ISIS Fighters, Having Pledged to Fight or Die, Surrender en Masse
The New York Times’s Rod Nordland reports that more than a thousand ISIS fighters have fled their collapsing Hawija stronghold and surrendered to Kurdish authorities since last Sunday. Nordland writes, “Many of the fighters claimed to have been just cooks or clerks. So many said they had been members of the Islamic State for only a month or two that interrogators suspected they had been coached to say that.” He adds, “Kurdish officials have been perplexed by the number of fighters who have surrendered. Many of the militants said they were ordered by their leaders to turn themselves in to the Kurds, who were known to take prisoners instead of killing them.”