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Jon Alterman: Hassan Hassan is the director of the program on non-state actors in geopolitics at the Center for Global Policy and the editor-in-chief of its new online journal, Newlines Magazine. In the last decade, he has emerged as one of the world's leading experts on the Islamic State Group, which occupied and then was expelled from eastern Syria, where he grew up. We first met about ten years ago in Abu Dhabi, where he was working as a journalist and analyst after obtaining his master's degree in international relations from the University of Nottingham. The book he co-wrote on ISIS in 2015, Inside the Army of Terror, was justly and widely acclaimed, and was translated into more than a dozen languages. Hassan, welcome to Babel.
Hassan Hassan: Thank you, Jon. Always pleasure to speak to you.
Jon Alterman: Your article in Newlines draws on the work of a former colleague to explore the rise of Shi'ite militias in Iraq. What are the core conclusions of that research?
Hassan Hassan: The core work was focused on this idea that there's a new regime in Iraq. At the forefront of this regime—or the people who control this new regime in Iraq—are Shi'ite militias beholden to Iran. These are the groups that are most loyal to Iran. The work distinguishes between two types of militias: the more nationalist, the more loyal to a local clergy versus the ones that are loyal to Iran and the supreme leader in Iran.
Jon Alterman: Tell me a little bit about the researcher who worked on this, Hisham al-Hashimi.
Hassan Hassan: Hisham al-Hashimi is mostly known as an expert on ISIS. He is really the foremost ISIS expert in Iraq and even globally. He understood ISIS best, he helped the Iraqi government and the U.S.-led coalition understand ISIS and track some of the most important figures that operated within ISIS. And that was because of the expertise he had. He was part of the insurgency from which ISIS emerged, the anti-American insurgency after 2003. His radicalization started earlier and his association with some of these groups enabled him to understand these groups very well, but also because of the involvement in the insurgency, he knew some of these people who operated with an ISIS first firsthand. He fought alongside them, he was a cleric supervising some of the most powerful and largest insurgency organizations within Iraq after the U.S. invasion 2003.
Jon Alterman: That's a remarkable journey for somebody who was born Shi'a, became a Sunni, fought as an insurgent, and then became a trusted advisor to the prime minister, Mustafa al-Kadhimi. That is a pretty unusual journey. What does that tell us about Iraq and what does it tell us specifically about Hisham?
Hassan Hassan:
The thing about Hisham, if you go back to the 90s and early 2000s: yes, he went through these radicalization phases, like you said—he embraced hard line Sunni views in the 1990s, he became part of the insurgency in the 2000s—but he always had issues with the people who ruled Iraq, the bad guys essentially. So he was against Saddam Hussein, he was jailed by the regime of Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. He had issues with Al-Qaeda in Iraq in the 2000s. That was one of the reasons actually he left Iraq just before 2009 for Syria, before he came back during the government of the former prime minister of Nouri al-Maliki. So he returned to Iraq and became an advisor and trusted advisor and expert on ISIS.
If you trace his journey throughout, his adulthood. He always had problems with people who ruled Iraq. And now, after ISIS was defeated, the new bad guys in Iraq essentially were the Shi'ite militias. And that's when he started to have these tensions with the Shi'ite militias. And it started around the time that ISIS was being defeated in Iraq in 2016. Then he was threatened directly by one of the most powerful leaders of the most powerful militia organizations in Iraq, known as Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, led by Qais al-Khazali. He threatened Hashim directly and told him, "look, you need to focus on ISIS and the Sunni extremism, forget about Shi'a groups." He kind of threatened him: if you continue to talk about Shi'ite militias, you will have trouble with us.
Jon Alterman: And they killed him in July.
Hassan Hassan: And that's what some sources are telling us that this person and his organization was one of two organizations involved and implicated in his assassination in July.
October last year was a time when young Shi'a Iraqis started to protest against the Shi'a dominated political class in Baghdad, that was really unexpected. That was just a year after ISIS was defeated in Iraq and after many scholars called then the first non-sectarian election took place in Iraq. Hisham al-Hashimi emerged out of this movement, the young movement in central and southern Iraq that was really fed up with all these political elites that were ruling Iraq. Even after the defeat of ISIS, they never tried to sort of move away from the sectarian politics and all this sectarian discourse, and the young people rebelled against them.
And they said, "you know what? We need to have a technocratic government led by non-corrupt elites or politicians." Hisham started to become kind of one of the most outspoken figures against these militias, against the political class. He started to have these problems and tensions with the very militias that would kill him later. It’s actually the same time that he started to work on this report that really mapped out all the Shi'ite militias that were controlling Iraq across from the south all the way to the west and north.
And in this report, he was basically tracking how they make money, how they control Iraq, how they manipulate the system, how they started to take over the system from, within, from without. And his conclusion is really that there's a new elite in Iraq, a new regime. It's the new Saddam that's controlling Iraq from within, even though you have someone like Mustafa al-Kadhimi being the prime minister and he's a good guy. He is seen as a person who represents that sort of post sectarian system or politics in Iraq. But underneath that the deep state, if you like, is through these Shi'ite militias controlled by Iran.
Jon Alterman: You've spent years studying ISIS; what is similar and what's different in the way these militias operate?
Hassan Hassan: Well, if you think about it, the Shi'ite militias and Sunni militias are two faces of the same coin. They are hijacking their society—and the causes and the grievances of their societies—to claim that they represent these demographics. ISIS sold itself as the vanguard of this Sunni revivalism. But it was really rejected by those demographics that it claimed to represent. The same thing goes for Shi'ite militias; they claimed that they were the protector of the Shi'a demographics in Iraq, and they fought against ISIS, and they were seen for some time as the heroes of Iraq because they sacrificed themselves in the fight against ISIS as the security forces were retreating in the face of ISIS. But then just a year or within a few months, they emerged as the enemies of this very demographics they claim to represent. They hijack the grievances, the legitimate grievances of their communities, and they go further into imposing their own ideology on these communities.
Jon Alterman: You grew up in the eastern part of Syria, close to the Iraqi border, and you have witnessed firsthand what it looks like when the United States is very hands-on about reconstituting the political order, like it did in Iraq, and what it looks like when the United States is very hands-off like in Syria. What lessons do you think Americans should draw from the last 20 years of direct involvement in the areas that you grew up in?
Hassan Hassan: That is always a hard question, because on one hand we do need the United States to play a role in the region, if the other choice again is China, Russia, and so on, or Iran in this case. But on the other hand, the problem is the United States does just enough to deal with the problem and then it leaves it to fester and come back. The United States intervened in Libya and left the day after. In Syria, it left, it didn't intervene against Bashar al-Assad. And Iraq, it occupied Iraq for some time. And in all these different places, even though we have different models, we see the same result, which is failure.
And I think the key thing here is not really intervention or lack of intervention. It's really a “stay in long enough to see the results.” And in each place, there's a failure of being there. I think that's a key thing. In Iraq, the United States is there, but it's not there at the same time. It's not there, meaning it's not supporting the right people, there's always a change of policy. It's almost always six-month plan, there's no long-term planning. And this applies across the board. It applies in Afghanistan, in Iraq and Syria and Libya.
Jon Alterman: Phil Gordon has a new book out that argues that the United States just shouldn't be involved in regime change. It never works out, so we shouldn't even start. Am I hearing you say that not only should the United States stay involved, but it should be more deeply engaged in making sure that the outcome is closer to what would serve U.S. long-term interests?
Hassan Hassan: I think this really goes back to a bigger question, is what is the U.S. role in the whole region? If you make a decision that the United States needs to be there at some point, that it has interest in the region—whether you're talking about economic interest, allies in the region—then it follows that you have to do something to make sure that you're part of the solution, part of this long-term stability. If you decide that, if we here in the U.S. make a decision that the U.S. shouldn't be there anyway, and should just retreat, what follows from that is a whole different way of thinking. There's a flawed logic in starting from point three, rather than from point one, in the sense that you don't start from the initial logic of why the U.S. is there.
Jon Alterman: As a final question, how would you, as somebody who grew up in the Middle East, persuade Americans, that they should really care about the long-term trajectory of the region?
Hassan Hassan: One thing we do—whether at work here or just intellectually—is to call for a way for the United States to serve its interests. We believe that the U.S. has interests, and we need to protect these interests, but at the same time you can protect your interests while doing the right thing. And usually they actually come together. It's not like, can we do this and do the right thing, no. Doing the right thing actually serves American interests in the world because the U.S. has a good idea, which is “democracy doing good work in the world” versus all the bad ideas that we have in the region and beyond.
Jon Alterman: Hassan Hassan, thank you very much for joining us on Babel today.
Hassan Hassan: Thank you very much, indeed.