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U.S. Attacks ISIS Targets Inside Syria; U.K. Not Helping U.S. with ISIS Air Strikes; U.N. Resolution Goal to Track Terrorist; U.S. Went to War in Syria Without Vote in Congress

Aired September 23, 2014 - 14:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back. President Obama making it clear today America is not alone in the fight against ISIS. Five coalition partners in the region participated in the operation. Four of them actually taking part in air strikes. One of America's strongest allies in recent conflicts in the Middle East, the United Kingdom, they were not involved in the air strikes so far. The British defense minister commented on Twitter saying, "The U.K. supports the air strikes launched by the U.S. and regional allies last night. The government continues to discuss what further contribution the U.K. may make to international efforts that tackle the threat from ISIL."

I want to bring in CNN chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour.

First of all, the United Kingdom, they need parliament to vote and parliament has been in recess, which is one of the reasons they're not involved.

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: That's true. But also remember they had a terrible setback this time last year when David Cameron was all set to cross the red line, so to speak, with strikes against Assad back then and parliament said no way. And it's been very politically traumatic. But they do want to help. And David Cameron's here in New York and he's also talking about he supported it. They do want to help.

COOPER: You talked to an official from Bahrain --

(CROSSTALK)

AMANPOUR: I did. The foreign minister joined me just now on my program. Ad he said, we've joined the coalition, we are allies, we will do so, quote, "for as long as it takes, and we have to destroy these hateful people." He said, it's not just you guys or the Syrians. It's all of us that they're threatening, potentially.

COOPER: And it cannot be overstated how important it is to have Sunni countries involved in this, so it's not just the United States or Western countries attack Sunni extremist groups. You actually have a Sunni dominated countries attacking the Sunni -- (CROSSTALK)

AMANPOUR: One hundred percent. it's a very big diplomatic, political, cultural, religious fig leaf as well as being a military help. It's important. There's nobody but the United States that can do this stuff properly. These others are all very much in support. But nonetheless, they're there. That's pretty important because it's unprecedented.

I remember the first gulf war. There was an army of Arabs set up with the West against Saddam Hussein. But most of them were on the ground, tanks, fighting forces, boots on the ground, et cetera. This is the first time in more than 20 years we've had this array join in Western air strikes, or just one Western air strike.

COOPER: And not just, you know, giving vocal support. But having planes in the air.

AMANPOUR: Exactly.

COOPER: It's pretty significant.

AMANPOUR: Exactly.

COOPER: The time line in all of this, I think a lot of people -- President Obama said, look, this is going to be something that lasts beyond my administration, but this is a completely open-ended operation. And though the -- we might not see this level of air strikes continually every day for a long period of time, this is completely open ended. We don't know how long it'll take inside Syria to get rebels, if it's even possible, into the field, and also for Iraqi forces to really stand up and be able to fight.

AMANPOUR: That's right. A couple of things. First and foremost, this is something the new Iraqi prime minister has to get his house together politically. He's going to be meeting with President Obama tomorrow. Fortunately, I'm having an interview with him tonight so I'm going to find out about his plans to get Sunnis on board with his government. It's not working yet.

COOPER: Right, because the White House keeps saying, well, there's a new Iraqi government in place. They're already reaching out. But that's -- it's not something that happens overnight.

AMANPOUR: No, and six weeks of American air strikes have actually not dislodged the dug-in ISIS forces. They're still in control of Mosul. It's sort of held the line, so to speak, but it hasn't caused them to retreat. They've attacked their hardware and depots and this and that. But the forces are still dug in. That's a big, big problem.

Then, as the Bahrain foreign minister agreed and President Obama said today, stop the funding to these groups. That's something they have to commit to do. Whether it's official sanctioned funding going to ISIS or other groups, it's wealthy sympathizers in the region doing it. That has to stop, stop, stop. Stop the flow of foreign fighters going in. And the European nations are taking all sorts of measures to prevent their nationals going --

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: Let's be real, though. To get Sunni groups in Iraq to peel away from ISIS, Sunni groups which are now supporting ISIS, they have to have confidence that the central government in Baghdad is going to reach out to them, represent their interests.

AMANPOUR: Right.

COOPER: And you have Shia militias, Shia death squads enmeshed with the Iraqi security forces right now fighting alongside.

AMANPOUR: And you're right. And this is the challenge. Something big and dramatic has to happen by the new prime minister in his office, his cabinet to persuade the Sunnis to come onboard. That's the only thing that's going to fix this. The U.S. can air attack all it wants but it cannot win this war just by that. And furthermore -- and this is vital to understand -- this is going to be a long campaign, but without boots on the ground -- and I don't necessarily mean U.S. boots on the ground -- but without some kind of ground force, they can't keep progressing to various different stages. That's why setting up a new Free Syrian Army or whatever has to happen quickly. But I just talked to the Pentagon who tells me it could be literally more than 12 months before it's fully formed and ready to go back in the fight.

COOPER: A long time.

Christiane, thanks very much.

A lot more from Christiane ahead.

Also, don't miss Christiane's interviews this week from the U.N. General Assembly. Today, she sits down with Iraqi prime minister, the first international TV interview he's given. Tomorrow, an exclusive interview with the U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. On Thursday, another exclusive, with the new emir of Qatar, his first since becoming emir. Also that day, she'll interview Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran.

Goodness. You've got a busy week.

AMANPOUR: You've got everybody in this pie, yeah.

(LAUGHTER)

COOPER: There you go.

All right, just ahead, new video showing how ISIS terrorists train for war.

Plus, a look at the -- at this new al Qaeda cell that plays an imminent threat against the U.S. It's a group you may not have heard about. Its leader is a former bin Laden commander, reportedly obsessed with blowing up planes. How close did they get to pulling off an attack?

This is CNN's special coverage ahead.

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COOPER: Welcome back. The U.S.-led attack on ISIS included bombing the terror group's training camps. And just released by ISIS, a new video CNN has obtained of a training camp that purportedly shows a group of fighters conducting military exercises in Raqqa where the air strikes took place.

Tracking foreign terrorists is the main focus of a U.N. draft resolution. The goal is to try to thwart the expansion of groups likes ISIS.

Joining me now is CNN global affairs analyst, Kim Dozier.

Kim, thanks for being with us.

How would this U.N. plan actually put a dent in the militant groups' recruiting efforts? What can the U.N. actually do about anything?

KIM DOZIER, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIR ANALYST: Well, part of it is that it establishes an international definition of what is a foreign terrorist fighter. And it asks all the signatories -- and the U.S. expects this to be signed fairly easily -- to both track those foreign fighters when they come through their territory, stop them if they can, and also to stop recruitment within areas they control. The advantage is it gives countries in the Arab world, who perhaps didn't want to do this because they didn't want to be seen as a U.S. stooge, listen to what the U.S. was telling them to do, instead, this makes tracking foreign terrorist fighters a U.N. mandate. And they can say to their local population, we're part of the U.N., we're being responsible, we have to crack down on these militant groups.

COOPER: It's interesting, because there's been so much focus on ISIS by U.S. officials, certainly by the media. You had Lindsay Graham talking about attacking ISIS or else everybody else in the U.S. is going to get killed. We're all going to get killed. But now there's this group, Khorasan, which U.S. officials are talking about. And it sounds like -- and it's an al Qaeda splinter group. It sounds like, from an operational standpoint, they have more capabilities of attacking Western targets, attacking the U.S. directly than ISIS.

DOZIER: I have to say that while we in the media have been focusing on ISIS, because they're media campaign has been so successful and also because, look, they took so much territory, you can see why we concentrated on that. But when you talk to folks in the counterterrorism community, they have been tracking these other groups. At an intelligence briefing recently, they warned that while ISIS was gathering -- capturing everyone's attention that al Qaeda, al Qaeda in Yemen and other of al Qaeda offshoots still had more capability, more expertise, including bomb making expertise, the will and intent to attack the United States now, and that's why the focus was on them. COOPER: It's also interesting because it seems like, given the world

that we live in and the ideological struggle going on here, that whether it's ISIS or another group, there are going to be groups like that for the near future. This is as much as a struggle, war of ideas, as it is a military war.

DOZIER: Anderson, I think you're partly right there. It's often seen by people on the ground, within the Arab world, the Muslim world, as the U.S., the West coming in and telling them what to do. I think that is why when you speak to administration officials, they were so intent of not moving until they had other Arab nations to be part of this coalition. Because the message is that this is a global coalition, it's not as ISIS portrays it, Islam against the West.

One of the things that the Obama administration believes the U.S. has failed to do over the past decade or so is to win the ideological fight, to win the fight for the hearts and minds of the people on the ground across the Arab world. And until you do that, you're going to keep having these groups pop up more and spread and draw all the followers like they're doing now -- Anderson?

COOPER: Kim Dozier, I appreciate you joining us. Thanks.

The U.S. went to war in Syria without a vote in Congress, of course. Is it time for lawmakers to show where they stand, in favor of war with ISIS or opposed to it? We'll speak live to the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee next.

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LT. GEN. WILLIAM C. MAYVILLE JR, JOINT STAFF DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS, PENTAGON: This first picture shows an ISIL finance center in Raqqa. It's before and after. On the left is the before, on the right, as you look at it, is the after. It was engaged with Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from "USS (INAUDIBLE)." Now the intended target was the communications array on the roof of the building. The Tomahawk cruise missiles detonated as air bursts with the effects focusing on the communications array. And as you can see on the right-hand-side in the picture, the after picture, the rooftop communications is heavily damaged while the surrounding structure remains largely intact.

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COOPER: Just some of the briefings we have seen from the Pentagon today showing the impact of some of the bombing campaign that took place overnight.

This is CNN special live coverage of the U.S. strikes against terror targets in Syria.

Joining us live now from Washington, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Thank you very much for being with us.

The Pentagon is saying initial indications suggest the strikes were very successful. No Americans killed or wounded. As the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, have you been briefed? And if so, what can you tell our viewers?

SEN. CARL LEVIN, (D-MI), CHAIRMAN, SENATE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE: I was told in advance what was going to be coming, but I've not been briefed beyond that briefing that you've seen provided to all of us. I think probably the impact militarily is the beginning of a sustained military effort. But the political impact in the Middle East is going to be just as great as the military impact by having Arab and Muslim nations join in so strongly in this effort, making a very strong statement that mainstream Islam is turning against these crazy fanatic terrorists.

COOPER: I want you to listen to General William Mayville, the Pentagon's director of operations. He's talking about this group Khorasan, which was bombed in Syria, as well.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MAYVILLE: We've been watching this group closely for some time. And we believe the Khorasan group was nearing the execution phase of an attack in either Europe or the homeland.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COOPER: So nearing the execution phase, he says of an attack either in Europe or in the homeland. Had you been made aware of that? And do we have any idea of what kind of attack and whether it's been disrupted?

LEVIN: We had been made aware they were moving towards an attack, it was fairly imminent. We did not have more details than that, other than being briefed, for some time that this group in Syria represented perhaps a more imminent threat in the United States than even ISIS.

COOPER: Given that this now seems to be -- as you said, it's an ongoing conflict, it's going to be a long conflict, should Congress vote on authorizing this?

LEVIN: Well, it's always better for Congress to authorize something. But there's been many instances where Congress has not authorized, particularly when it's an air campaign. I don't think we've ever, as a matter of fact, had an Authorization for the Use of Military Force when there were air strikes involved, such as in Bosnia, for instance. And, in fact, there's even been times when Congress has not voted to authorize ground forces.

But it's better. It's preferable that we vote on it because we're a lot stronger as a country, if Congress expresses its opinion. Particularly if it's unified with the president. We're asking Arab and Muslim nations to come together and they have done that in a very powerful statement. We want them to be open about it. And not just to do something behind the scenes, but to be openly going after terrorist groups that represent a narrow strain of Islam. And they've done this now.

So we surely should be open about what we believe here in the Congress. And I hope that we come back and vote on an AUMF. But if we don't, that doesn't mean that the president doesn't have the authority. He does. Every president, every president has said they have the authority even without congressional authority in these kinds of situations.

COOPER: But most folks on Capitol Hill are going off back to their districts, aren't they?

LEVIN: They are. And hopefully, they're going to explain where they are. We had one vote in the Senate that had to be a representative group vote because it wasn't directly on this issue. Even though it was like a 3-1 or 4-1 vote among Democrats supporting the continuing resolution, which had the funding for this, for the train-and-equip effort. Nonetheless, people going back to their states and their districts. We'll explain where they are. I think most of us very much support the president's policy on this. And it's important that people be asking that they state their position. And hopefully, when we come back, we have an opportunity to vote.

COOPER: But a lot of people aren't coming back until the November, isn't that right?

LEVIN: That's right. The only thing now which represents in voting form that people believe will be the votes in the House of Representatives, which was directly on the train-and-equip issue, and on the continuing resolution here in the Senate, which was, in effect, representing where people are on the training-and-equipping of the Syrian vetted moderates.

COOPER: Senator Levin, appreciate your time. Thank you.

LEVIN: Thank you.

COOPER: More of the breaking news in just a moment. We'll be right back.

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