of this, and then I know that Egyptians and Syrians felt as well because I spent years talking to them about it afterward, which was that it wasn't just that people in America were following them on the news on CNN, but they were interacting with them, sharing their posts on Facebook and liking their tweets. And at the same time, you had the US government saying that it supported the protesters in their struggle. To me, you know, when I think back on it, it was sort of a naive time where we all thought social media would bring about greater openness and freedom in the world, and also it spoke to a moment, I think, in the Obama administration's first term that a certain mindset that I think we all had, which was that we could all just sort of sit at our iPhones and laptops and like our way to a better world. I don't think you can understand ISIS and the darkness that came with the end of the Arab Spring, if you don't understand like that sense of hope that there was then, and that sense of connection. When I did meet people who had joined ISIS later or who were helping it out in various ways, I found that a lot of them were always looking back to that moment of connection, and the way that America and the world had just severed it when they lost interest as sort of the genesis for what had set them down that path, and the sense of betrayal that they felt where there was this moment where America seemed to be pushing for freedom in the region and support the protestors in both those countries, and then ultimately it ended up leaving them on their own to face counter-revolution in Egypt, which was really bloody, and the book recounts the massacre of 500 people that I was at the center of in Cairo when the military who imprisoned the president took over the country, and then in Syria, the US sort of meddled here and there, provided some support to the opposition, but ultimately looked on as the pro-democracy protestors, and then the moderate rebels that had come after them were sort of co-opted, killed, and otherwise erased from history. So that's the beginning of the book, and from that moment of hope, the book tracks the darkness that came next, as I mentioned, and so it meets with Syrian rebels and activists as they were trying to win the war that started, and then as they were slowly eliminated by ISIS, which took over the Syrian Civil War. I know we'll talk a bit more about this, but I think if you wanna understand what ISIS was, it's helpful to look at foreign fighters that came, and they were sort of the most sensational story, these Europeans and even Americans that came over to ISIS, but the book really focuses on Syrians and Iraqis, because if we think about what ISIS was, when it had its so-called caliphate, it controlled territory across Iraq and Syria that was the size of Great Britain, and there were millions of people who were forced to live in that territory. So if we don't see it as first and foremost an Iraqi and Syrian issue, I think we sort of missed the point, and Iraqis and Syrians made up the majority of ISIS members. And so the people you meet in the book are tend to be Syrians who in the chaos of the Civil War were either radicalized or through desperation forced to work for ISIS in some way, and explains how ISIS was so powerful because it was able to tap into the desperation of the war and monetize it and weaponize it. And so when ISIS was funding itself, it was literally supporting the process of taking Syria apart piece by piece in pillaging the oil fields and looting churches and graves and museums of antiquities, and through doing that and through taxing the people who were sort of held hostage there became the richest terrorist group in history. And then also when the refugee crisis began to move through Europe from Turkey, ISIS weaponized that as well and the book explains how it was able to sort of put its members onto refugee ships because the chaos was so bad and get them to Europe, but also the way it was trying to play in Western politics and doing that. And I think if there's one thing I want people to take away looking back at this period of history is it's that both ISIS and populist politicians in the West were sort of playing off one another politically in the lead up to the 2016 election especially because that's when ISIS was at that strength. So ISIS had calculated that if it could get terrorists onto refugee boats and if it could have them commit attacks in Europe, it would inflame political sentiment in Western countries and it would demonize Muslims and refugees in those countries. And if you read ISIS's propaganda, if you read it at the time, they were clearly pushing for this greater mission to make Muslims everywhere and especially those living in the West see that they were in conflict with the West. And so the idea was that we will show you the truth about the Western countries in which you live by forcing them into this box of radicalization in their own politics where they themselves start demonizing Muslims and refugees. And I think politicians in America and in the West were very happy to take that bait. And so the book sort of tracks that struggle and that dynamic between those two competing forces up until the battle for Mosul in 2016 which was like the seminal battle for the ISIS so-called Caliphate that was playing out just as the US election was happening in 2016. So the battle for Mosul started in October of that year and the stakes for that battle seemed incredibly high as the book explains because the soldiers in Iraq and Syria who really carried out the war, Iraqis and Syrians and Kurds, they understood these global stakes as well. So when you would meet soldiers on the front lines in Mosul and around Iraq, they would say, we are here to fight for our own territory but we're also here as the world's frontline against ISIS and terrorism. And so the book tries to explain that this was, like I mentioned earlier, like a very local struggle but it also had major global implications and the soldiers who fought for on the US side of this war saw that clearly throughout. And I think we should keep that in mind as we look at the current news with those allies who work with America being left behind now in Syria. Thanks. So one thing you mentioned and where your book starts is in that sort of Arab Spring moment. A couple of the early chapters tell, give a few stories about what Syria looked like at that moment before the conflict had really gotten to the point and sort of arrangement and focus on ISIS that we see now or up until just recently. Can you tell us a bit about your reporting and the people you met and talked with, worked with who sort of give a sense of what Syria was like at that moment? So I started working in Southern Turkey covering the war in Syria in the summer of 2012. And this was the moment where the Syrians of a war went from this sort of low-scale conflict where it didn't seem like it would really go anywhere and everyone was sure that the Syrian government in the Assad regime would crush it fairly quickly to the Syrian rebels surprisingly taking the commercial capital of Syria or launching an offensive and taking a lot of territory in that city called Aleppo. And at the same time they had launched an attack in Damascus, a bombing that killed members of Assad's inner circle. And so all of a sudden the rebels were like on the map. And I sort of like a lot of journalists crash landed into Southern Turkey and into Syria in this moment. And I think it's important to remember especially like what US policy has been throughout the sense back then that this would be a quick war. Once the rebels had made these surprising flash games US support started flowing to them. So the US started working with the CIA to provide them weapons and started working with the opposition to provide political support. And there was a sense in Washington and also in Turkey which was another major backer of the rebellion that this would be a quick war and it would be over soon. And so problems were left to sort of fester. So Turkey for example began allowing foreign fighters some of the most radical jihadi fighters in the world to freely cross this border into Syria because and when the US government would push them on it they would say they're just gonna expedite the war and then we'll take care of them. This war will be over in six months. I think Erdogan always said he was gonna have Ramadan the next Ramadan in Damascus. And the Obama administration when they made this fateful comment that Assad must step down, when Obama said that the understanding within the US government as well was that this will be quick and therefore we don't need to do much more than this sort of small scale CIA program and opposition support program. And then what happened was the policy just sort of for both countries and all the rest of the international actors who mail the Syria continued on like a three month timeline and now we're going on eight years of that. And I think that's a really a recipe for disaster. The refugees I met had the same mindset and the book really tries to explain what it was like from their perspective from the people who actually lived the war. This is all on the ground reporting. It doesn't have a Washington view. It's really just what was happening and how did the war affect people. But I remember and it's in the book like meeting a refugee family from Aleppo. They had, it was a man who was a barber. He had his own shop in Aleppo which is a very prosperous, well-educated city. And he had just arrived across the border and was now living in like a shanty house with a bunch of other refugee families and he had his kids sitting on the floor next to him. And he told me that he had canaries in his barber shop and he left the canaries in their cages and left the keys to his barber shop with the rebel. And he was calling the rebel twice a day to make sure that he had fed his birds. So in his mind, he had just come across the border but they were gonna be back in a week, two weeks a month and he was very concerned that the birds get fed. And I actually, I called the rebel from this refugee's phone and asked him what was happening and whether that was unusual. And he said, no, no, I have keys from people all over the neighborhood and he was like going and watering plants in people's houses and taking care of pets. And I never got that out of my head because it really shows how, I think when a war happens like this, the people on the ground also they're just hoping it's gonna be over soon. I can't tell you how many refugees I met that would talk about being home for the next school year. And so from that level, the books kind of shows the human effect of the sort of policy decisions that end up dragging out the war for years and years. There's another interesting story that reminds me of that you tell from I believe the same chapter around it about I think one of the people you were working with reporting and is sort of communication with people in Damascus still, even as the war escalated. Can you talk a bit more about this question of connection and that sort of connection of individuals even as I guess Syrianist begins to splinter? So he's referring to when I first arrived in Antakya which is the city in southern Turkey that was sort of the gateway to the war in Syria. In the blur of people that I was meeting, all of a sudden I found myself talking with a Syrian who had a really thick New Jersey accent. And I was like, I actually pinched myself, I thought I was dreaming because it was like, he sounded like Robert De Niro. And he was my age and had like slick back hair and he looked like someone from the Jersey Shore which he was. So his name's LaWande, he's actually became one of my best friends. And he had grown up, he was born in Syria, his parents were Kurdish dissidents and then they moved to New Jersey on asylum when he was 14. And then he finished school in America and he lived there for about 10 years. And he drove a limo and he sold bootleg jeans out of his Camry. And he was a really sweet guy and really loved America and considered himself American. He didn't realize that when his father passed away, he needed to apply for citizenship. I think he assumed that he just was on the asylum program with his father and that he would naturally become a citizen. And so by the time he put this all together, he was, he had passed the age that he could have done it and he was then living in America illegally and eventually he got deported to Syria where he got deported to Syria I think in 2009. So two years before the revolution started there. And as soon as he, you know, this is the guy that had, I think he hadn't set foot in Syria by that point in more than 15 years. And he, as soon as he arrived back, was tortured at the airport because the police assumed that he must be some CIA agent. I don't know why they think the CIA agent would enter the country that way. But they, you know, they cracked his teeth and they whipped him with electric cables and then they kind of just like released him into the city. And he ended up coming into Southern Turkey with the first wave of refugees. And I, when I met him, you know, I'm from Long Island. We hit it off and he ended up working with me as a translator. And I mentioned in the book, you know, the, it was this sort of surreal experience that I think is actually, was actually informative to me to, you would hear stories, I would hear stories of people coming from like the depths of chaos and suffering and confusion in his New Jersey accent. And it made it easy for me to imagine that they could be anyone from anywhere, you know. And it was a, you know, one thing I really try and get across in the book is that, you know, war is not necessarily some far away thing that happens to far away people. Like it happens to regular people and they deal with it as such. And it was an easy reminder when, you know, you're in a foreign country but you're hearing people speak to you, you know, in a Robert De Niro voice but about all these kind of horrible things that are happening. And he had still his circle of friends in Damascus. And he had been, you know, everyone, the war became a sectarian war, you know, which means that, you know, there are Sunni and Shia and Alawite Muslims in Syria. And when the civil war really spiraled, those groups became pitted against one another. So the Alawites and Shia became pitted against the Sunnis. And that was something that was very intentionally done by the Assad regime to sort of keep his support base. But before the war, my friend, his name is Lauan but he goes by Leo. So my friend Leo has occurred and his group of friends were Alawites and Sunnis and all sort of people that they wouldn't think to ask each other's ethnicity or religious beliefs. It was something that really got promoted by the hostile forces in the civil war after it started. But he was still in touch with all his friends and so sometimes we would call them. And it was really striking, like I remember doing a Skype interview with one of his friends who was a, I think he was a bouncer at a nightclub. And so he was sitting in front of his computer and he's got a graphic tee on and he just again, kind of real Jersey short type feeling. And he was working as an assassin and he was finding his neighbors who were supporting the regime and killing them at night. And then I think two weeks after we spoke to him, he got killed himself. And the story of Leo's friend, like the book tracks the story of Leo's group of friends and how they sort of disintegrated. So he had one group of friends who were wedding planners. They became Shabihah, which are like the pro-regime death squads. And they actually were suspected and disappearance of another one of his friends who was a Sunni, who was a shoe salesman and was just supporting the protesters with food and blankets and just disappeared from his shop one day. And so through Leo, I try to explain, we're trying to give the feeling of, what does civil war really mean? And it's friends turning on friends and neighbors turning on neighbors. That's a really sensitive point to me because moving back to America, I've been really struck by the way people play with the language of civil war in American politics. And I really think it's irresponsible. And when I see someone boasting, like if I don't get my way in the election, then I'll grab my musket, which is what Joe Walsh, who's now a presidential candidate, said in 2016. I really wish I could share these experiences with them. If you might think this is some kind of noble thing in a movie version of patriotism, but civil war means your family being killed and neighbors turning on neighbors and everything that you know being destroyed. And for some reason, people in America, because I think we haven't, we've been lucky enough not to experience war for so long. I've just sort of missed that point. You talked about this in a couple of ways, since the book, the broader sort of disconnection of most Americans from, I guess violence generally and the nature of a civil war, but also from the specific wars that we're fighting. Can you talk a bit about how that came through and your reporting and the almost simultaneous presence, but not presence of Americans in this war? Yeah, so, you know, my parent's generation was Vietnam War and there was a draft. And so, and there were protests in the streets. And in one way or another, I think as I understand it from reading about it and speaking with them, you were affected by the war, right? It was always a chance that your number would be called and the politics of it were really intense, I think partly because of that. Then the war that I grew up with was the Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan. And by that point, we had a volunteer army. And so I recount in the book, I'm from Long Island, I was in high school, I think my high school was 20 miles from the Twin Towers when they fell. And the people in my school, whose parents worked in those towers, got called one by one on the loudspeaker to the principal's office. We got sent home. And then as I say in the book, I just sort of like continued with my life. And I think that was the message that a lot of Americans got, which was just go on with your life. I think Bush does something like go shopping. And eventually Americans sort of even turned on this idea that we have a volunteer army, but I think the Iraq War was such a disaster in the war in Afghanistan as well that it became even politically untenable to send a volunteer army to overseas wars. And so when the war with ISIS started, the Obama administration developed a new kind of way to fight wars, which is explained at length in the book, is US airstrikes, secret commandos, so special operations forces who work in the shadows, but aren't officially acknowledged as a presence in these countries. So when Obama would say repeatedly, I think he said it more than 30 times. I was looking, trying to find an exact count recently, but I found one from 2015 where he said it more than 23 times. You know, he said there's no boots on the ground, but because he doesn't have to acknowledge that we have Delta Force and SEAL Team Six in these countries, because their presence is officially classified. And Trump has done the same thing. And so that's the extent of the US involvement, and then they enlisted these local forces across Iraq and Syria to do the ground fighting for America, which I think is arguably a good strategy. You know, it's empowering locals to take care of the problem themselves. What worries me is that is the way it was always presented to American people by Obama and Trump, which is basically, as I assess it, we're at war with ISIS, don't worry about it. So the society gets all the bad things about a war. You know, we are, we have an enemy, we, there was a fear mongering, there's a sense of hysteria about the war. And at the same time, there's no sense of collective responsibility and shared sacrifice. And I'm not saying that I think people, we should send more troops or anything like that. I'm saying I think we haven't done enough as the political class certainly, and then as a society to really grapple with the idea that yes, it's mostly locals fighting these wars, but America is still heavily involved. And what collective responsibility do we have in these places? And so a lot of my work was trying to bring to life the suffering and the sacrifice of the local soldiers, because I think that they too often went unacknowledged. And you know, if you look at what happened, what played out with Trump in his recent decision, he was able to say, the Kurds did nothing, we don't owe them anything, and just sort of throw that partnership away. And I, obviously it's not true, they lost the Kurds and their allies in Syria, lost more than 10,000 fighters against ISIS in Syria. I think the US number of personnel who were killed in Syria, it might be six. So a big difference in scale. So in my work, when I was reporting for BuzzFeed and also in the book, I tried just to kind of show who are these people, why are they fighting and what did they actually do here. But the other part of it is, and I have always said, I promise this, is civilian casualties. They were unavoidably rampant in the war. Because the US just pounded cities with airstrikes to defeat ISIS. And they went unacknowledged really by the US government. And you know, I think the most credible monitoring group puts the number of civilian casualties from US airstrikes in Iraq and Syria between 8,000 and 13,000. The US military has admitted to 1,000. So it's a huge disparity. I found that in Mosul, for example, which was a World War II level of destruction in combat, the US actually made no real effort to even investigate if it killed civilians and its airstrikes. So just to kind of give an example of what I was able to do that the US government didn't bother to do, I took two days to go into Mosul without an embed and on my own and I literally just went into neighborhoods that had been freed from ISIS and went to like a deli or a fruit stand and said, hey, is there anyone here who has been killed by US airstrikes and being civilians in this neighborhood? And they would be like, sure, here. And we'd pass houses, this house, for example, would be collapsed and they'd say, that one just had ISIS in it, so that one had no civilian casualties, but this one had a family of five died. And then inevitably the person who, there'd be a survivor or a relative nearby, we'd call the person and he'd come and give me an account of what happened and I can only spend in this situation because it's dangerous, there may be ISIS like cells or remnants in the area. So I'm on a timer of, I think it was like 25 minutes per site. And so I would interview the witnesses, take their phone numbers, geolocate where I was standing, take photos, and then send that to the US military. And in me doing that, just over two days, they admitted to 36 civilian deaths, just based on the information that I sent by visiting these sites at random. And the lesson was, for me, was that they weren't even bothering to do that basic level of research. And then after the US admitted that it killed these 36 civilians that I documented, my editor from BuzzFeed did a very typical journalistic thing when they said, you should write a story. BuzzFeed got these results and I was like, no way because I called, I ended up calling the victims and asking if they had been contacted by the US or the coalition or the Iraqi government even after the US admitted that it killed their relatives. And there was no effort made whatsoever to contact them. The Congress sets aside, admission by the US government just means they have a website for the coalition. And it just says, in all their data points, it will just say after media reports, the coalition determined that it killed ex-civilians on ex-state and ex-general area. That's it. And Congress sets aside funds to offer redress to families who had relatives killed in US attacks and the US just made no effort to, they didn't use it, just unaddressed. So I think that was part of the whole problem that I sort of detect still now about us as a country saying we're at war and then really just trying to ignore everything that that means. And I do worry what that does to the national psyche in the long term. So before we start moving to your questions, let's talk a bit about what the character of the war with ISIS actually looked like. Because one of the most interesting parts of this book, in addition to the stories of the people actually fighting the war and affected by it, which we've talked a bit about, is your discussion of the various technologies of war ranging from sophisticated to this sort of put together, how this interacted on an actual battlefield and sort of the countermeasures that ISIS developed to deal with the way the United States is fighting its wars today, the drone strikes, air strikes, so give us a sense of what that looked like. Yeah, so in Mosul, I just couldn't get away from the sense that I was witnessing dystopia right in front of me. ISIS had set oil fields on fire and so we had this constant kind of ominous black cloud in the air and the soldiers that I was with were, and they're the protagonists of the book, they were the most elite battalion of Iraqi special forces and they were created in 2005. So after America got involved in the Iraq war and then it descended into civil war, they realized that they were gonna need help from locals to do some of the hard work of rooting out insurgents and knocking on doors, kicking down doors and doing their night raids and so they built this unit and some others to do the raids with them and so the soldiers that I was with had been basically fighting alongside the Americans or with the Americans at that point for 12 years and they are really intense guys but I also, I make the point in the book like if you think of a soldier in the American sense they're like chiseled or in good shape and these guys are, they tend to be like fat or like really thin with no muscles and I make the point like it's because they do really nothing but fighting for year after year. They don't have physical training, they have very limited downtime and when they do they're just exhausted, it's really just fighting and the way they fought ISIS was they go into these neighborhoods in Humvees which they might not know what a Humvee looks like or is so they go in in these Humvees and they spend 14 hours a day sometimes in these Humvees where they can't even get out to pee and so on the one hand I'm going in with these soldiers and this unit they wear black, they paint their Humvees black and then they wear skull masks and then on the other side you have ISIS which had developed these sort of really grim weaponry as like the counter to the US airstrikes that were always backing us and so ISIS had so much territory in this sort of proto-state that they were able to make their car bombs and factories basically where they take a car or truck and they outfit it with armor so that the only way you could really sometimes get to it like explode it while it's driving at you is with a tank or with an anti-tank rocket launcher that the groups took in and so these, I know Dave was asking about the tactics of the war and the technology. I mean, it was never ending source of shock for me how many car bombs ISIS had. They sent them one after another after another at the Iraqi forces in Mosul and I could never imagine how they found so many pilots for these and then the opening of the book recounts when the Mosul was split in two halves, there was the Eastern half which the Iraqi forces cleared first and then the Western half which was more of an ISIS stronghold and was always gonna be really bloody and more concentrated so to open the Western half of the offensive ISIS deployed a new weapon which was drones and so as we were driving up to the approach to Western Mosul, all of a sudden drones just started buzzing overhead and they were dropping grenades as well as filming from overhead so that they could better coordinate ISIS mortars and car bombs and so it was kind of like this weird situation where you have ISIS which is like this throwback to another century long-haired jihadis preaching a very retrograde extremism and at the same time they're attacking us with drones and these factory-made suicide car bombs and after that day's battle, the drones were on every soldier's mind I mean, some people got wounded and I was asking an Iraqi colonel who was part of the team that called in US airstrikes what they were doing about it and he said, he made a reference to the fact that as far as their intelligence was concerned, the person who was, there was this battle going on between the US and Iraqi side and ISIS so the US and Iraqi side were trying to jam the drone signals but they can't just blanket jam the signals because it would knock their own aircraft out and their communications out so they have to find the frequency that the drone is flying on and usually a drone will fly only on one frequency but ISIS actually had someone on their side who kept changing the frequency so they had rigged the drones differently so that they could avoid the jamming and according to the intelligence of the unit I was with, the person who was doing that for ISIS was an American and also the person who was trying to jam the drones on our side was an American soldier so you had these two Americans in this kind of battle over the drones and it was an issue that they, I think just toward the end of the war the US figured out how to deal with it but in the early days of it it was just chaos and you had drone, you had grenades just falling out of the sky. So my last question is, you ended the book with the collapse of ISIS territorially and what happens after, can you talk a bit about what happened to all of these ISIS fighters, tens of thousands, what come the many local ones in the context of the smuggling economy you really portray and in particular, you talk about an almost class dynamic of people leaving Syria generated by the nature of ISIS and ISIS's role, can you describe a bit of that? So after the Mosul battle was finished and it was the fall of 2017 and US forces and the Kurdish forces in Syria had surrounded Raqqa which was the last major ISIS stronghold at that time and I went back to the Turkish border and I reconnected with my sources in the trafficking and smuggling networks there to find out whether ISIS was trying to escape ahead of the battle and I found that they were and it was a really sad story actually because if you think about it, I remember coming back so many times, I come back home once a year, twice a year when I was overseas and I would always feel this kind of like, it's a well-meaning question and I don't think there's any mouse in it but people tend to assume, at this point anyone still living in ISIS territory must be an ISIS supporter and it's really just not true and it misses the idea that ISIS wanted to have a state and to have a state it needed citizens and so the people that lived in these places became hostages and ISIS would execute people for trying to leave and the people who were trapped in ISIS territory at the end tend to be people who couldn't afford smugglers so just to get out of like Raqqa for example you had to pay a smuggler to get past the ISIS checkpoints then you have to, if you want to get to Turkey you have to pay a smuggler to get past the Kurdish checkpoints and pass the Turkish checkpoints so it's gonna be a lot of money and some people just couldn't afford it and so in the end of the day these smuggling networks have been active throughout the war the people who were able to afford the smuggling fees were ISIS because they had hoarded money over the course of the war so all the money they made from oil and from artifacts and from taxing people they then were able to use some of that to get out from Syria and I was actually able, I wrote an article about this it's referenced I think in the end notes of the book but I confirmed this with Western and US intelligence before I wrote the story but I was able to track an ISIS fighter who was like a senior member of the group who was responsible for its hospitals and he traveled from Syria with an Australian who was famous he was like an Australian playboy doctor who joined ISIS and then became one of their main propagandists and they actually just got in a car in Raqqa and drove right into Turkey because they must have had so much money that they were able to pay high enough price and then they went to Istanbul and the Syrian who had his family living in Germany under asylum the Syrian just got a job almost immediately in a hospital in Istanbul, right near where I lived and the Australian I think had a harder time because he was so recognized and he ended up going, he stayed a while in Istanbul and went back into Syria but it was just an example if even people of that high profile were able to escape and they were able to bribe their way not just to get out of ISIS territory but to get through Kurdish and US controlled territory and into Turkey through the Turkish border guards it was really like an alarming way to see that ISIS was sort of almost consciously spreading back out into the world again and using the same smuggling routes that they had used to get into Syria in the first place but also to get from Europe and Asia and elsewhere and then going back and I came back here and I met with a bunch of really smart people from the US intelligence community and they were explaining where they were thinking these people were going and it was some fighters I remember someone told me that he said he was a defector but he said, well our commander in ISIS just told us wait in Turkey eventually America will lose interest and then you can come back and join us again and then that was a real concern of the US government and then they were also joining ISIS has global affiliates all over the world now and they were going back and they were trying to join these groups and they were also some of them just trying to go home or just hiding out in Turkey and trying to think of what's next or in another country. Well we'll now turn it over to you we have a microphone please wait for it to come to you as we're live streaming and state who you are, any affiliation and then ask a question. So who has questions? Let's do up front. Joel Shekman from Reuters. You talk in the book about some people that you had met who defected from you know kind of Syrian rebel groups and it kind of defected to ISIS and it was interesting what you were saying about sort of this disillusionment post Arab Spring. I wanted to get your sense you know like now you know with America sort of abandoning the Kurds and sort of abandoning the fight there in general. Do you, are there other people you know or other groups that you think are sort of like at risk at risk to defect to ISIS or to defect to other similar Islamic terror groups? That's a good question. I think you know some of the Turkish back fighters who have been pushed into northeastern Syria as part of the Turkish defensive are Syrians who have definite Islamist ties and so you know some of these people who have been committing war crimes according to US government I think are in some way or another you know linked into the Jihadi movement. I don't know that they would necessarily join ISIS. I think you know the issue with ISIS right now is that it's an underground movement again and so I think the concern is less new people joining ISIS right now than it is existing ISIS members being allowed to reconstitute and resurface at some point. The New York Times had a report where it cited the US government saying that thought this is over the summer that there were still 18,000 active ISIS fighters across Syria and Iraq. I think the important thing to remember about ISIS is you know this is the same this is an iteration of the same group al-Qaeda in Iraq that the US was fighting during the Iraq war. They're very comfortable as an insurgency. It was really like a strange thing to see them come and take territory and declare a state and I remember talking you know over the years with US military officials who seemed almost like they were relieved that they would do something like that because you know the thinking is if they plant a flag we can take it away. I mean the US government is very good at defeating a state it's had less success in defeating insurgencies and so I think for the long term you know what the Kurdish forces and the US troops that are with the Kurdish forces we're trying to do in Syria was to you know roll up these networks that still exist and that now is in jeopardy so I think that's the main risk right now. Third question. Hi Alex Evans with Rand. I have a question to go back from the beginning of the conversation about the smuggling networks and if you could discuss sort of how you saw the content what was being traded change over the course of the conflict and what types of things you are seeing now. Are there new markets emerging? Do you see evidence of new types of demand? How has that changed over time? I have to apologize so I've been in DC for two years so I'm not clued into those networks right now. Over time it always seemed to move to a different key good or at least that's what I focused on and so initially it was oil, eventually that dried up. The oil that was brought across the border was it was a lot less sexy than you might think from the biggest area there was about it back then. If you look at one there's a BuzzFeed article it's referenced at the end notes. I actually published photos of the oil as a video of people bringing it across the border and it was just like really like underground little hoses that they were kind of like using to fill these jerry cans and then it was just disappearing into the fueling stops around southern Turkey. So it was really gritty and I think because of that harder to sort of stamp out then something that was like really like large scale it was just kind of small scale smuggling all across the border and it's important to remember like these smuggling groups have existed since the border was drawn. The border splits towns, they have the same name sometimes on each side of the border and so the families in these towns don't really recognize the border anyway and then because of that they tend to have really powerful smuggling families like mafia style families like in these border towns and so this has always been an issue. What happened with the war is that and with Turkey sort of turning a blind eye to this for so long is that it just it made these mafia families so much more powerful and these smuggling networks so much more powerful because the amount of money that all of a sudden got poured into it. I know he's not in the book but I know a smuggler who he was like a chicken smuggler, it was his main business like he sent chickens across the border illegally and then over the course of the war like he started sending everything and people, he got involved in whatever business he could at the time and I met him just before I left Turkey for the last time and I asked, he met me in this cafe in this border town that had been like when I first started working in Southern Turkey like just really like a downtrodden place and now all of a sudden it was like new money seemed and we were sitting at like a really nice cafe that just seemed like completely out of place and he was being like catered to by the staff like he was like very happy to like host me with this hookah and be like the big guy but he told me he had bought apartment buildings and all this real estate over the course of the war so it's more that these people are now so powerful and the more money and power you have I think the harder it is to stop the smuggling. If you want to actually see stuff that was smuggling you can always look, I've been an artifact for example and I always put pictures with the article so that they show like some of the objects that's of interest. Your questions? And what? So can you talk a bit about the passport trade before we finish up? Sure. I think that's one that connects to the Sun is particularly interesting. Yeah. It was amazing like some of the scams that people try and pull on journalists. It becomes like an information economy at some point so you have all these operators around the war who are trying to sell information to spies and to journalists, right? I think usually they try first to sell it to the governments and then they resell it to journalists if they can. If you're a journalist it's entirely unethical to buy information and I don't and if you do you're very likely to get bad information along the way but that's just by way of explaining this meeting I had once at the height of the refugee crisis in 2015 in Istanbul I met someone that had been with the ISIS media department and now said he was a defector living in Istanbul and he was like a little bit famous because he has like a beautiful singing voice and he appeared in propaganda videos and like the Euphrates River like singing about ISIS so I actually knew him from his work and he told me yeah you know I still have some source in the ISIS media department and he found all these passports for Western fighters do you want to buy them? And I was like no but why don't you give me one so I can see what's going on for free and he gave me one and it belonged to he had just the image, right? So he had all the images like on his phone so he sent me on WhatsApp one of the images of a passport and it belonged to a medical student at the University of Michigan and I like looked at him, looked on Facebook and he just seems like a normal nice guy like you know he's pictures of his girlfriend he's like a total dork and I sent him an email on his student email address just so you know like I just you know I'm not using anything here but I got this, I got your passport here from someone that says you're an ISIS and you can imagine the email I get back from him you would just like you know like how did you get my email? I'm like student directory but you know and then it was he was a really sweet guy and what happened was he was on vacation in Istanbul and he had what he called a man purse and he went through the Grand Bazaar which is like a tourist hunt and the pick pocket hunt because of it and someone stole his passport and I was so fascinated by okay how did this guy's passport get from pick pocket to this dude whose sings in the ISIS videos to me and why is it being marketed as in ISIS fighters and so you know at that time me and my Syrian colleague who I share bylines on all my articles with we had really good connections in the trafficking world and we started asking everyone about these passports and we kind of like get another passport like here and there everyone wanted to sell them everyone would just give me one and so another it was I remember it was another student who was like on her rowing team she just won a championship and then you know another like a stoner kid who was like oh yeah I got nabbed in Barcelona and like they were all kind of like making their way to Istanbul and so finally I went to this kind of like kingpin smuggler that I go and I go to when I need help with something and I have to bring him whiskey and listen to his stories and he you know a little word about like Turkey like they never really cracked down on smuggling into Europe because they don't care and sometimes they encouraged it and so this guy that I knew he was a Syrian I'd known him by that point for about two years as far as I know he's still doing the exact same thing he worked like in an office so you would go into his office and he's got like a heavy desk and he would like receive clients and people there one time I actually was sitting interviewing him and a cop walked in and I was like I texted me my security advisor like okay just so you know I might get arrested here and I was like you know went to get up like should I leave and the smuggler was kind of like and he just pulls out a wad of cash and just hands it to the cop right in front of me and the cop kind of went like give me more and he just gave me a middle finger and the cop left just like a little window into what the situation was in Turkey and there was a park right outside this guy's office where refugees would gather every night in these kind of heartbreaking scenes with garbage bags full of all their clothes and then these really low grade life vests that people sold in the market stalls all around this little economy had boomed up I remember asking one of the life jacket sellers once why there was a price difference between his life jackets and he said well this one, which is the one most people buy it can keep someone afloat for five minutes and then this one is guaranteed. So it was you know you would have these refugees sitting in the park and walking in and out of the smuggler's office while police just sort of like sat there and watched it and then they would get in buses like take them down the coast and then they would go to Europe. This smuggler when I showed him the passport photo he was like pulled out his iPad and he flipped it around and he showed it went like this and he was just scanning through like hundreds of passport photos like when I say passport photos I mean like your information page someone took a photo. And what was happening what they were doing with this was there's nothing to do with ISIS but everything to do with the refugee crisis and by that way ISIS. They when they you know if the smuggling journey by boats is really dangerous this smuggler actually had lost on his own boat his wife and I think because of that he was like always also pushing to find better ways and safer ways to get people to Europe. And he he they had this scam where they could take a stolen passport and then use it at certain airports where they don't run passports against the Interpol database of stolen passports and they had like advanced teams like in Greece and places like that and they were somehow always through their you know connections with the mafia and other criminals checking like which airports they can either bribe the people not to check them or just that they don't actually if you talk to experts on this often places like just don't bother to check if the passport's stolen you would think that they would but they don't. And so when a client came in if you want to spend $500 for example you can go on the boats and you might die if you want to spend $3,000 you can try to do their airport scam and the worst that's going to happen to you is that you get sent back you know you're not going to die and you're not going to get arrested either. And so when a client came he would go through the passports and like just try to find someone that matched and then you call I guess there's information with the passport like who owns it and then you call the person and you buy the passport. And I ultimately, because I'm obsessive I actually found the thief who even stole the passport from the guy in Michigan and kind of connected it and sure enough he had stolen it and he sold it to a smuggler who sold it to a smuggler and then it entered into this kind of database. And so the people who were approaching journalists and probably Western intelligence agencies saying they have all these ISIS fighters they were actually just selling these passports. And I actually met one of the Syrians who was like behind the whole scheme to sell the stuff to journalists and he himself used to be a journalist and during the, he had been like a proper professional with the family and when I met him I remember he had cigarette burns on his shirt and he was sleeping in the park down the street from where I met him. And so it was, the reason I wrote this story and the reason I recounted it in the book was just to kind of explain like the way that the desperation around the conflict was fueling this like just utter chaos and the inability to, for governments and for anyone else to really tell who's who and what's going on and because of that chaos, ISIS was able and any other bad actor is able to really easily get a foothold and operate. Any final questions? My name's Kevin, is the war over and are people gonna rebuild? What I, part of what I think is so troublesome about like what Trump has done is that these areas in Northeastern Syria that had the US presence with Kurdish and Kurdish troops and their allies, part of the US presence was to guarantee enough security that they could rebuild these areas. And there are NGOs, American NGOs, international NGOs have been working in these areas to rebuild, like Raqqa for example is like a hellscape of destroyed buildings from US airstrikes and ISIS car bombs and all the rest of the stuff that came to the battle. There are thousands of internally displaced people in these areas and there are, I also recount in the book, ISIS used IEDs also like landmines in the fashion of landmines so they seeded them throughout the landscape in Iraq and Syria and you have international groups working to diffuse the IEDs so that people can return to these areas too where it's safely and I think all that is now at risk so I only have an article in the Atlantic tomorrow and I've been interviewing aid workers who are leaving because with the US possibly doing a full withdrawal, I don't know what Trump said at 11 today because he had remarks about this but it seems inevitable that the US troops will eventually come out. Probably the Syrian regime is gonna have to take their place and come to some accommodation with the Kurds when this, if the regime does that, the first people it will target will be anyone who work with the Americans and so all the Syrian aid workers are now either plotting to escape or leaving and so all these projects are in the process of basically being halted. There's a refugee camp in Northern Iraq in the Kurdish region and I just spoke to some aid workers who are in the camp and they said the same people, Syrians, who've been working in the IDP camps in Syria are now refugees in the refugee camp in Northern Iraq so it's hard to imagine how that will go. I mean the Syrian government needs to rebuild these areas ultimately then but they've had a hard time securing funds. People don't trust them necessarily to work with them and also the Trump administration has blocked funds from going to them because they see it as a way to choke Iran. Any other questions? Do you have any concluding remarks? I hope you read the book. If you do and you leave me a review on Amazon I'll buy you a drink one day and other than that thank you very much for your attention and for coming. Thanks. The book is on sale outside. I'm sure you can get it signed. There's much more detail to everything that was discussed today as was way more chapters than we had time or ability to talk to. Thanks. I recommend it.