(Not) a war crime

As reported at PJ Media:

Defense Secretary James Mattis said the U.S. is going to focus on killing remaining foreign fighters in the Islamic State. “Because the foreign fighters are the strategic threat should they return home to Tunis, to Kuala Lumpur, to Paris, to Detroit, wherever. Those foreign fighters are a threat,” he said. “So by taking the time to deconflict, to surround and then attack, we carry out the annihilation campaign so we don’t simply transplant this problem from one location to another.”

“I’ll leave that to the generals who know how to do those kind of things. We don’t direct that from here,” he added. “They know our intent is the foreign fighters do not get out, I leave it to their skill, their cunning, to carry that out.”

An “annihilation campaign”?  That sounds war crime-like.  And presumably it would be, if the practice was to kill ISIS fighters who were attempting to surrender.  I would imagine that the U.S. follows all appropriate protocol in that respect, but that the assumption is that ISIS fighters are not surrendering so that it’s a moot point; the objective seems to be to ensure that they have no ability to just “disappear” but are forced into these two choices.  Even according to an article about captured ISIS fighters, they don’t wind up in Iraqi government hands because they have surrendered, but because they have tried to hide among the civilian population yet have been identified.

But this does raise the question:  if those fighters were indeed to surrender, what would be, or what should be, their fate?  Just as with the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, there is no ending point to this ongoing war, no point at which these men can be believed to be no longer likely to “return to the battlefield” — when the “battlefield” is not just a literal battlefield on which ISIS attempts to gain ground, but the entirety of Syria and Iraq and, if they are able to gain access, Europe as well.

Image: By Yo (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons