ISIS Fighters Are Now Surrendering En Masse. Most Are Claiming To Be Cooks Or Clerks

At the Kurdish screening center in Dibis, suspects are searched, their shoes taken, their pockets emptied and their belts discarded. Credit Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

New York Times: ISIS Fighters, Having Pledged to Fight or Die, Surrender en Masse

DIBIS, Iraq — The prisoners were taken to a waiting room in groups of four, and were told to stand facing the concrete wall, their noses almost touching it, their hands bound behind their backs.

More than a thousand Islamic State fighters passed through that room this past week after they fled their crumbling Iraqi stronghold of Hawija. Instead of the martyrdom they had boasted was their only acceptable fate, they had voluntarily ended up here in the interrogation center of the Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq.

For an extremist group that has made its reputation on its ferociousness, with fighters who would always choose suicide over surrender, the fall of Hawija has been a notable turning point. The group has suffered a string of humiliating defeats in Iraq and Syria, but the number of its shock troops who turned themselves in to Kurdish officials at the center in Dibis was unusually large, more than 1,000 since last Sunday.

The fight for Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, took nine months, and by comparison, relatively few Islamic State fighters surrendered. Tal Afar fell next, and more quickly, in only 11 days. Some 500 fighters surrendered there.

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WNU Editor: All of these men are going to be held for a long time. It is also fortunate that the Islamic State produced thousands of videos of their fighters .... and I am sure that each of these videos are being checked, catalogued, and the men in them identified and checked to see if any of these men are in a prison camp.