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Wolf

Iraqi Forces Fight to Retake Ramadi; Muslim Families Banned from Boarding Flight to L.A.; 2 Israelis Dead in Jerusalem Stabbing Attack; Assessing the ISIS Threat. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired December 23, 2015 - 13:30   ET

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

[13:30:00] WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: And in Iraq, security forces are making headway in the quest to take back critically important town of Ramadi from ISIS. The new Iraqi assault began by unfolding a U.S. military -- began unfolding as a U.S. military brigade, U.S. military forces provided a bridge across a branch of the Euphrates River and then pushing it into the center of the city with the help from U.S. airstrikes to confront an estimated 350 ISIS fighters. But forces have a long way the go. It is believed ISIS has laid mines in buildings, laid explosive devices in the streets. An extremely dangerous situation there.

Let's bring in Republican Representative Scott Perry, of Pennsylvania. He's on the Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs Committee, and he's also a colonel in the Pennsylvania National Guard, and he has served in Iraq, and visited Afghanistan as a U.S. congressman.

Thank you very much for joining us.

I guess with all of the troops engaged in the military combat, this is real combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in Syria, and unfortunately, we should anticipate more U.S. casualties like the six Americans who had to come home in body bags this week?

REP. SCOTT PERRY, (R), PENNSYLVANIA: Unfortunately, it is true, Wolf. And certainly, my heartfelt condolences and prayers and thoughts with the families, especially at this time. But what the American people need to realize is that although the administration says it is no longer a combat zone, when you are assisting the forces out there on the combat zone, it is a zone for those individuals, whether they are Afghan, NATO forces or what have you, and they can and will be attacked. These are the consequences of war, unfortunately. And so for a political narrative we could say that the war is over, but if the enemy does not agree, then the war is not over, and that is the disheartening thing.

And also, Wolf, a declared combat zone means certain things for the families of lost soldiers, because the benefits and the awards and the decorations will change inexorably, and that is problematic for the soldiers who have lost their lives and the families who have lost their loved ones.

BLITZER: The six soldiers, airmen, and the military personnel who died at the Bagram Air Base this week in the suicide attack, they will get all of the benefits and the honors that they deserve, because this is real combat, unless you know something that I don't know?

PERRY: Well, once it is no longer designated a combat zone, the military sees that differently, and there are subtle changes, but they make a big difference to the families. The servicemember has passed, so they will never know, but it makes a difference on how things are administered, benefits and those types of things. There is a difference that goes with a combat zone, and people need to be aware of that.

BLITZER: And Afghanistan no longer a combat zone designation?

PERRY: Well, the president said that the combat zone is over, and so designations go from that. One you downgrade, certain benefits leave with the downgrade.

BLITZER: Fair point. And we will check into it to see if these military personnel and their families will get the honors and all of the full financial benefits that they deserve, because clearly they were in combat even if it is not formally called some combat zone. You make a fair point, Congressman.

PERRY: Right.

BLITZER: All of the tens of billions of dollars that the U.S. has spent to train and arm and equip the Afghan military, the Iraqi military, and was that money thrown down the drain?

PERRY: Well, not entirely, Wolf. I will tell you this, in all of the training in the world, it does not mean a hill of beans if you are not willing to fight for your country. And I think that we have seen it particularly in Iraq with the sectarian violence and the choosing of sides with the Sunnis and the Shias and they can be the best trained, no matter what, but if they don't have the will and the heart to fight and place their life on the line for the country, it does not matter how well trained you are. But if you don't stand and fight, the other side will take the stuff, and that what has happened as they have cut and run. And we find it objectionable, and very objectionable, as Americans who have paid our taxes to see the money thrown down the drain and literally given to the enemy.

BLITZER: And earlier, in May, when a few hundred ISIS terrorists stormed Ramadi, what did the Iraqi military do? They left their vehicles and simply ran away. And the same thing happened in Mosul where they ran away in the face of the ISIS terrorist assault. That is not the training that the U.S. expects would result. They should stay there and fight.

PERRY: That is right. But we confuse the training with the will to fight and place your life on the line. And it is easy to say that we have trained the people, and we have trained the people, but if they are not interested in putting their life on the line for the country and their belief, they won't do that. So we have to be careful about the terms they use and the reality of what those terms mean.

BLITZER: Do you support the U.S. spending billions of dollars to train the Iraqi and the Afghan military given the records they have shown so far, because the people, including the Republicans have so much money that could be better spent here in the United States?

[13:35:14] PERRY: Well, listen, Wolf, I think the training is part and parcel of the overall strategy and this strategy, if you want to call it such, has many points of failure, so while we rely on the training, we need to know that the people are willing to do the hard work and willing to work with one another when we also have the Shias working in there, and then the human rights violations against the Sunnis, that is not a complete strategy. So all of the training, again, while it might be well intended, if they don't have the will to fight, and fight the enemy, then it doesn't mean anything. So it is more of a comprehensive strategy, including training.

BLITZER: Good point. Scott Perry, the congressman from Pennsylvania. Thank you so much. And merry Christmas to you and your family.

PERRY: Thank you. And merry Christmas to you.

BLITZER: Thank you very much.

Coming up, a Muslim family in London had the Disneyland dream dashed. Why they say they were suddenly kept off of a plane to Los Angeles. And now an investigation into precisely what happened.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: Two Muslim families are blaming discrimination for ruining their plans to visit Disneyland. The families say they were not allowed to board a plane from London's Gatwick Airport to Los Angeles because of their religion.

The father just spoke to CNN.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MOHAMMAD TARIQ MAHMOOD, FAMILY BANNED FROM FLIGHT TO L.A.: He would not give us an explanation, and the kids were asking, what is the problem, why are we not going? And we said, what shall we tell the kids what is going on. And we need to know a bit more than a problem here, and because we have ESTA that says it is perfectly fine.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[13:40:05] BLITZER: Our aviation correspondent, Richard Quest, is joining us.

And, Richard, walk us through what happened right here with this family.

RICHARD QUEST, CNN AVIATION CORRESPONDENT & CNN HOST, QUEST MEANS BUSINESS: Right. You can hear the family talking there about ESTA, the Electronic System of Travel Authorization, and it is what a visitor from a visa waiver country has to apply online before travel to the United States. And all 11 members of this family received the ESTA approval. It's an online process. So six weeks ago, they get approval to go to the United States. They checked into the London Gatwick Airport, and no problem, and then between check-in and boarding the plane, something happens. Washington or the United States or somebody says that these people, nine of the 11, are not able to travel. They are denied access to the plane. They are escorted out of the airport.

And so, their local M.P. is saying, what on earth has happened? How can you get electronic approval to travel and check in and then be denied access at the aircraft.

And, Wolf, so far, nobody is able to give them an answer as to what was in the records when the manifest was sent to the U.S., because, Wolf, every plane that is flying into the United States, the entire passenger list is sent to the authorities for approval. And only once the passengers are approved can the plane take off.

BLITZER: And what about the alleged e-mail address that is supposedly associated with the 18-year-old son of the family that links to some sort of suspicious Facebook page, and what do we know about that?

QUEST: Well, this is a posting on Facebook by a name that is the same as the son, where it has a reference to al Qaeda in the posting. However, however, the father says it is not his son's page and that they don't know where it has come from, and it is a coincidence that it is the same name. So the suggestion or the potential is that it is simply a case of mistaken identity.

The local M.P., the local member of parliament is spitting feathers and has asked the prime minister David Cameron the take this up with Washington.

And the fundamental point is this, how would Americans feel if they were denied access to an aircraft having been given and granted permission with the visa or the ESTA, and then given no official reason why. It is the last bit that has the British officials incensed. Nobody can tell them why they were not allowed to board the plane.

BLITZER: As you know, Congress recently passed some legislation on the visa waiver program, which allows people from friendly countries to come here without actually getting much of the visa, unless those individuals had visited four countries, Sudan, Iraq, Iran or Syria, and in this particular case, the family's origins were from Pakistan, is that right?

QUEST: It is. And the law that you are talking about, which I'm not entirely certain it is fully coming into force, and certainly if it has come fully into force, it does not appear to be the reason why this was restricted, because they had received their ESTA approval. It is a conundrum here, and so far, the Customs and Border Patrol say they won't discuss individual case.

And really, this is going to be going to the top, because the question being asked is whether in some unofficial way this is an implementation of the sort of policies that Donald Trump had been talking about, barring Muslims. Nobody is suggesting that officially, but the family involved -- and I will pin it firmly on the family involved -- they are certainly saying that is this a question of a religious bar on the family going to the U.S.?

BLITZER: Well, we will find out what we can find out.

Thank you for the report, Richard Quest, in London for us. Appreciate it.

Coming up, there's new violence rocking the Holy Land only days before Christmas. There was an attack carried out this morning, and the impact it is having on tourism in the region. We will share what we know when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[13:47:45] BLITZER: More violence gripping the city of Jerusalem right now. The police there are saying that two Palestinian assailants carried out a deadly stabbing attack earlier this morning. It occurred outside of the Jaffa Gate in the old city of Jerusalem. Police eventually gunned down the attackers.

We will go to Oren Liebermann who is in Jerusalem for us.

Tell us what happened, Oren.

OREN LIEBERMANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We have learned that moments ago that two of the victims have died from the attacks, one is an Israeli who suffered stab wounds from the attackers and one is shot in the stomach, likely by police responding to the initial attack. This happened just outside of the Jaffa Gate of the old city, a busy place, because it leads straight into the Christian quarter and of course, it is two days before Christmas.

Here is what police say happened. Police say two attackers north of the refugee camp approached the area of Jerusalem and attacked with knives. They say that two were seriously injured and one moderately injured, but one of them have died from stab wounds in the attack, and the other died from police fire of police responding to the attack. And they had opened shooting and killing one of the attackers there at the scene and another attacker was rushed to the hospital where police say he died of his wounds -- Wolf?

BLITZER: Oren, how is this affecting tourism in nearby Bethlehem in this week of Christmas?

LIEBERMANN: Well, no doubt, that tourism is down. And we are in Bethlehem where we will be all day tomorrow, and we have spoken to the vendors and the tourists who say that it is down. And they say that mostly missing in tourism in the Holy Land is Westerners. The State Department issued a travel warning for Israel and the Palestinian territories. They say they are not seeing Americans or Europeans, and they are saying that it could be a rough Christmas this year for the Holy Land, and Bethlehem, and tourism in Jerusalem, because of the violence and the clashes occurring almost everyday here. It could be a very much Christmas of sorrow here -- Wolf?

[13:49:51] BLITZER: All right. We will check in with you tomorrow. Oren Liebermann, in Jerusalem, thank you very much. It has been one of the biggest stories of 2015, the war against ISIS.

Coming up, some of CNN's correspondents who have covered the story day in, day out, breakdown where the war stands against ISIS right now, and what the year ahead could have in store.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BLITZER: The war on ISIS has dominated international stories this year. The rapid spread of the jihadist groups and attacks at Paris are changing the ways the U.S. and other countries are fighting ISIS now.

Some of CNN's top foreign correspondents gathered to talk about the war on ISIS and what we can expect in the year ahead.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CLARISSA WARD, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Paris has been such a game changer, because as closely as I've been following the sort of reach of militant groups of ISIS in Europe and the U.S., I had never expected them for them to pull off this organized.

NIMA ELBAGIR, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Did you think it was that organized?

(CROSSTALK)

ELBAGIR: No, I don't think so.

(MUSIC)

WARD: The main thing that didn't go as well as they were hoping were the vests, the suicide vests.

(CROSSTALK)

ARWA DAMON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: They accomplished their goal.

ELBAGIR: They accomplished their goal.

(CROSSTALK)

ELBAGIR: There's a difference between extraordinary complex that need an infrastructure and eight guys with a vest --

(CROSSTALK)

WARD: I think they had an infrastructure.

IVAN WATSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: What surprises me a little bit about this is I think the lack of the short-term memory. It was a decade ago that we were looking at al Qaeda carrying out massive attacks which killed scores of people and we kind of forget the fear and panic of those days.

WARD: Also, the whole nature of recruitment was different. Like, al Qaeda was recruiting in the mosques.

WATSON: In the mosques.

WARD: And it was an entirely different prospect. Jihad was very abstract.

WATSON: Now these Facebook --

(CROSSTALK)

WARD: They are like your own friends.

WATSON: Who are doing it in their bedroom, yeah.

WARD: In their bedrooms. So it's a completely -- I think for intelligence authorities, it's a frightening prospect.

ELBAGIR: This kind of, I know he grew a beard, he started going to mosques, these are the telltale signs of radicalism that entire landscape --

(CROSSTALK)

ELBAGIR: -- has changed now.

[13:55:16] DAMON: But that also the greater underlying issues that we have in society, and what ISIS has now done for people that are slightly so inclined is give them that sense of purpose.

(CROSSTALK)

DAMON: The next question is, it's not in terms of intelligence, how do we fight this, but how do you actually fight that etiology. How do you revamp society where these kids have a different sense of purpose?

WATSON: All of these kids, their parents came to Europe for a better life. The sign of irony, their offspring grow up to be people that attack Europe.

WARD: We have this misconception that ISIS is about radical Islam. It's a product of a bunch of very complex geo-political historical trends that have been brewing for years.

(CROSSTALK)

WARD: It's not about Islam.

NICK PATON WALSH, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It's terrifying that some guys who are mentally well configured in San Bernardino can go shoot coworkers and put something on Facebook and that somehow joins global movement.

ELBAGIR: It's like a wave of hysteria that's building on each other. You saw Paris and then you saw San Bernardino crest off of it. It's like a contagion in a way.

DAMON: There needs to be not hysteria, but, I mean, let's not underestimate the threat either.

ELBAGIR: Yeah. I mean, it is huge.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BLITZER: Let's bring in our military analyst, retired Lieutenant General Mark Hertling; also joining us our CNN intelligence and security analyst, Bob Bair.

General, you heard the reporter roundtable, ISIS attacks. Do you agree this entire landscape or the U.S. has changed?

GEN. MARK HERTLING, CNN MILITARY ANALYST: I think it has changed somewhat, Wolf. I think we're looking at an adaptation of an Islamist ideology in different ways of recruiting and passing information and intelligence. But I truthfully think that under the wave top U.S. Intelligence communities, military communities, diplomatic communities are also adapting in the same way. But we have a lot of work to do.

BLITZER: Bob, how does the U.S. Infiltrate ISIS and get good intelligence on what's going on inside?

BOB BAER, CNN INTELLIGENCE &SECURITY ANALYST: Well, Wolf, it's a problem because the people joining this movement are believers. They believe in martyrdom, in end times, they're ready to give up their lives for this movement. And to recruit somebody like this is very difficult. We have to fall back on intercept telephones, e-mail and the rest of it, which really doesn't give you a complete picture of what the Islamic State is up to and there are whole parts of the world that are just off limits to us, Yemen, Libya, where the movement is growing and it difficult to predict where it's going. It's not an intelligence failing. It's that the nature of the target is so much more difficult than, for instance, the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.

BLITZER: General, do you think the U.S. has a good strategy in place right now to destroy ISIS?

HERTLING: I do, Wolf. I think we are attempting to discredit the organization along multiple paths. You have to do that. You have to destroy and kill some people in the battlefield. You have to intercept their messages. You have to change their ideology. You have to take away their finances. And you have to stop the travel, the freedom of movement, of the organization. That's the kind of things you do on the battlefield as you look at an enemy. You just don't go full force frontal against your opponent. You have to look at multiple ways to annihilate and take them out of their capability. We're doing that. However, that doesn't mean you're not going to see some of the kinds of attacks that we've seen this year. I truly believe that we will see more of those. I don't know if they will be as dangerous as we've seen in Paris or the like, but we will see more attacks from these lone wolves because, as Bob just said, you didn't intercept all of them. You have to be 100 percent perfect, and that's a hard thing to do. But the key is you have to discredit this organization for what it is on as many fronts as possible.

BLITZER: Some have suggested, Bob Baer, this could take not just a matter of months but years. General Odierno said it could take 10 years. What do you think?

BAER: I think general hurtling as this is going to be a long, long conflict, and as we take these cities back, if we take Ramadi, Baghdad, if we destroy them in Raqqa, I think they will become more dangerous. I think they'll move to other parts of the world, Nigeria. This could go on for a very long time. There is no better strategy at there point than to just fight this for a very long time. The Syrians did it in the '80s. They beat it. We'll be doing the same thing.

BLITZER: We'll see what happens.

Guys, thank you so much. Important discussion.

That's it for me. The news continues right now on CNN.