whenever a mortar shell would come in and I would get to the ground, which you're supposed to do,

soldiers, even generals would laugh at me because the idea is if you're here, if you're in a war,

you should be prepared to die. That's what war is for. And if you're not prepared to die,

you shouldn't be here. And the soldiers in the counterterrorism service, the Iraqi Special Forces,

I think, felt particularly this way. It was a strangely proximate to the attitude of the

Jihadis, which they saw their role essentially as to die eventually, if not sooner than later.

Hello and welcome to Wise is Happening with me, your host Chris Hayes.

Well, today we've got a really good episode for you on a thing. This is like these are these

widthpods that I love doing because I am a person who follows the news of zezzarly and

both. Like those were both facts. Like I followed because I have to do it for my job, but also

I'm just an obsessive news follower. And there are all these things that are constantly happening.

I'm like, whoa, that seems intense and interesting. And there's things that I would like to know about

that that I don't know about, but we can't find time to cover on the show, particularly in the midst

of all this impeachment insanity. So I've been watching what's going on in Iraq, where there are

these incredible protests across the country against the government. And what makes these protests

really interesting is that Iraq has been so driven by sectarian animus and bloodshed since the

2003 invasion by the US that often when there are protests there, when there are uprisings,

when there's a state violence against those uprisings, they fall along sectarian lines. But what's

happened in these protests is that Sunni and Shia, different parts of the country with different

backgrounds are uniting in opposition to fundamentally that, you know, there's corruption,

there's poor services, but fundamentally comes down to like the Iranian domination of their nation,

which is one of the most enraging ironies of this entire era of US war in the Middle East,

...