On The Nation: Lisa Owen interviews Rukmini Callimachi

Lisa Owen: Donald Trump has reached the 100-day mark in his presidency, and it’s been an interesting 100 days, to say the least. Despite bold promises during his campaign, Trump’s Mexican wall is off the cards, Obamacare hasn’t been repealed, and a ban on Muslims entering the US has been bogged down in the courts. I’m joined now by the Middle East correspondent for The New York Times, Rukmini Callimachi. Good morning. Thanks for joining us. Tell me, how do you think Trump has generally done in his first 100 days?
Rukmini Callimachi: Well, among the promises that Trump made in the campaign leading up to his win is that he would take aggressive action against ISIS. I just came back from Mosul last week. I was in western Mosul, which is the scene of the heaviest fighting now, and from my perspective, ISIS remains as strong and entrenched as ever. So at least on that front he seems to be running into difficulty.
All right, well, one of his biggest fights that he had was over this travel ban. How has it played in those countries?
It’s been pretty disastrous in these countries. Wherever I went in Iraq, I was being accompanied by Iraqi troops, many of whom have been trained by US forces and who are close to the coalition. And they at every stage expressed confusion and frustration at this ban, because they see themselves as being the entity that is fighting the Islamic State most directly. It’s not US troops that are fighting the terror group; it’s Iraqi troops. And so they don’t understand how it is that their country was among the countries that was listed. And I think the reaction has been the same in all the majority-Muslim nations that were named on the travel ban.
And Trump also focused hard on terror during this campaign trail, saying that he was going to get rid of ISIS. What do you think his strategy is to actually achieve that?
Well, the one concrete thing that we’ve seen is that the procedure for calling in airstrikes has been loosened and has been streamlined. What I was hearing from Iraqi commanders, again in Mosul, and these are the people that are right there on the front lines fighting this terror group, is that it’s much easier now for their spotters on the ground to call in an ISIS position. It’s much easier for that information to now make it up to the coalition and for the airstrike to be approved. Now, I’ll back up by saying last year and the year before last, the strictness of the rules of the engagement was one of the main complaints that I kept hearing in Iraq and also in Syria from the rebel units and the Iraqi army that are working in tandem with the coalition. Back then they were telling us that the rules of engagement were just too restrictive and it made it too hard to fight the terror group. So that was, I think, a legitimate complaint. But what’s happened now is it seems that we’ve flipped to the other side and some of the safety mechanisms that were in place to avoid mass civilian casualties have, at least according to Iraqi sources, been removed. And one of the tragedies that occurred quite recently is an airstrike that essentially took down an entire block of buildings in western Mosul. When I left western Mosul, they were still digging up the bodies there. And we’re hearing that the death toll could claim as high as 300 people killed. If it really reaches those numbers, that single airstrike could be one of the deadliest in terms of civilian casualties in America’s history.
Can you tell me, what do you hear about what ISIS thinks of Donald Trump as president?
So, ISIS has been relatively coy in terms of its official communications. They only just recently put out their first official statement about Donald Trump post-election and post-inauguration. They used insulting language to speak of him. They described him as dumb. But what’s interesting is to look at the social media posts of ISIS fighters and followers, and they have been— I mean, to put it bluntly, they have been overjoyed by the election of Donald Trump. They see him as useful to their cause, because, in their minds, he is putting out a version of foreign policy that targets Muslims, and that’s exactly what they think America is trying to do, and for them, Donald Trump is just doing it explicitly.
So, what, is he having a positive impact from their point of view on recruitment?
Well, it’s hard to measure recruitment, but one of the comments that I collected when I was in Mosul earlier this year, this was a conversation that my translator had with a friend of his who was in one of the occupied portions of western Mosul, and that civilian was saying that he was overhearing ISIS fighters on his street joking about how the travel ban was in fact ‘the blessed ban’, because from the point of view of these ISIS fighters, it was going to help their cause. So there’s really no concrete way for us to measure recruitment. We don’t have exact numbers of how many more fighters have joined the group or have been drawn to the group, but it goes without saying that rhetoric that alienates Muslims is not helpful to a fight where the terror group is positioning itself as the protector of Sunni Muslims.
The thing is, I suppose, when you look at the numbers for Trump, he’s, what, the worst approval ratings of any new president, but when people have surveyed voters who voted for him about whether they would vote for him again, about 96% of people have said they will vote for him again. So, clearly, there is a bunch of people that really like Donald Trump’s hard line on terror, his hard line and flexing his military muscle with the strike on the Syrian air base. Some people like it. It’s working for him, isn’t it?
I mean, those numbers speak for themselves, and I think part of that is a reaction to the previous administration that was seen, really, as having, in a way, turned a blind eye to the rise of the Islamic State. The administration was caught off guard when Mosul fell in 2014, and many, in retrospect, have blamed that failure on the premature pull-out of troops. The point of terror, the very etymology of terror, is to terrorise people, to frighten people. And what ISIS has, I think, succeeded in doing, and not just in America but we’re seeing it now in Europe, where Marine Le Pen is a real contender in the presidential election, is people are frightened, and so they’re looking— In a reaction to that, they don’t fully understand the mechanisms of terror, they don’t understand, for example, that the vast majority of ISIS acts of terror, both inspired and directed, have not been carried out by immigrants; they’ve been carried out by native-born citizens of each of those countries. But in that reaction and that fear, they reach out to a political figure like Trump or like Marine Le Pen who they think are talking tough, you know, against terrorism.
Rukmini Callimachi, thank you so much for joining us this morning.
My pleasure, Lisa.

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