Blood on our hands

The fate of prisoners taken in war uniformly depends upon the views of the captors, combined with their capacity to act in compliance with their ideals.

It's never been an enviable fate to be a prisoner taken in war.  And by that, I don't just mean prisoners of war, those combatants taken in battle, but also those individuals who become captives because of war.

In the Old Testament the Law modified the custom of the pagans in providing that women who were taken as prizes in war were allowed to morn their dead  husbands and were to be treated fairly by those Jewish captors who took them as prizes.  This is often misunderstood to mean that the Old Testament sanctioned taking widows of combatant opponents as forced brides.  It did not.  It restrained an existing universal custom by putting some elements of kindness and humanity into it.

And so commenced a long tradition in the Jewish world, and then the Christian world, of trying to treat prisoners of wars humanely.

It's not a universal norm, and it hasn't been even among those peoples who Christianity has reached.

During the Revolution, at least at the start, the British kept American prisoners, who after all were rebels, in horrible condition contributing to their high death rate.  A way out was to switch sides and join the British, which more than a few did.

During the American Civil War both sides, for much of the war, paroled enemy prisoners, simply sending them home on the promise not to fight again.  Some did fight again, and eventually both sides stopped the practice.  In the prisoner of war camps on both sides the conditions were awful, with those in the resource starved South the most horrific.

During the Boer War the British found it expedient to depopulate the countryside and make prisoners of the Boer women and children. The British have generally been decent, post 18th Century, to captives in war but these concentration camps had appalling conditions and many of the prisoners died.

During the Great War the Allied nations treated the prisoners it took fairly well, as they did those that they interned during the war. The Germans less so, but still not like what was to come.

During World War Two a soldier surrendering to the Allied in Europe, who survived the tense first moments of that experience, were treated quite well.  The Germans were less kind, once again, to western Allied POWs in their hands, ultimately shooting quite a few in one spectacular instance of mass escape from Stalag Luft III.

In the east, it was different.  The Germans were brutal to Russian prisoners, assuming that they survived the experience in the first place.  The Soviets reciprocated as the war went on.  Civilians on either side ran great risks from the enemy in their midst.  Civilian foreign prisoners of the Germans faced dreadful uncertainties.

Of course, anywhere, prisoners falling into the hands of the SS risked death for that reason alone.

In the Pacific, the Japanese tried to avoid surrendering, and as the war went on the Allies didn't make much of an effort to take them prisoner.  Allied soldiers falling into Japanese hands were horrifically treated, and civilians weren't treated much better.

During the Korean War prisoners of the United Nations forces were fairly well treated.  UN POWs were not well treated by the Communists.  ARVN and US troops who fell into North Vietnamese hands were horrifically treated by the North Vietnamese.  Treatment of NVA and VC prisoners by the South Vietnamese was mixed.

The point?

All of this points out the difficult nature of this question to start with.

And now the Turkish army is set to overrun the areas of northern Syria held by the Kurds.

And he Kurds are holding a lot of ISIL prisoners, including a lot of women and children of ISIL combatants.

Under the Christian world view the west possesses, whether it is willing to admit the origin of that view or not, these people are people, and they should be allowed to live as humanely as possible. And while I suppose its possible that the Kurds have been acting in this manner is due to their own views, I sort of doubt it.  My guess is that prisoners of war of one Middle Eastern combatant who fall into the hands of another, or just prisoners in general, aren't treated really well.

I could be wrong, of course.

In any event, in very quick time, the Kurds will have to leave these prisoners.  I don't think they'll hang around to do a change of flag ceremony.

So, what will become of them?

Well, we're not going to take them.

The Kurds might simply kill them.  That's horrific, but its expedient, and the Kurds have plenty of enemies, don't need any left alive, and don't have a lot of time. 

Or they might let them go, in which case these still very radical ISIL adherents will see their situation as a just perseverance vindicating their views, and go on to be trouble for us, Syria, and Iraq. Trouble we don't need. 

President Trump has suggested that its a European problem as they were "headed to Europe". Maybe some would head to Europe, but trouble for Europe doesn't help us.  And disregarding a problem and suggesting its a European problem will come back to haunt us.

Or perhaps they Turks will overrun them. They don't want to deal with them either, however, and what happens next isn't clear.  They won't hold them for years.

Maybe they'd turn them over to the Iraqis, or the Syrians.  It'd certainly be better to be turned over to the Iraqis.  The fate of people turned over to the Syrians would be grim.

All of this, of course, is something we wouldn't have to face if we hadn't have gone into Syria in the first place. But we did. And we supported the Kurds whom we're now abandoning. By doing that, we encouraged the Kurds to hold the prisoners we did.

So we are responsible for whatever occurs.