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Transcripts for CNN Anderson Cooper 360 20150304 04:22:15 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The iraqi army is going to put something in the range of 20,000 troops up against them. kurdish peshmerga, iraqi troops, both sunni and shia, and a small number of american advisers. but they will have american drones, there will be american air support. and the idea here is to launch a genuinely iraqi response, not iranian, not if that works, nothing succeeds like success in military affairs. can we take a look attic rit. and tell us why you think it s so important. it goes to what fareed said. the criticality of taking land away from isis, because that s what they desire, that s part of the caliphate. taking back mosul. we ve seen the buildup also in s samara. a critically important shia city with a lot of sunnis there. not too far from baghdad. about halfway distant between tikrit and baghdad. ....
Hip cra hypocrisy that we have to go after. the point is so important because we have to remember, al qaeda began as a grand jihadi organization and picked some specific goals. we re going to attack meshes, maybe the saudi royal family. isis began with a very narrow sectarian goal, which is the cause of the dispossessed sunnis in syria and iraq. in iraq, they felt like they were ruled by a shia dictatorship. in damascus, it was quasi shiite. graham s article does a wonderful job. and the goals become grander and more, and now they re attracting people. but at heart, they re a sunni revolt against shia rule. to your point, a lot of people in the west don t pay attention to the sunni/shia ....
One were the shia. above christians, above everyone else. even above the americans. when the americans leave iraq, the majority of shia will be the enemy i face. what was the strategy. his strategy was, let s kill them. he hated them. in fact, when he first met osama bin laden, one of the things he did to alienate bin laden, was to go after the shia, murder them, dispossess them, blow up their holy shrines. their retaliation against the sunnis will drive the sunnis greater into our fold. that was the strategy. by the way, this is playing out even today. but here s why i think it s an important issue, which is all their globes are truly global or are their goals local. because in essence, at the core they seem to have these very local goals. but they ve layered on these global ones. you know, and a lot of the foreign fighters come for those global goals. the foreign fighters don t come because they want to save syria. ....
This iranian force, you see a shia militia/death squad coming in you are suspect. but i would contend that the sunni/shia divide is not what we re all making it. in the north, there have been kurds, sunnis, shia, turkman, syrians, living together under saddam hussein for a very long time. it is not that much of it would be the equivalent of saying your politics are different, your religion is different, but they now see a threat. and even though the iranians are now contributing to the fighting of isis, there might be some contention, the sunni tribal members might say, these are shia forces come in, sadrists, it is contributing to the good. i think let s see if this works out. you re right that that s the plan, and the iraqi government has made some good steps. they are going to try to retake mosul, as we understand it. there are about 2,000 isis fighters there. ....