Competitive marketplace where youre bidding for, say, a Great Quarterback this many california or a great linebacker in western pennsylvania, and youre bidding up the price theyre actually going to pay more that player. I mean, its not impossible that we will get to that model. After words airs every saturday at 10 p. M. Eastern and sunday at 9 p. M. We can watch all previous after words programs on our web site at booktv. Org. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible] bear with us while we get going. Im here to introduce Michael Weiss who is the author of isis inside the army of terror, which is a National Best seller, New York Times best seller on isis, and to introducl him and moderate a discussion and question and answer session with t you all. Jodi was supposed to be here, the author of black flags, another book on isis, and he was not able tohe come because of ao death in the family. So really good to see such a large crowd, and we have a lot ofth time allotted at the back d of the session for questions an answers. On the back end of the discussion for questions and answers. First of all, i will tell you about Michael Weiss who has reported recovered russia and the middle east extensively as a Senior Editor at the daily beast and his book came out last february iran and it was a National Best seller are in crisis. On isis. We can go into my set of questions first to get started. Tell us of little how you came to write the books and why. Guest i was covering the serious crisis more or less since its inception 2011 and long before there is any isis presence in syria or the acknowledged of the declared presence and i got to know the opposition which in the beginning was Peaceful Protesters and activist but then with the rebellion of speed aside regime i was meeting with refuge shes dead rebels because Southern Turkey our barracks for the revolution but the summer of 2012 during ramadan with the Free Syrian Army convoy hearing that the squadron was liberated in spent the night about one an hour north of the city. The order of the house was in serious trouble and spent the night there and it was extraordinary because i have seen firsthand to see the images broadcast from thousands of miles away but you have to do see it for yourself to understand the driving force behind the rebellion. Because at night they would put down there guns to pick up a white gloves and a garbage bags to pick up the of rubble from the streets because assad was bombarding civilian never structure targeting of hospitals anybody injured or badly wounded could not be treated. Was extraordinary they turn the mosque into a makeshift hospital in treating everybody militiamen even the progovernment fighters equally with the rebels lysol that with my own eyes. About six months later the town was completely taken over that i stated the house that i stated is now controlled by isis the family went into a turkey that i stayed with. So i watched a generation of what started out as a noble and a dignified rebellion over a totalitarian government and is the my coauthor is actually a syrian national. He comes there an Eastern Province of syria. To put this in context, this is a gateway town between syria and iraq which for the better part of ten years had been a sort of traffic point for alqaeda in iraq, the Jihadist Group that is now known as isis. Alqaeda in iraq was their original incarnation. So it sort of has a relationship as being a kind of juarez to el paso. Those of you were in texas, so you know the mexican drug cartels. So hasan comes from a syrian tribe, has a very extended family network. His family knows everybody, basically, in this renal. So for the purpose in this region. For the purposes of doing this book, we thought we shield to actually we need to actually interview guys in isis. So we got these interviews with a lot of fighters at the lower ranking levels, but even more important than that, their family members. You know, how come a guy, a 16yearold boy who was studying Chemical Engineering or Electrical Engineering wanting to live in the west decides to cast his lot with a bunch of headlopping barbarians . What is the driving mechanism behind this . So the purpose of writing this book is to try and explain by no means justify, but to give an explanation and an account for the rise of this terror army which, i mean, by last geographic call calculus now controls a swath of terrain in the middle east roughly the size of Great Britain. And the other purpose i should just add is, you know, i did a lot of media in june of 2014 when isis stormed mosul, thus inaugurating this coalition war. And the question i kept getting asked on tv was where did they come from, you know . How did these guys just emerge from nowhere . And it sounded like the most absurd question id ever heard. In the book we say imagine its 1985, and the viet cong have conquered a third of southeast asia, but everybodys scratching their heads saying where did they come from . Who is this enemy . Theyre unknown to us. Isis was alqaeda in iraq from 2003 to 2004, really, up until, well, now. They have been a primary enemy, a primary target of the united d states and its allies in the ream. So theyve just changed in the region. So theyve just changed their branding and their marketing, and their strategy has evolved in a dire and sophisticated manner which makes them all the greater to defeat. A lot of this book is a work of history. We go back to the early origins of the terrorist organization. The founder of the feast, if you like, zarqawi, a jordanian who went into iraq after the Coalition Campaign in afghanistan. First he spent time in iran and syria, went into iraq and, essentially, set up this organization which didnt start as an alqaeda franchise but became one after a series of spectacular terror attacks targeting the united nations, the jordanian embassy. So we wanted to sort of give the average reader, people who are interested in the subject matter because, lets face it, we all have targets on our backs. These guys would bomb this book festival, they would do everything they possibly can to try and bleed and humiliate and abase the United States. And, frankly, every civilized country in the world and some notsocivilized cups. So this is sort countries. So this is sort of a broad history, but it culminates with very indepp canth reporting and depth reporting and what they want, which is maybe even more important. Could you go into what you describe as the social media and the Internet Campaign that draws so many recruits. To just finish that thought, you know, keeping in mind, you know, what i was trying to get at here is the question of whether or not the extent to which isis is able to recruit is simply a function of the scope of its social media and Internet Campaign or whether and to what extent it is isis actual message. So, you know, everybody has seen or read or heard about the socalled foreign fighter phenomenon. 14yearold boys in tunisia, you know, addicted to video games go off and join isis. Kids in kentucky get married for the purposes of traveling to turkey, because they want to join the army of the caliphate. But the real story of how isis has done what its been able to do is the people who are joining are already in the terrain that isis controls, right . They operate like a mafia. They operate like a totalitarian political organization. One of the things that i think is important to understand, it does not do to look at this through the lens of terrorism or counterterrorism studies. It really doesnt. 20th century, you know, blood brutal movements, naziism and stalinism in particular, that is the lens through which you have to understand these guys, and its actually not a coincidence, by the way. People in the upper echelons of the organization, not albaghdadi, the selfdeclared call live, but the people right behind him by and large come from where . The former regime of saddam hussein. The baathist regime that the United States toppled. What does that tell us . Well, these guys, the Iraqi Government had been trained by who . The soviet kgb, the east german stasi. There is a great report in der spiegel obtaining documents from a guy called well, the guys dead, but he got these documents that belong today a former security official in saddams regime who essentially established the isis network in aleppo in particular. And christophe, who is german, said it was like reading something from the gdr in the 1970s, what stasis used to do to the dissidents, spying on inform plants, cultivating informants. We think that isis is somehow this military juggernaut. Youve all seen the videos of them driving u. S. Humvees or armored personnel carriers stolen from iraq. Populations, towns, villages and cities give themselves over to isis in advance of the military invasion. So what do i mean by that . They send in sleeper cells. They send in spies. The spies go around to the local population, and they say whos controlling this area . Is it the Free Syrian Army . Well, you know, theyre corrupt. Theyve devolved into rape, murder, extrajudicial killings and, by the way, the trash is piled, you know, half a mile high. Well come in and well make the trains run on time. All you have to do is pledge allegiance to us. You dont, well come in and kill you because youre a traitor, an enemy. So entire villages go to isis before isis even gets there. This is the reason theyve been able to take all this terrain. As far as the social media and propaganda is concerned, yes, theyre very good at using twitter and facebook. Actually, they even have platforms most people here havent herald of. Theres one thats an application you can put on a mobile device that allows you anywhere in the world to listen realtime to what clerics are promulgating from the caliphate. So isis clerics giving their friday sermons and prayers, you can listen to that on your cell phone. This is a process that goes back years. Zarqawi, again, the founder of what we now call isis, his cell, his network really masterminded the use of process thelytyization, what we used to call agitationing of propaganda. We didnt have the term viral back in 2004 or 5, whenever it was, but that video essentially went viral. And in the west its very difficult to understand. We watch these things and were horrified by them. But a lot of people in the islamic world watch these things, and they think this is the just desserts. America had led an illegal, you know, holy warstyle occupation in iraq. That is the propaganda. They came in, they knocked out and this is important too because isis has a political project. Its not just, you know, an apocalyptic death call. They really do have motivations in their action and thinking. America came in 2003, they knocked out saddam. Saddam was a sunni minority government ruling over a shia majority in the keystone state of the middle east. If you were sunni under saddam. You lived high on the hog. You had your wife, your six mistresses, your 12 kids, your palaces, your illegal black market trade, you know . It was also a crime, a mafia state under saddam. When we went in, we did two very stupid things. We diswanded the iraqi army disbanded the iraqi army, we did the debaathification. The first three levels of the baath party, you were rendered unemployed. Worse than that, humiliated. They lost their sense of dignity, their sense of selfworth. The insurgency, as it started in 2003, was not led by foreign fighters. Again, i want to emphasize this. Weaver talking about guys from the were talking about guys from the United States or Great Britain going over, thats a problem, but you have to look at the native populations first. Guys who were dis enfranchised from the saddam regime became insurgents fighting americans. Osama bin laden issued a very important statement. This was around 2002. He said that for the First Time Ever the mujahideen, the holy warriors from around the world, should make common cause with, quote, the socialist infidels. Meaning the baath party and saddam agents. Knowing that the toppling of this regime was going to create this lump and class of people who would want to get justice, who would want revenge against the americans. Zarqawi was a foreign fighter. But he expanded his base. Alqaeda in iraqing became the insurgency, the tip of the spear was he had behind him [inaudible] so this is the most important thing to understand, why isis wants to reign, why they conquer areas. They convert people to the cause. They need sunni arabs to fight and die on their behalf because they present themselves as the can custodian and the safeguards of sunni islam. The political project is one of restorationism. They want to reclaim baghdad for sunni islam. The shia, according to zarqawi, are less than dirt. Youre better off being a christian or a jew than a shia. He wanted to kill all the shia in iraq, but he knew he was outnumbered by them, so what was the grim, machiavellian plan . If we go up, behead the shia, blow up their mosques, they will radicalize, and they will come after the sunnis. Backed by iran, they will come after the sunnis and kill us and torture us and we head us and do all these horrible things that we all remember from the iraq war, and that will drive the entire population of iraq and also the sunni from around the world into our arms. That was his plan for alqaeda in iraq. Isis has adopted that plan and expanded on it in a grim and almost brilliant fashion. Because now theyre essentially, the reason theyve been so successful apart from their military strategy and their sort of ontheground sociology for lack of a better term, look at the geopolitics. 2003, 2004 the United States essentially dose in and hands iraq goes in and hands iraq to iran, right . I mean, this country, we call it iraq as though its this cohesive or, you know, unified state. It has devolved into separate, you know, stands. Youve got sunni, shia and kurdistan now. Shiastan belongs to iran in terms of the government ministries. The sunnis said why is the u. S. Doing this . We are the majority, we are the majority sect of islam. This is just a strategically stupid thing for you to do. So we thought we went in and blundered and accidentally handed the country to iran. Today what do they say . They say the United States didnt accidentally do anything. This is all part of a global conspiracy. The crusaders, the jews and the shia, okay . The United States is in belled with Bashar Al Assad in syria, thats why they didnt intervene and topple his government, because hes an allah white, and theyre working towards its not that we have any favor toward iran, but effectively, who are the people flying planes and dropping bombs . Its the United States, its iran, its now russia, and theyre going against the extrememost wing of Sunni Islamism which is isis. And even if youre not ideologically sympathetic to isis, you see this, and it maddens you like it actually creates a level of sympathy and a level of political empathy for the isis project. So you have to understand these things in the way that this part of the world works. One of the tragedies of the last decade apart from stupid Foreign Policy decisions the United States has made is we actually learned a lot of this stuff. One sort of saving grace of iraq, if it can be be called that, was we learned how to cultivate sunnis to turn against sunni jihaddism. And now weve forgotten all that, but isis has not learned from its mistakes. It has absorbed them. It has corrected for them. And right now it is succeeding, and we are losing the war because of that very dire dichotomy in strategies. When you say, for example, were losing the war, could you talk a little bit about what it is just to, you know, what it is that we are doing and whether or not there has been anything that you could qualify as progress and then a little bit about and we dont have a lot of time a little bit about what the current russian campaign, how that is affecting our options politically and militarily. Look, i really dont think that the United States has developed a coherent strategy for defeating, containing, raping on the raid whatever you want to call raining on the parade, whatever you want to call it, of isis. A strictly counterterrorism operation, drop a lot of bombs from the sky, lean on very noncredible and ideologically motivated and downright nasty war criminal elements on the ground to do our spade work for us to boot these guys out of territory in iraq. In iraq the people who are fighting isis the most are these shia militia groups who, by the way, spent the better part of a decade going after american soldiers. So our former enemies we have now partnered with, giving them close air support, and they come in and kick isis out, and the sunnis say, hey, weve been ethnically cleansed by the government of iraq. So were doing the same things over again. But the reason that isis is still on the advance, youll remember the al anbar awakening, right . You remember the surge. We injected 35,000 new troops into iraq. The idea was to solidify political gains that had been made at the grassroots, local level. Im talking village by village, city by city, much less province by province. The awakening was what . Sunni tribes in westerncentral iraq lorded over by alqaeda in iraq which had outstayed its welcome. Eventually, the jihadists were seen as another form of Foreign Occupation of iraq. They stole the money, they impinged on the black and gray market economies, they assassinated the tribal leadership, they raped the women. So the tribes said we had enough. We dont like the americans, but at least the americans when dayy come in and expel the terrorists, they dont kick us out of our own homes. So they partnered with us in a very pragmatic fashion, and it worked up until the point that it didnt work, and that was when the u. S forget about a m