In this episode, recorded during a media briefing, Daniel J. Levy speaks with Jonathan Hackett about reported efforts to work with Kurdish forces against Iran. Jonathan examines the history and ambitions of different Kurdish groups and explains the mechanics of unconventional warfare. He also relates to the regional implications, and the possible outcomes of a new front opening in western Iran.
Jonathan Hackett is a United States Marine Corps veteran who spent 20 years across special operations and intelligence, much of that time focused on unconventional warfare. He worked with more than three dozen partner forces, including Kurdish groups in the Middle East.
Transcript
(This transcript has been automatically generated by AI — please excuse any potential errors.)
00:00:00:03 – 00:00:26:08
Daniel J. Levy
Good afternoon today is 10th of March 2026. My name is Daniel Jay Levy, programs manager at the BICOM think tank. And today we are joined by Jonathan Hackett for a briefing following the update at the back end of last week that the CIA, Mossad, are working with Iranian Kurdish militias in Iraq to ultimately deploy them eastward across the border and open a land front up against the Iranian regime.
00:00:26:10 – 00:00:45:24
Daniel J. Levy
Jonathan is a United States Marine Corps veteran and had a 20-year career spent between special operations and intelligence, with much of that time being spent conducting unconventional warfare. Working with over three dozen partner forces, including the Kurds in the Middle East. So, Jonathan, thank you for joining us. And over to you.
00:00:46:01 – 00:01:05:20
Jonathan Hackett
Thanks, Daniel, and thanks, everyone for being here. So, I want to talk about this a little bit history first and then go into kind of what an unconventional warfare operation is going to look like or could look like and then talk about the implications of that on various regional actors and other partners around the world. And I want to frame it.
00:01:05:22 – 00:01:19:17
Jonathan Hackett
I was an interrogator before, and a lot of times as an interrogator, we’d ask three questions about someone that we don’t know something about. We’d say, who are they? What do they want? And what are they willing to do to get it? And that’s how I want to kind of frame this briefing. So, the who are they of course, is the history.
00:01:19:17 – 00:01:37:05
Jonathan Hackett
And that’s who the Kurds were before and who they are now. And it’s very important to understand this historical perspective, because when we choose these partners, if we choose the wrong partners or don’t understand who we’re choosing, we could be setting ourselves up for second and third order effects that we may not anticipate. That would be negative for the West.
00:01:37:07 – 00:02:04:05
Jonathan Hackett
And so, this kind of has many different start points. But I’ll start with my own experience with the Kurds, my very first time with the Kurds. We were working against Daesh or ISIS to retake Mosul in 2016. And we had to separate and, pause our training with the Kurds on May 15th, 2016, because that was the 100-year anniversary of the ratification of the Sykes-Picot agreement between France, the UK and Russia.
00:02:04:05 – 00:02:33:07
Jonathan Hackett
And Russia, of course, dropped out during the Bolshevik Revolution. But that, to many Kurds was the turning point of when they first lost their state. And many Kurds today want to have some form of sovereignty, which we’ll talk about what those look like for the different groups. But the Kurds have was training to retake Mosul and northern Iraq remembered this as if it was yesterday, and it was so important to them that they had to stop their training in active combat operations to remember this tragic event in their own history.
00:02:33:09 – 00:02:58:17
Jonathan Hackett
Similarly, the Treaty of Love saying in 1923, split Kurdistan into four groups. That was and that’s what we now call Rojava Roj, helot, Bakr and Bolsover, which are northern, southern, eastern and western Kurdistan and Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran. That’s how we got to where we are today with where these different groups formed and how they formed inside of this, the actual sovereign states that the UN recognizes and kind of separated from one another in various different ways.
00:02:58:19 – 00:03:35:22
Jonathan Hackett
You might hear the name Barzani, for example, or Talabani. These are big names that represent some of these groups, for example, the KDP, the Kurdish Democratic Party and the People’s Unit of Kurdistan, which actually creates separation in Iraq of two different groups of Kurds. All of this is extremely important for which groups we’re picking and working with in Iran, because, for example, the KDP and the UK are not one group because they oppose each other, both politically and historically, have been at odds not only over linguistic differences, but also territorial sovereignty issues and in their beliefs.
00:03:35:22 – 00:03:58:00
Jonathan Hackett
For example, the PUK, which is aligned with the KDP, which is another group we’ll talk about, and there are many acronyms for Kurds. Unfortunately, there are dozens and dozens of different Kurdish groups with many acronyms. But the PUK, which is led by Talabani, who is currently the president of Iraq, is what some would call a leftist organization. It used to be a communist for a period of time, then became socialist, and now is simply just leftist as they describe it.
00:03:58:02 – 00:04:18:01
Jonathan Hackett
Whereas the KDP, which is Barzani and the group that the US has worked with significantly in Erbil, is a traditional or conservative Kurdish group. And there are, of course, some overlaps. These aren’t pure distinctions, but these are important for the groups with each other, because that means you can’t be training them at the same time in the same base, because they don’t agree on many things.
00:04:18:03 – 00:04:35:05
Jonathan Hackett
Then you have groups like the KDP, which is inside of Iran, which is what you may see in the news about the groups that were actually arming and hoping to go into Iran in combat operations. The KDP is aligned with the PUK, which is not the organization the US habitually has worked with in Iraq as much as others.
00:04:35:07 – 00:04:54:22
Jonathan Hackett
The KDP is significant because the Iranian regime has attacked them numerous times, not just in the Middle East, but, for example, the Mykonos restaurant attack and the Vienna assassinations in the 1990s were against the KDP leadership that Iran actually carried out. And these are very brazen, you know, kind of broad daylight attacks that were headline grabbing at the time.
00:04:54:22 – 00:05:17:09
Jonathan Hackett
But many in the West have forgotten that this was a galvanizing factor that caused these groups to continue resisting Iran, despite other groups, non-Kurdish groups like the Communist Party, the two-day party, for example, laying down their arms, so to speak, and not resisting the regime. These Kurdish groups had habitually been attacked by the regime up until now, since the since the revolution.
00:05:17:11 – 00:05:38:03
Jonathan Hackett
So, these groups are a target for the US to work with and from Assad to work with, because they have not had a reason to stop fighting the regime since day one. And what do they want? This is a huge important question because some groups want a secularist Kurdistan. Some groups want a secularist party. Within a country like Iran, for example.
00:05:38:03 – 00:05:57:01
Jonathan Hackett
Some want to be a federal entity within a country such as Iran. Somewhat total freedom. Some do not want to participate in the system of sovereign states that we know as the West Valley and system. They’d like, for example, to take our car previously, although they’ve changed their views, but previously they wanted to have this non sovereign list.
00:05:57:03 – 00:06:22:06
Jonathan Hackett
I don’t want to use the word state because also they didn’t want a state per se as far as the West defines what state means. Again, that has changed over time and has caused some differences within the PKK and other groups associated with the PKK, which is in Turkey, and which the Turkish government recently gently coerced into putting down their arms and changing or declaring that they’ve changed their resistance to Turkey, which we’ll see how that works out.
00:06:22:08 – 00:06:43:17
Jonathan Hackett
Groups like the PAC, which many are hearing for the first time now but has existed for decades. The PKK is an Iranian Kurdish group that wants its own independent Kurdish state. The KDP now wants autonomy and federalism within Iran. So, they want to have basically you can think of it like California inside the United States. They want something like that for Kurdistan.
00:06:43:19 – 00:07:09:16
Jonathan Hackett
A lot of this goes back to the Mahabharat. In 1946, there was a revolt and a revolution inside of the Kurdish areas of western Iran. Places like Kermanshah, Sunanda, Mohabbat or Mia, which is all the western areas of the mountainous part of Iran. Those areas rose up against the Shah in 1946 and actually got rid of the Shah’s sovereignty in those areas, and for two years they had an independent Kurdish state.
00:07:09:18 – 00:07:30:11
Jonathan Hackett
There have been some other Kurdish states that have formed very briefly here and there, but the 1946 Mohammad state is the longest-lived independent Kurdish state that was fought by the Barzani family in the Talabani family and Ahmad and some others who the grandchildren of them are leading those Kurdish groups inside Iraq now. And this is important to understand about how do we have these relationships?
00:07:30:12 – 00:07:55:22
Jonathan Hackett
Why do we have these relationships? What are these groups want long term, and what does their history look like? And the reason I mention that is because when we’re looking for forces to work with, we have to carefully evaluate who they are and what they want. What are they going to do to get it? And we in the US, for example, with unconventional warfare, when we’re looking at a partner, we use something that actually looks a lot like a private equity model, where we identify a target, we acquire that target with various motivational reasons.
00:07:55:24 – 00:08:16:16
Jonathan Hackett
We pump money into the target; we pump time troops with a political will into that target. Sometimes we change the leadership of that target. Sometimes we change the mission of the target or even its location or its purpose. Then once we achieve what we want to achieve, we typically dump the target. This has happened to the Kurds numerous times.
00:08:16:16 – 00:08:35:17
Jonathan Hackett
If for most recently it was the Syrian Democratic Forces, which the YPG was a major part of that led by Muslim Abdi Mazloum. Abdi is warning today’s Kurds to be careful about working with the CIA, Mossad and others in exactly this operation we’re talking about today, because on two occasions, the US abandoned the Kurds in northeast Syria in the last five years.
00:08:35:19 – 00:09:00:15
Jonathan Hackett
And I remember actually, Secretary of Defence Mattis was about to come visit fifth Group in northeast Syria on Christmas Eve 2018, and we were organizing his visit into Syria. He was going to come into Jordan and then go up into Syria with a helicopter, group and President Trump told him that we were going to withdraw all 900 US special operations forces out of Syria and stop supporting the Kurds.
00:09:00:15 – 00:09:22:24
Jonathan Hackett
This is back in 2018. That’s why General Mattis resigned as secretary of defence. He resigned that day, actually. I remember it very vividly because we literally had the helicopter ready to go to take him to visit the Kurds and visit our special operations forces, working with them against ISIS at the time. The Kurds remember that. The Kurds also remember that last month the US abandoned them again in Syria, exactly the same group abandon them again.
00:09:23:01 – 00:09:39:16
Jonathan Hackett
And we’ve also done the same in northern Kurdistan. The reason I mention is because very important to be clear eyed about how our partners view us when we’re working with them, and what do they hope to get out of us? Because if they trust us long term, they’re more willing to take more risks with us that have a more delayed return.
00:09:39:18 – 00:10:05:14
Jonathan Hackett
But if they see us as a temporary partner, who’s going to turn our backs on them and leave, they want the return on that investment more quickly. And that can be quickly in terms of money, resources, political will and things like that. So, if we’re doing unconventional warfare with the Kurds, what does that look like? So unconventional warfare like doctrinally, doctrinally looks a little bit like the inverse of counterinsurgency, although that’s not actually totally accurate.
00:10:05:16 – 00:10:29:13
Jonathan Hackett
But in some ways, it can be thought of that where we are going into a place to work with a partner who is not a state to do something against an existing state. That’s a very simplistic way to describe it. Of course, it’s more nuanced to it. And when I say we, I mean not only special operations forces, which is what that’s part of their core tasks in conventional warfare, but also intelligence organizations like CIA, Mossad and the CIA.
00:10:29:13 – 00:10:48:22
Jonathan Hackett
Mossad part is going to look a lot like ground branch for the CIA, for example, doing things that look a lot like what the special operations forces are doing with a partner, except typically this will be a covert action. And when I say covert action, this means that the sponsor of the activity is hidden, but the activity is visible.
00:10:48:24 – 00:11:09:03
Jonathan Hackett
This is in contrast to clandestine activity where the activity is hidden and the sponsor is not necessarily hidden. And so, Ground Branch, as part of the CIA, specializes in covert action, which is under title 50 of the U.S. code. Whereas clandestine activity can sometimes be under title ten, which is the armed forces and special operations forces. And there’s a lot of authority overlaps in here.
00:11:09:03 – 00:11:29:17
Jonathan Hackett
And that’s why you typically see CIA and especially Ground Branch and the special forces from the military working together, because there’s a lot of synergy that we can achieve by having both of these authority structures overlapping with each other. And kind of the term to art is sheep dipping. And we’ve done sheep dipping in Afghanistan. We’ve done it in Syria and actually in Syria.
00:11:29:17 – 00:11:57:11
Jonathan Hackett
We had an operation called Timber Sycamore, which started out successfully and rapidly declined in efficacy because of many failures there. And we worked with the northern front forces in Syria in the Southern Front forces in Syria, and then basically turned its back on those forces at in 2017. And we have a whole other conversation about Timber Sycamore, but it’s actually a very similar model to what the US in Israel will likely use with the Kurds in eastern Iraq and western Iran.
00:11:57:13 – 00:12:16:21
Jonathan Hackett
Now, how would we do that? As far as authorities are concerned, we would have to draft something called an execute order on the title ten side. On the military side, this executes order will basically have a list of things that the government, the US government as a grand strategist, wants to achieve. They will say work with the Kurds in order to achieve X, right.
00:12:16:21 – 00:12:37:05
Jonathan Hackett
It’ll have multiple paragraphs that have these things and there’ll be authorities attached to that. And when there are authorities attached to that, that means there’s money attached to it. That means Congress has appropriated a dollar amount to use for this. There’s something called one, two, seven. Echo, for example, is a type of program that has these authorities attached to it that allows us to work with irregular forces in a foreign country to achieve certain objectives.
00:12:37:07 – 00:13:00:04
Jonathan Hackett
That execute order will generate out of the office of the Secretary of Defence, will be approved by the president. And then our special operations forces will have these authorities to go into the country, because we already have forces there. They just have different authorities doing a different mission. Until what just recently happened in January. So, some of those forces will change their mission, and then some other newer forces will come in to identify which partners they’re working with.
00:13:00:06 – 00:13:18:24
Jonathan Hackett
And in that execute order, they’ll be named partners in there, for example, the PKK, the PDK. There’ll be locations, there’ll be mission objectives, there’ll be constraints that we have to operate with and things like this. They’ll also be ways to describe the operation to the public and to the media. There’ll be things that say that we can’t describe X, Y or Z.
00:13:19:01 – 00:13:40:12
Jonathan Hackett
And this is where the CIA authorities command the title 50 authorities, because in those title 50 authorities, there will be a publicly stated mission, and there’ll be a non-publicly stated mission that the CIA will use to conduct their portion of the mission. Now, there’ll be each of these forces we have, let’s say we have the PDK, for example, or the KDP, and we have the PKK.
00:13:40:14 – 00:14:06:16
Jonathan Hackett
These will each be protected under separate, titles. So, for example, let’s say the KDP will be called crystalline Viper, and the pack will be called crystalline butterfly. And crystalline is kind of a series of operations that these partners are attached to. And then the second word will be kind of the compartment that those forces belong to, so that the partner in group A doesn’t know what the partner Group B is doing until we want them to actually merge together and begin moving forward.
00:14:06:18 – 00:14:33:09
Jonathan Hackett
And we do this for operational security reasons, to keep these partners from accidentally or purposely divulging anything at all about the operation, because there will also be an information operations component to this that the partners are not participating in. And that’s where the US and Israel will be messaging both covertly, clandestinely and overtly so in different ways as far as concealing sponsorship or showing sponsorship, talking about what’s happening.
00:14:33:15 – 00:15:00:19
Jonathan Hackett
So, for example, when you see in the news and Trump says two different things in the same day about what we’re doing with the Kurds, it is possible that one of those things he has said was purposely said as part of that messaging campaign, not only to kind of diffuse or distract from what’s actually happening in northern Iraq, but also to influence the other side as a deterrent factor to try to force and influence behaviour from the Iranian side and from others in the region, as well, and the forces on the ground.
00:15:00:21 – 00:15:19:06
Jonathan Hackett
What they’re going to be doing is looking at organizing, manning, training, equipping, sustaining, deploying, employing and redeploying, which are these kinds of buzzwords. But these are different stages in the operation. So, the special operations forces will get there with them. They have to evaluate the partner and see, you know, are there any counterintelligence problems with these partners. And we’ll have intelligence folks like me.
00:15:19:06 – 00:15:37:12
Jonathan Hackett
They’re evaluating every single partner sitting down with them, talking to them, sometimes using tactical equipment to do this, always using interviews as well, and keeping a file on every single partner in every platoon and every company of this partner force and constantly evaluating them. The operators will also be looking at are they good marksmen? How much can they shoot?
00:15:37:12 – 00:15:57:24
Jonathan Hackett
How well can they shoot? How sustainable are they, how much arrested? They need? These very granular things, extremely important at the strategic level, because you only get kind of one chance to train these partners the right way. And then you’re going to start thinking about how you move them to where you need them to go, because obviously you’re moving them from one sovereign country to another, not with passports and things like that.
00:15:57:24 – 00:16:22:24
Jonathan Hackett
So there needs to be a way to get them across either rat lines or clandestinely through the border into the places you need forward, deploy them to begin their operations, and that’s going to look like anything from a very clandestine activity, like getting a box truck and modifying it so that the troops can be put in there and it looks like a shipment of rice, or it could be on the covert side where they are going through, but you don’t know that that’s who they are.
00:16:23:01 – 00:16:41:19
Jonathan Hackett
So, this is what the forces will be thinking about when they’re doing their mission planning. And this could change over time depending on what the situation looks like. And basically, the task organization will look like probably a lieutenant colonel leading the task force with different teams underneath him. And each of those teams is partnered up with a partner force.
00:16:41:21 – 00:16:58:18
Jonathan Hackett
The partner force could be different sizes depending on what the mission profile looks like. That could be a small, raid force, or it could be a larger company size element, depending on what the operational output looks like. And that task force commander will have a lot of authority to determine how do we task, organize, and train man and equip these partner forces.
00:16:58:20 – 00:17:13:02
Jonathan Hackett
While this is all going on, this training is going on. There’s mission planning going on for the real world. There’s also training going on because you have to evaluate those partners to make sure that they’re actually ready to do what you want them to do in combat. There are many Kurds in northern Iraq that have already seen combat, and there are some that have not.
00:17:13:04 – 00:17:33:09
Jonathan Hackett
And so, there’s going to have to be some evaluation there to see are these guys ready to lead? Are these guys ready to move? Are they going to operate under fire? The other issue is in these are authorities that are in the execute order. It will say whether we’re allowed to advise a company and assist the partner. And if there are sometimes little benchmarks that have to happen before we’re able to move from one of those authorities to the next.
00:17:33:09 – 00:17:54:06
Jonathan Hackett
So, for example, we will start by advising them what then we’ll go to assist them and then there’s always a question of should we accompany them? Because if you accompany them, you’ve moved from a training and equipping place. Now you’re moving into active combat operations, perhaps up to the last line of cover and concealment. Even if you move up to the last line of cover and concealment, you’re still putting US forces in dangerous.
00:17:54:06 – 00:18:29:13
Jonathan Hackett
The risk profile rapidly increases, and the commander and folks above him have to make a decision about, are we ready to move into this higher risk space? And the reason I mentioned that is because there’s a lot of talk about boots on the ground, the reason we were so successful or a reason we were so successful against ISIS in northern Iraq and Syria, is because of our targeting activities and methods, where a US service member, usually from the special operations community, but sometimes from CIA, would work with partners behind enemy lines to gather targeting information to help enable some of these higher impact targets that are not as easily understood from the air.
00:18:29:13 – 00:18:50:07
Jonathan Hackett
For example, currently we saw the Mena, school strike, which is probably a mistake in targeting activity because we didn’t have a group on the ground to actually validate that target, and also to tell if the trigger had been met to actually strike that facility. In other words, whether civilians there or not, you need to have troops somewhere physically near or able to work by, with and through the partner to actually validate those targets.
00:18:50:09 – 00:19:06:03
Jonathan Hackett
If you’re talking about a ground force that’s large enough to create an insurgency that’s sufficient to overthrow the regime, or at least to stabilize it so that people can take it over, you’re going to have to have that kind of targeting support to ensure you’re hitting precisely the correct targets, because it’s also easy to hit precisely the wrong target.
00:19:06:05 – 00:19:26:20
Jonathan Hackett
And we’ve done that in this conflict. We’ve done it in the Iraq war. We did it in Kosovo in 1999 when we struck an embassy with Chinese diplomats by accident. This happens almost every conflict, not just the US, but every conflict, because that fog of war is very heavy. And if you don’t have someone there on the ground to help the targeting, you could really screw up the outcome of that conflict.
00:19:26:22 – 00:20:00:03
Jonathan Hackett
And I can go into more about special activities and human trigger strike mechanisms and things like that, that we would do to enable that. But I can wait until the questioning part afterward and finally, I’ll talk about as far as what are they willing to do to get and how are they going to move in there. They’re going to stage in places like Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, and they’re going to move eastward into that, into Kurdish friendly areas and Kurdish areas like Haumea, Tabriz, Xinjiang, these places I mentioned previously, there may also be Azeri forces that join up with them, especially in the north further north area, like Tabriz, which is traditionally Azeri.
00:20:00:03 – 00:20:26:06
Jonathan Hackett
And also, there was a separatist movement there in 1945 and six as well that could be part of this, that could join up with them. We don’t have any indication that’s happening yet, but it’s very possible for that could happen and might actually make sense to allow Turkey to be more supportive of this operation, because Turkey supports the Azeris, because they have also worked with Massoud in the past extensively, and this may make it a more palatable operation to the Turks, rather than having a purely Kurdish operation which may be less palatable.
00:20:26:06 – 00:20:45:06
Jonathan Hackett
The Turks, the Turks. And now, how would others view this? So, this is important to me as an intelligence officer. I want to think about what is the other side thinking then what do other people around think? Because that could also affect the outcome. So, we could have great forces that do well, but if the region doesn’t support them, there will be, not as much of a benefit as we hoped.
00:20:45:08 – 00:21:06:03
Jonathan Hackett
So, the monarchists, which is, you know, Reza Pahlavi, the crown prince, he has vocally said that he sees the Kurds as separatists. So that’s not good. The regime sees them as separatists and as insurgents. That’s not good. The US has actually designated some of these Turkish groups as terrorist organizations. Not good. But we did switch sides very quickly with al-Qaida in Syria.
00:21:06:05 – 00:21:28:20
Jonathan Hackett
Within about a week, we suddenly were meeting him in Damascus. So, it’s possible that we could switch things if we needed to harder for Turkey to do that. Turkey sees a lot more of these groups as dangerous for reasons that make sense to Turkey. So that’s important to consider as mission planning is going on. And commanders will be thinking about this as far as which groups they work with and how many resources and how publicly are they talking about this, and then how does this end?
00:21:28:22 – 00:21:56:07
Jonathan Hackett
So, the most likely outcome, in my opinion, is 1946 all over again. That means separatists rise up. They have temporary sovereignty, but the strengths and pressures of the regional powers are too great. The US does not have the political will to support that independent state or that federalist, appendage to the, Tehran led government. And the Kurds are crushed, pushed out and 1946 all over again.
00:21:56:09 – 00:22:20:24
Jonathan Hackett
Now, that’s what I think is the most likely outcome. I think the most dangerous outcome is that the provinces devolve into these semi-autonomous statelet, kind of like a balkanized situation. And the reason that’s dangerous is because I mentioned there’s all these Kurds with different ideas. There is also Baluchi, Abbas’s, Azeris, horror and other groups that have been fighting the central government since the Kaija period in the 19th century, and many of them continue to resist any form of centralized government.
00:22:20:24 – 00:22:42:00
Jonathan Hackett
Iran is that centralized government in Iran is no longer able to suppress that resistance. You might see Statelet forming that want their own totally sovereign independence from Tehran. So as far as benefits, let’s talk about benefits to the West. So, if this ends well for the West, what does that look like? So, the insurgency would move into a regime collapse.
00:22:42:06 – 00:22:58:17
Jonathan Hackett
There would be a short period of regime collapse. Then there’d be a consolidation of local and state elections, and there would be a referendum. And this kind of overlaps with what Reza Pahlavi has asked for, as well as a referendum. And many Iranians in capital city have also asked for a referendum. So that’s something that a lot of people want.
00:22:58:19 – 00:23:21:02
Jonathan Hackett
Whether it’s easy to get or not is another question. Would it be beneficial to Turkey? While Turkey would want the insurgency crushed by the new regime? As I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of Kurdish groups that Turkey does not trust and does not want on its eastern flank. And that’s a little bit in tension with what Israel wants, because Israel has worked a lot with the Kurds, with the Peshmerga, specifically the 1990s and later on, and with the Azeris.
00:23:21:04 – 00:23:38:23
Jonathan Hackett
So, there’s kind of a buffer space in there that Israel could help form between Turkey and the Kurds that Turkey is concerned about for the United States. The US wants central authority of any kind, basically is what it seems like is coming from our administration, is that we want to have some kind of stability, centralized authority, not a balkanization.
00:23:39:00 – 00:23:58:16
Jonathan Hackett
And what would be most beneficial to Russia, I’m sure people have seen that Russia is going to be benefiting from sanctions relief in order to kind of hedge against the reduction in oil output from the Straits of Hormuz. And so, they might hope for more chaos, because that would hope that possibly reduce more sanctions on them and let them benefit financially to fund their war.
00:23:58:16 – 00:24:20:09
Jonathan Hackett
More in Ukraine and other places. China probably wants something similar to the sanction’s relief with Russia, but instead of chaos, they want stability because they need their oil from Iran, so they would benefit from that. There’s a lot of benefits there. And the question is, how does this benefit the Kurds? Because the Kurds will be thinking about all of these things I just mentioned when they’re working with us on the ground, with us as our partner.
00:24:20:11 – 00:24:42:21
Jonathan Hackett
And so, when that sergeant first class in this group is working with his Kurdish counterpart, that Kurdish counterpart is thinking about everything that I just said. And so, it’s very important to think about these things as we think, okay, we want to have these strategic, large outputs of the US destabilizing the regime. But there are individual Kurds on the ground thinking about their own interests as rational actors, about what they want to come out of it.
00:24:42:23 – 00:24:44:23
Jonathan Hackett
And I’ll leave it there for questions.
00:24:45:00 – 00:25:04:03
Daniel J. Levy
Thank you. Ready? Good. As I have a probably first question for me, you’ve elaborated in great detail on how America views and runs unconventional warfare. What’s the Israeli doctrine if such doctrine has been published? And what’s the history of Israeli unconventional warfare from, say, the late 40s through to today?
00:25:04:08 – 00:25:28:12
Jonathan Hackett
So, a lot of it started out not as the actual definition of irregular warfare and unconventional warfare. Rather, it was actual Jewish organizations fighting for their independence and then consolidating within the state. So, things like, Zwingli, which I’m not pronouncing correctly, but these groups that formed the eventual army in, Israel against the British, for example, and things like that, that later matured.
00:25:28:12 – 00:25:51:13
Jonathan Hackett
And the most kind of, you know, perfect case study about unconventional warfare that Israel has used is in south Lebanon after 1982. And that was the South Lebanon Army, which was a Christian militia which formed the Kataib Hezbollah party, which acted as well. But the party, sorry, which means battalions or phalanges in English and French. This group is now a political party in Lebanon.
00:25:51:15 – 00:26:19:00
Jonathan Hackett
This group was basically the Lebanese Ground Force partner for Israel inside of Lebanon during that conflict, and after 1982 through 2000, they matured into a political entity and still wield a great deal of, power inside of Lebanon. And you could call it a success story, actually, because from the very beginning, this was kind of a couple of disparate groups that Israel was able to bring together into a common cause, which was securing Lebanon south of the tiny river, which is still a problem now.
00:26:19:02 – 00:26:26:12
Jonathan Hackett
And they were able to move them from a militia organization into an actual political party that now was completely illegitimate inside of Lebanon.
00:26:26:17 – 00:26:39:24
Daniel J. Levy
Thank you. And you alluded to how it’s the Mossad to sort of operate in a similar manner to the CIA’s ground branch. What kind of involvement with the Israeli Defence Forces? So, the conventional Israeli military having, if anything.
00:26:40:04 – 00:27:05:04
Jonathan Hackett
Right. So, there are specialized units within the Special forces that would be helping with this. And Israel has a much more differentiated way of doing this, at least in my understanding. For example, like unit 504 in Lebanon, for example, doing very specific activities and intelligence activities, whereas in the US side we kind of allow our, for example, our 18 foxes, which are our intelligence sergeants inside of our special operations teams, those 18 foxes going to kind of a broader exposure to the things we want them to do.
00:27:05:05 – 00:27:25:18
Jonathan Hackett
Whereas unit five or for its mission based rather than, like broad skills based training, which has a lot to do with the mission outcomes that the countries have differences on, because Israel is focusing a lot more on securing its borders and kind of protecting the area around the country, whereas the US is doing force projection far away in many different places that have different operational requirements.
00:27:25:20 – 00:27:45:06
Jonathan Hackett
So, you have the two things I would look at our what our flotilla doing and what our kaiten and, siren might call doing with a partner on mission focus outcomes, because each of those has different things they’re good at. And so, we’re looking at the partner saying, okay, do we want this partner force to go across Lake or Mia or navigate some rivers.
00:27:45:06 – 00:27:58:05
Jonathan Hackett
And we need some more naval focused special operations training and advisement, or are we trying to get them to infiltrate through clandestine rat line networks? And we might use CIA on the call to do that, or especially we’re doing direct action raids. We need PSI rep McCaul to help with that.
00:27:58:05 – 00:27:59:24
Daniel J. Levy
Okay, great. Thank you very much.