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Crisis in Iraq: Militants March Toward Baghdad; Army Unit Remembers Al-Baghdadi; Army General to Investigate Bergdahl Case

Aired June 16, 2014 - 09:00   ET

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

ANA CABRERA, CNN ANCHOR: I appreciate it. And I'm a runner so I can appreciate it even more.

Good to see you, guys. Happy Monday.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Thanks.

CABRERA: The NEWSROOM starts now.

Good morning, I'm Ana Cabrera in New York in today for Carol Costello. Great to have you with us.

Let's get right to our big story. We begin this hour in Iraq where militants are marching toward Baghdad and the U.S. is inching toward possible action.

Now within the next few hours, the amphibious warship USS Mesa Verde will enter the Persian Gulf. There are 550 Marines on board. Now they could help with evacuating Americans who are currently in Iraq. Some have already been moved from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and as many as 100 additional U.S. Marines have now been scrambled there to provide extra security at the embassy.

Another measure of this deepening crisis, the U.S. may turn to a long time enemy. In fact, it's considering direct talks with Iran, which also shares some grave concerns that Iraq could collapse, destabilizing the entire region. Meanwhile, the extremist Islamic group ISIS posted these photos. You can see they seem to show the execution of captured Iraqi Security Forces. ISIS claims it has slaughtered 1700 of the unarmed men. A statement from the U.S. State Department condemns the execution as horrifying and says they show, quote, "the blood lust that these terrorists represent."

Only CNN has the vast worldwide resources to bring you every angle of this rapidly changing story. So over the next couple of hours, our correspondents, analysts, guests, will walk us through the many layers. This is a complex situation.

Let's begin with foreign affairs reporter Elise Labott with a closer look at what's happening at the embassy in Baghdad -- Elise.

ELISE LABOTT, CNN FOREIGN AFFAIRS REPORTER: Well, Ana, the U.S. embassy in Baghdad is currently open for business but the State Department has moved some employees to its consulates in other parts of Iraq and others to neighboring Jordan to work out of the Iraq office there. It will make it much easier in the event the U.S. needs to pull out entirely.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LABOTT (voice-over): With an Islamist insurgent force moving swiftly towards Baghdad, officials say the State Department is preparing fresh plans for evacuating its staff in the event of total collapse.

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Our top priority will remain being vigilant against any threats to our personnel serving overseas.

LABOTT: The U.S. has some 5300 personnel in Iraq, about 2,000 of them Americans, at its embassy in Baghdad and consulates in Basra in the south and Erbil in the north. Moving so many people in a war zone will be an extremely difficult task.

Unlike the evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1975, where American negotiated safe passage for 1200 Americans, here, the U.S. must be able to secure airfields with the U.S. military no longer on the ground and Iraqi forces fleeing as extremists advance. The militants are seizing airfields and have surface-to-air missiles which can threaten pilots during an evacuation.

The largest of its kind, 10 times larger than any U.S. embassy in the world, the American embassy in Baghdad sits along the Tigris River and it cost U.S. taxpayers nearly a billion dollars to build. The fortress was designed to sustain a massive long-term U.S. presence.

JIM JEFFREY, FORMER U.S. AMBASSADOR TO IRAQ: The embassy is very, very heavily fortified. We have extremely good security personnel and a lot of them. The embassy is set up to be self-sufficient and the embassy can take a lot and it has.

LABOTT: The 104-acre compound is bigger than the Vatican with 22 buildings, apartment, and even an Olympic-sized swimming pool. About 200 Marines and U.S. Army personnel, along with diplomatic security agents and contractors now guard the complex but that's a far cry from the thousands of U.S. troops that once patrolled the secure Green Zone.

Officials say for now, most of the Americans will stay put but acknowledge security could deteriorate very quickly.

JEFFREY: You do have to consider what would happen if not that the city were overwhelmed by 800 or 1200 or 1500 ISIL but rather what if they're able to cut all of the roads, lines of communication, lines of supply into the city and essentially besiege it?

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LABOTT: And senior State Department officials say the embassy has plenty of food and water for employees to hunker down and ride this crisis out but less people to take care of in Baghdad does ease the burden on the embassy. It means those provisions could stretch longer. They say the U.S. will only move to a full evacuation if things really get out of hand -- Ana.

CABRERA: All right. Elise Labott, we know you're staying on top of that. Thank you.

Let's dive deeper. And joining me now is former deputy National Security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan under President George W. Bush, Meghan O'Sullivan, she is now an international affairs professor at Harvard's Kennedy School.

Good morning to you.

MEGHAN O'SULLIVAN, FORMER DEPUTY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: Good morning.

CABRERA: What, if anything, surprises you most about this deteriorating situation there in Iraq?

O'SULLIVAN: Well, I think the most surprising element to people, even who have watched this very closely, is how rapidly the Iraqi Security Forces seem to crumble when faced with the ISIS threat in the north. This when we dig deeper is an entirely surprising when we see how much the force was politicized over the last two and a half years. But even still, it was quite a dramatic throwing down of their arms and leaving open the battlefield in the gateway to Baghdad fairly open.

CABRERA: It seemed like a forest fire in terms of how quickly they spread throughout the country. The U.S. is now reportedly exploring direct talks with Iran, our enemy, over this crisis in Iraq. It's an idea that has lawmakers split.

I want you to listen to what Senator Lindsey Graham told our Dana Bash this weekend on "STATE OF THE UNION."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R), SOUTH CAROLINA: If Baghdad falls and the central government collapses in Iraq, the Iranians are the biggest winner. We're the biggest loser. ISIS, as Nic says, operates with impunity from Syria to Baghdad. They will hit us again. They will march on Jordan.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CABRERA: So, Meghan, would enlisting Iran's help be the right move, do you think?

O'SULLIVAN: I think politically it makes a lot of sense for the United States and Iran to speak together about this. They in fact don't have totally disparate objectives in Iraq. Politically they're looking for stability. Iran has looked for a Shia-leaning government, but in fact, you know, there is a political solution here that I think could be both in Iran's interest and the U.S.' interest.

Militarily, it's absolutely I think an imperative to see Iran does not come into Iraq and assist it militarily. That will further enflame the conflict and it would obviously mean very, very negative things for U.S. interests there. So a political conversation, I think, makes sense because this, we have to remember is a political crisis as well as a military crisis. But making sure that the Iraqis have what they need militarily is one of the ways that the U.S. can ensure that Iran doesn't get involved militarily.

CABRERA: That's what's the key here because we don't want Iran to go in and then seize control of parts of Iraq. That's the big concern from some of the critics of the idea of talking to Iran and bringing them into this conflict at all.

Meghan O'Sullivan, we appreciate that. Sorry, go ahead. I'll let you -- I'll let you get that last word before we move on.

O'SULLIVAN: No. I was simply just -- no, I was simply underscoring the difference between conversations about the political system and conversations about military assistance. And that's the distinction to make and critics shouldn't react I think so vehemently to the idea of speaking with Iran about a conflict that is not just about Iraq, but is also very, very much about Syria. And, of course, the Iranians are knee-deep or neck-deep in Syria.

CABRERA: Yes. It's a regional conflict. It's a territorial conflict. Also political, cultural, ethnic. So there are lots of layers to it.

Meghan O'Sullivan, thank you.

Let's take a closer look now at what's happening there on the ground in Iraq.

One by one militants are gobbling up villages and cities as they push toward Baghdad. Last Tuesday, Mosul was the terrorist made prize. It is Iraq's second largest city in the far north, near Syria. And by Thursday, ISIS fighters captured much of northern Iraq, sweeping all the way to Fallujah, just 100 miles from the capital.

Today, the militants have wide control of the north, threatening to cut off that corridor to Baghdad and making it all the more vulnerability to a siege. Now Iraq's Defense Ministry says it's hitting back hard. It released this video of an airstrike, reportedly killing as many as 200 ISIS fighters in Mosul. And Iraq's prime minister is defiant to the armed assault on his government.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NOURI AL MALIKI, IRAQ PRIME MINISTER (via translator): We will march on every inch with all our weapons and with all our will and faith so we can liberate and cleanse every inch of Iraq from its southern most point to the furthest point in the north.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CABRERA: CNN's Nic Robertson is in Baghdad.

Nic, first off, tell us about that U.S. warship we mentioned at the top of the show, heading into the gulf. That and other preparations that might be happening there to keep ISIS at bay.

NIC ROBERTSON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yes. USS Mesa Verde, this is an amphibious assault ship, carries on board airlift capability, the V-22 Osprey Rotor vertical takeoff helicopter aircraft variant. 880 Marines on board, we're told.

This ship can travel at a speed of some 22 knots, 680 or so feet long. And right now given the statistics that are published publicly, it is crowned full of Marines. Its maximum capacity. They are, we understand, going be to be available if there is a need for evacuation of U.S. personnel. We have seen a drawdown of staff at the embassy here in Baghdad. Some sent to the south to Basra, that is a Shia dominated area. That's relatively stable, to a villa in the north, some staff have gone.

Again, that's a Kurdish area, that's relatively stable. Some of them sent to Amman. But the embassy itself here is inside ring after ring of security. It's in the green zone. And it is perhaps one of the securest buildings inside Baghdad. And that's been now ramped up with an additional 100 Marines there on the ground.

So it is -- the embassy itself very secure. And the fact that there's these additional Marine and airlift capability is in the gulf is an indication of the potential for -- potential level of concern that there should be something on standby if the situation escalates and gets worse.

CABRERA: And there, you are on the ground. Are you feeling or sensing sort of a clamoring of the Iraqi Security Forces as well as our U.S. Marines protecting the embassy there? But are you feeling that they're kind of getting ready for a fight?

ROBERTSON: I think that all bets are off. I mean, nobody really wants to make predictions on this at the moment. Why? Because we saw this rapid move in towards Baghdad from ISIS. Their stated goal is to surround the city and take the international airport on the edge of the city. They're running -- they're getting slower. They're running into problems north of Baghdad. In Diyala Province. That's a province just to the north and around.

Why? Because it's not Sunni majority. They rapidly moved through the country because they were moving through people who thought like them, that were angry against the government. They're now in a more mixed area, Sunni, Shia, Kurdish. That is slowing down the advance on the capital.

But ISIS has cells in this city here. There was a car bomb just -- a suicide bomb just yesterday in a cafe that killed 17 people and wounded 40 others. ISIS didn't claim it but most people believe it's theirs.

The real danger here is of an escalation in the sectarian nature of the conflict, the horrific pictures of ISIS murdering Iraqi security services, that ISIS released, that's going to enflame tensions with so much else. The potential for escalation really is there.

CABRERA: Right. Those pictures, they're so graphic, and they certainly do send a message.

ISIS currently trying to get out that message about how terrifying they certainly can be. Does it seem to be working, Nic?

ROBERTSON: Yes. I mean, look. What you have to look at here is how do people react to it? And what we saw over the weekend is political and religious leaders call on people here, particularly in the Shia community, people will tell you they're not -- they don't want a sectarian fight. They want to get on with their Sunni neighbors. But predominantly, you have Shia fighters coming out, even, and this just gives you an indication of how complicated the situation gets.

But in the fight in Syria, Shia militias have gone to the fight in Syria, to fight on the side of Bashar al-Assad against ISIS and groups like that, now they've come back here to -- come back here to Iraq, they've been reactivated, people are coming out on the streets to join these militias because they think the threat is very real. And they're responding to it.

So I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's minds here that ISIS is potentially capable of coming further towards the capital and of perpetrating more murders. But we are -- it is an escalation at the moment, not a de-escalation through political talks.

CABRERA: It's all very concerning, Nic Robertson, thank you. And please stay safe.

Still to come, before becoming the head of ISIS, he was a prisoner in Iraq. And the American army unit responsible for guarding Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. Remember the shocking statement he made just before he was released. That's next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CABRERA: "I'll see you in New York." Those were the final words to a U.S. Army unit from the man at the head of this extremist group we have been talking about, ISIS. Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi spent time as an inmate inside the largest U.S. detention camp in Iraq back in 2009. He was eventually released.

Michael Daly of "The Daily Beast" interviewed the head of the Camp Bucca where Baghdadi was held, Army Colonel Kenneth King told him, "I'm not surprised that it was someone who spent time in Bucca but I'm a little surprised it was him." He went on to say that al Baghdadi was a, quote, "bad dude, but he wasn't the worst of the worst."

Michael Daly is joining us now.

And good morning to you. Fascinating interview. Had a chance to read your article.

MICHAEL DALY, THE DAILY BEAST: Thank you.

CABRERA: So, what I understand is there really were no clues that this detainee would end up becoming what some are now calling the most dangerous man in the world. How can that be? DALY: Well, I think it -- the way it could be is a number of reasons.

First of all, the guy who said he wasn't that remarkable at the time is a very sharp guy. This wasn't just a guy who sat up in his office and kind of looked out at the prisoners. They were watching the guys every minute of every day for four years and they were looking for any signs of leadership and if they saw that, they would move the guys around. If they saw a group coalescing, they would move them around.

I think at that point, when al Baghdadi was released, he probably wasn't that prominent of a guy. I think that -- but what he almost certainly did was he learned how to become a prominent guy. And he watched the importance of discretion, the importance of patience.

He knew that he was eventually going to get out, he was -- first of all, he's western enough, he speaks English, which is interesting that he -- and he's also was sharp enough to notice that the last group of guards who watched that camp were from a New York unit, compromised mainly and largely of FDNY and NYPD reservists. So, he knew they were New Yorkers.

So this was a guy watching us, at least as much as we were watching him. And when he gave those parting words, "I'll see you in New York," what is interesting to me is King didn't take it as a threat, I'll be on your doorstep and going after you.

CABRERA: Right.

DALY: He took it as I'll see you around the block, this is like a -- this guy kind of learned the system, knew the system, knew that all he had to do was wait and he was going to get back out and do what he was doing. I would imagine that as he was sitting there, in that camp, he was planning ahead and one of the things that everybody talks about how sudden this ISIS advance is.

But the other thing is that it must have been incredible detailed planning before they suddenly made their move.

CABRERA: And, Michael, you --

DALY: So, again, one of the things he probably during four years at Camp Bucca is how to watch.

CABRERA: Right. You told me that it is like he was using that Camp Bucca as a school of sorts. And those words, "I'll see you in New York," had such a different meaning then than perhaps what they do now.

Does the colonel think that we are threatened here in America, given what he said? Obviously, those are words that stuck with the colonel.

DALY: I didn't go that far with him. I think it was more -- his feeling was, first of all, he was surprised that this guy got to where he was. And that second of all, he -- you know, he was thinking about how much effort went into capturing this guy to begin with. And you wonder how many Americans got hurt going after this guy initially. All the effort put into watching him, all those years, and then all of a sudden he walks out and the guy knew all along all he had to do was wait, and he was going to go back to doing what he was doing.

And that's what he was telling us, you know, kind of a joke.

CABRERA: He kept such a low profile while he was there at Camp Bucca that people don't really remember him, there is no video of him. We just have that one picture because of his time there. I understand he wasn't even kept, you know, in the area where the most dangerous of the prisoners were usually kept at Camp Bucca.

Now, did we learn anything more from Colonel King about this man? Al Baghdadi. Did he seem to be a leader of sorts during his time as an inmate?

DALY: My impression was he was not. He was not perceived as a leader. He was not one of the guys running the Sharia courts by which they enforce discipline among themselves. I talked to a previous commandant of the camp who asked his name not be used. He didn't remember the guy at all. Didn't ring a bell, even when he had seen the picture, he didn't recognize the guy.

CABRERA: So interesting. Michael Daly, thank you so much for joining us and providing that insight.

DALY: Thank you for having me.

CABRERA: As the crisis in Iraq grows, CNN covers it like no other network can. Tonight, Anderson Cooper reports live from Baghdad. It starts at 8:00 p.m. Eastern, right here on CNN.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CABRERA: Why did Bowe Bergdahl walk away from his post in Afghanistan? That's what Bergdahl's comrades have been asking for five years.

Starting this week, a high ranking army officer will now try to get to the bottom of it.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CABRERA (voice-over): The main question in the Bowe Bergdahl controversy, is he a deserter? Now, a two-star general will investigate. The general appointed by the Pentagon but not named publicly will look into Bergdahl's disappearance from base in June of 2009.

An Army investigation in the months after he disappeared found that Bergdahl did deliberately leave his base in the Paktika province of Afghanistan. But it did not find that Bergdahl deserted. That will depend on his intent. And the answer to that question is not yet known.

DR. ELSPETH RITCHIE, MILITARY PSYCHIATRIST: You want to make sure he knows what's going on, that he is oriented and alert, and that he's not psychotic. By psychotic, I mean hearing voices that aren't there, or seeing things that aren't there.

CABRERA: It's not clear when Bergdahl himself will be questioned. Afghan witnesses tell CNN that when he disappeared, Bergdahl was abducted and beaten. Some of his fellow soldiers say he may have been trying to contact the Taliban.

EVAN BUETOW, BERGDAHL'S FORMER TEAM LEADER: I heard it straight from the interpreter's lips as he heard it over the radio. And at that point, it was, like, this is kind of snowballing out of control a little bit. There is a lot more to this story than just a soldier walking away.

CABRERA: Another question, were any U.S. troops killed while searching for Bergdahl? Some soldiers say yes, six troops were killed. The Pentagon says there is no evidence of that. The answer to another question is also not known, just how long the investigation will take.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CABRERA: So, let's talk more about how this army investigation will proceed and what Bowe Bergdahl may be going through right now.

Joining us, CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr.

Barbara, the general is expected to begin work on this case this week, a two-star general with the army. What might he focus on first?

BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT: Well, our understanding is that first he'll focus on looking at the existing report, the existing interviews with army personnel familiarizing himself or herself with everything regarding this matter.

The next step then, of course, will be to question Bowe Bergdahl. That will have to happen after Sergeant Bergdahl's military and mental health team as well as the people focusing on his reintegration after they say it's OK. This step is the logical next step. It doesn't mean that Bergdahl is going to undergo that legal questioning just yet, Ana.

CABRERA: And we know he also hasn't seen his family, so certainly there are steps he needs to take in his reintegration process. Now, when he does undergo the questioning, what types of protections might he receive?

STARR: Well, this is going to be something the Army will proceed with carefully and legally. We are told that he will be advised of his rights, he will be offered counsel just like anyone else in the army, the military or in American civilian society. He has all the same rights and protections.

And really, I think the key point here is at the moment, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl has not spoken to investigators for himself to tell his story. So, really we only have half the picture. What they were able to glean when they first investigated the matter back in 2009, what other troops are saying, they want to talk to him, they want to make very sure, however, he's mentally very healthy when they talk to him, so they know they're getting solid information.