Why the Turkish Invasion Matters

  • Posted on: 13 October 2019
  • By: thecollective
Why the Turkish Invasion Matters

From CrimethInc.

Addressing the Hard Questions about Imperialism and Solidarity

In the following overview, we address some common questions about why it is important to oppose the Turkish invasion of Rojava and suggest an analysis of what it means for world politics.

For those who have not followed the intricacies of the situation in Syria, Turkey, and throughout Kurdistan, it can be difficult to understand what’s at stake here. We are fortunate that some of us have spent time in Rojava and the surrounding regions. We are writing from relative comfort, far from the massacres the Turkish military is enacting, but with our loved ones in Rojava at the forefront of our thoughts—along with everyone else who has suffered grievously throughout the Syrian civil war.

War doesn’t just involve bombs and bullets. It is also a contest of narrative involving propaganda and information control. The Turkish government has been censoring news reporting, cutting off internet access, and forcing social media corporations to silence its victims; it has even succeeded in tricking some ostensible leftists into legitimizing its agenda. All that we have to counter this is our own lived experiences, our international connections with other ordinary people like ourselves, and volunteer-driven projects like this publishing platform that reject all state and corporate agendas.

The timing of Turkey’s invasion has likely been determined in part by Donald Trump’s response to the impeachment inquiry. US Presidents have a longstanding tradition of initiating military interventions to distract from domestic issues. The Trump version of this tradition is to intentionally reignite a civil war by pretending to “end” it. Worldwide, the far right seems to be trying to co-opt “anti-war” rhetoric the same way they appropriated “anti-globalization” slogans, while actually intensifying military aggression and capitalism. This is the same looking-glass-world right-wing “isolationism” that we saw when Hitler was annexing territory in Europe. We seem to have progressed very rapidly from repeating the early 1930s to re-enacting the later 1930s.

The betrayal of the people of Rojava is so shocking that it has even humiliated many otherwise shameless US politicians. Unless we create significant pressure via disruptive direct action, however, we expect that the US government will wait until the ethnic cleansing of Rojava is a fait accompli before doing anything to respond. Whatever happens, the Turkish invasion has reignited a civil war that was drawing to a close, ensuring many more years of bloodshed throughout the Middle East. No compassionate human being could support this.

Graffiti in front of the courthouse in New Orleans, Louisiana on October 12, 2019.

“Shouldn’t anti-imperialists want the US to withdraw from Syria?”

Supporting Trump’s apparent troop withdrawal from Syria in the name of anti-imperialism is foolish, if not downright disingenuous.

US involvement in Syria looks much different than it has in Iraq and Afghanistan. Well over 100,000 US soldiers occupied Iraq for over half a decade. By contrast, at the very most, there have only been a couple thousand US troops in Syria—less than 2% the number deployed to Iraq. US soldiers in Syria serve an advisory role, carrying out airstrikes but never taking on frontline combat duty.

Even after Trump’s announcement that he is pulling the US military out of Syria, 1000 US soldiers will remain in the country. Opening the way for the Turkish invasion apparently required moving only 50 special forces personnel—it was just a question of shuffling them out of the way of Turkish bombs. In fact, the US military has sent 14,000 more troops to the Middle East since May, specifically bolstering deployments in Saudi Arabia. We are not seeing a troop withdrawal—we are seeing a policy shift towards permitting the extermination of comparatively egalitarian projects while supporting more authoritarian regimes with a troop buildup.

So anti-imperialists who see this as a win against US militarism are suckers, plain and simple. Trump has done nothing to downsize the US empire. He’s simply given Erdoğan go-ahead to build the Turkish empire, to carry out ethnic cleansing while US troops look on. This is hardly unprecedented in the history of US imperialism.

On another occasion, it would be worthwhile to consider the word “anti-imperialist” in greater detail. We often see this word employed by the partisans of some rival empire—typically Russia or China, but not only those. We may need to use a different word for those who are consistent in opposing all empires, state interventions, and forms of hierarchical power. Anti-colonial, for example. Or, clearer still, anarchist.

For years, we have heard statists from various corners of the left accusing anarchists of being tools for neoliberalism on account of the fact that we oppose the Russian, Chinese, and Nicaraguan governments as well as the United States government. This is bad-faith name-calling from people who may have a guilty conscience about their own outright support for authoritarian governments—the same way that Trump supporters like to allege that George Soros, a Jewish billionaire, is behind anti-Trump activity while they toady to a billionaire for free. It is absurd to accuse anarchists of being tools of neoliberalism for identifying the ways that China and Russia participate in neoliberalism; it is doubly absurd to accuse anarchists of being tools of imperialism for criticizing the US for giving Erdoğan permission to invade Rojava.

The fact that some people who oppose US interventionism can be suckered into cheerleading when the US government gives another authoritarian government the green light to kill thousands of people illustrates the consequences of founding one’s politics opportunistically on incidental factors, such as opposition to a particular prevailing empire, rather than on ethical principles such as opposition to all forms of domination.

Heartbreaking naiveté from supposed anti-war activist Medea Benjamin—a tweet now soaked in blood.

“Are the Kurds just shills for the US?”

The fact that the US government so readily betrayed the people of Rojava undercuts the allegation that they are just pawns in a US strategy. Organizers in Rojava were pursuing the same agenda of multi-ethnic self-determination for many years before the US found it convenient to support their struggle against the Islamic State.

Should we blame groups like the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in Rojava for coordinating with the US? Anarchists in Rojava have argued that the people there were forced to choose between being slaughtered by the Islamic State and working with the US government. Considering that they were nearly conquered by the Islamic State in 2014, it’s hard to argue with this.

When we look at the issue on an individual scale, we’re hesitant to blame a woman who, not being connected to a supportive community, calls the police when she is attacked. The police are unlikely to help her, of course—and relying on them only reproduces the structural factors that cause poverty and violence. But if we want people to adopt our total opposition to policing, we have to give them better options.

Similarly, if we want to live in a world in which people in places like Rojava will not welcome the support of the US government, we will have to offer credible alternatives via social movements and international solidarity campaigns. Anarchists have been seeking ways to do this for years. Right now, that means doing everything we can to impose consequences on Turkey and the US for this invasion.

“Do the Kurds support Zionism and Islamophobia?”

One of the chief hallmarks of the social experiment that has emerged in Rojava over the past several years is that, in contrast to the various forms of ethnic and religious nationalism so prevalent in the region, it is multi-ethnic and inclusive. A significant part of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in Rojava is Muslim. It may have been attractive for some Islamophobes in the US to support Kurdish resistance to the Islamic State while the US was endorsing it, but we should not blame the people in Rojava for this.

The Barzani Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq has historically maintained good relations with both Turkey and Israel, but different Kurdish parties have very different agendas. There are many fair criticisms to be made of the PYD, SDF, and other structures in Rojava, but it’s a real stretch to accuse them of being Zionists. On the contrary, by and large, they deserve credit for being neither pro-Zionist nor anti-Jewish in a region where so many actors are one or the other.

Though there are nationalistic elements in some of the Kurdish movements and structures in Rojava, they are hardly as ethnocentric as many of the other nationalist currents in the region. In any case, we don’t have to endorse them to oppose the Turkish invasion.

“Did the Kurds betray the Syrian Revolution?”

As anarchists, we consider apologists for Assad beneath contempt. Those who explain away the original uprising against the Assad regime as a CIA operation are conspiracy theorists who deny the agency of grassroots participants. Blessing tyranny with the name “socialism” and justifying state violence on the grounds of legitimate sovereignty is bootlicking, pure and simple. The original revolt in Syria was a response to state oppression, just like the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt. We affirm the right of the oppressed to revolt even when there seems to be no hope of success. If not for this sort of courage, humanity would still be living under hereditary monarchs. For want of more such courage, our societies are descending deeper into tyranny once again.

Guided by the experiences of those who participated in the original uprising in Syria, we can learn a lot about the hazards of militarism in revolutionary struggle. Once the conflict with Assad’s government shifted from strikes and subversion to militarized violence, those who were backed by state or institutional actors were able to centralize themselves as the protagonists; power collected in the hands of Islamists and other reactionaries. As Italian insurrectionist anarchists famously argued, “the force of insurrection is social, not military.” The uprising didn’t spread far enough fast enough to become a revolution. Instead, it turned into a gruesome civil war, bringing the so-called “Arab Spring” to a close and with it the worldwide wave of revolts.

The fact that the uprising in Syria ended in an ugly civil war is not the fault of those who dared everything to resist the Assad regime. Rather, once again, it shows that we were not courageous or organized enough to support them properly. The unfortunate outcome of the Syrian uprising illustrates the disastrous consequences of relying on state governments like the US to support those who stand up for themselves against oppressors and aggressors. The current Turkish invasion confirms the same thing.

Some people outside Syria also blame the Kurds for this failure. It strikes us as hypocritical that anyone who did not go to Syria to participate in the struggle would accuse the Kurds of sitting out the first phase of fighting. The only people from whom this charge carries any weight are the ones who participated in the first phase of the Syrian uprising themselves.

We are sympathetic to this frustration we have heard from Syrian refugees. We have learned a great deal from Syrians who took courageous risks in the revolution only to be forced to flee along the Balkan Route, ending up trapped in places like Greece and Slovenia. Many Syrian refugees have contributed admirably to social struggles in these countries—despite not being there by choice, despite the daily xenophobia and oppression they have confronted. Many of them have since been incarcerated or deported by racist border regimes.

From where we are situated, it is not easy to judge the decisions of the members of an oppressed minority in Syria, far from most of the fighting at the onset of the revolt, that has historically been betrayed again and again by other groups in the region. Perhaps, had Kurds and others in Rojava immediately risked everything in the struggle against Assad, it could have turned out differently. If that is true, then the lesson of this tragedy is that it is crucial to build trust and solidarity across ethnic and religious lines before revolt breaks out. This is yet another reason to concern ourselves with the fate of the various ethnic groups on the receiving end of the Turkish invasion right now.

Sadly, it is possible that even if the uprising had toppled Assad, Syria would be little better off today—look at Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. Rather than simply replacing one government with another, the most important thing we can hope to accomplish in struggle is to open up autonomous spaces of self-determination and solidarity in which people can explore different ways of relating. To some extent, the experiment in Rojava accomplished this.

But even if the people in Rojava today were somehow responsible for the failure of the Syrian uprising, would they deserve to be slaughtered for this?

No, they would not.

The invasion has just begun.

“But I saw somewhere on the Internet that ‘the Kurds’ are involved in ethnic cleansing? Aren’t they holding people in detainment camps?”

Anywhere there are prisons—anywhere there is a penal system—there is oppression. We are prison abolitionists; we don’t endorse incarceration of any kind. At the same time, there are thousands of mass murderers among the ISIS captives who are surely determined to resume killing as soon as they are free. This presents a difficult situation for everyone who hopes to see multi-ethnic reconciliation and peaceful co-existence in the region.

In any case, there were jails in Iraq in 2003—and that didn’t keep us from trying to stop Bush from invading Iraq. We don’t have to endorse everything the SDF or PYD is doing to oppose the military aggression of Turkey—a more carceral state.

Likewise, we have seen reports of violence in Rojava under the current “self-administration.” We don’t consider Rojava a utopia; as anarchists, we have criticisms to make about the political structures there, as well. But we have to see things in proper proportion. Relative to the brutality carried out by most of the other actors in the region, the SDF and related groups in Rojava have been comparatively restrained.

The detainment of ISIS fighters along with women and children from the Islamic State is hardly the worst thing that could have happened. From what some of us heard in Rojava during the final phase of the struggle against Islamic State territory, the only people anywhere in the world who wanted to take ISIS prisoners off the hands of the SDF were Iraqi Shia militias. Around the time of the capture of Baghouz, they were reportedly offering the SDF money and weapons in exchange for captured Iraqi ISIS fighters in hopes of taking violent revenge on them. To their credit, SDF declined to turn the captives over.

This is not to legitimize detainment, but to emphasize the intensity of strife and hatred in Syria and Iraq after so much war. Many of these captives would probably have been executed in short order by the Syrian or Iraqi governments, or tortured slowly and methodically by the Shia militias, rather than given food and medical care as they are in Rojava. Indeed, some in the region have criticized the SDF for being too soft on these prisoners. If Turkey or its Syrian mercenary proxies enable the ISIS detainees to escape and resume their former activities, everyone who argued in favor of executing the captives will claim to have been vindicated.

For prison abolitionists and anyone else who wants to see peace in the Middle East, the top priority now is to halt the Turkish invasion. We don’t have to legitimize any particular SDF policy to undertake that.

Click on the image to download a printable PDF of the poster.

“But Turkey says the organizations in Rojava are terrorists and claims to be threatened by them.”

It is absurd to argue that ordinary people in Turkey were really threatened by the experiment in Rojava. The US military had already agreed to oversee patrols all along the border—and many of those on the other side of that border are Kurdish people who have a lot in common with the people in Rojava. A free Rojava doesn’t threaten the Turkish people; it threatens Erdoğan’s regime and the oppression that Kurdish people face in Turkey. This is an ethno-nationalist war, pure and simple.

There has been violent struggle in Turkey between the Turkish state and Kurdish movements and armed groups for decades. Erdoğan believes that he can keep maintaining supremacy by force of arms, both inside Turkey and against the surrounding countries, continuing a legacy that includes the systematic genocide of over one million Armenians just a century ago.

Surely, now that Turkey has reignited the Syrian civil war, far more Turkish civilians are going to be killed than would have died otherwise. Hopefully, that will clarify for some people in Turkey that state militarism does not make them safer, but endangers them as well as those on the other side of the shells and bombs.

“But Turkey says it has to seize Rojava to resettle Syrian refugees there.”

It’s not clear exactly what Turkey’s plans are for the region, nor whom they hope to settle there; the majority of the Syrian refugees in Turkey are not from Rojava. Chiefly, Turkey would like to get defiant Kurdish people away from its borders in order to stifle Kurdish independence movements.

In any case, for Turkey to use military force to murder or displace millions of people and replace them with an entirely different population is the very definition of ethnic cleansing. The fact that they are announcing ahead of time that they intend to commit war crimes is shocking.

“Does opposing the Turkish invasion legitimize the US military?”

As anarchists, we don’t believe the US military can do any good in the world. But no one has to legitimize the US military to oppose a Turkish invasion. We are not calling for the US military to resolve the situation; we are calling out the parties responsible for this tragedy—the US and Turkish governments and all the corporations that help set their agendas—and pressuring them to put a stop to it.

When Hitler seized Czechoslovakia in 1938, when Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, no one had to affirm or legitimize any state, government, or army to oppose those invasions. Rather, by making it as inconvenient as possible for anyone to stand by while such tragedies take place, we enact our principled opposition to injustice.

Likewise, the betrayal of the Kurds should make it clear to anyone who still puts their faith in the US government—or any government—that we will only get as much peace in the world as we can create by our own efforts, doing all we can to resolve conflicts horizontally while defending ourselves against the vertical power structures of those who aspire to rule.

Fallacies such as “If you’re against the Turkish invasion, you must be in favor of US imperialism” illustrate the pitfalls of binary thinking. It’s easier to understand what is at stake in this situation if we recognize that there are at least three basic sides to today’s global conflicts, each representing a different vision of the future:

  • Neoliberals of all stripes, from Lindsay Graham and Hillary Clinton to supposedly leftist parties like SYRIZA in Greece and the Workers Party (PT) in Brazil. Though they disagree about the details, they share a common aim of using networked global state governance to stabilize the world for capitalism.

  • Nationalists like Trump, Erdogan, and ISIS, who have made their complicity clear enough in the course of this affair. This category also includes Assad, Putin, and other demagogues who—like the neoliberals—are often at odds with each other, but all pursue the same vision of a post-neoliberal world of competing ethno-states.

  • Social movements for liberation that seek to foster pluralistic and egalitarian self-determination based in autonomy and solidarity. Much of what we have seen in Rojava fits this category, even if much of it has a nationalistic character as well.

When nationalists collaborate against a social experiment like the one in Rojava, calling for resistance should not mean endorsing the neoliberals who previously administered peace and war. On the contrary, we have to build up our social movements while breaking with both nationalist/militarist and neoliberal/reformist agendas. Otherwise, we will forever be instrumentalized by one side or the other, either via direct manipulation or out of fear of the other group achieving supremacy.

“How can we hope to stop Turkey, one of the world’s most powerful militaries?”

We may not succeed in forcing the US and Turkish governments to halt the invasion of Rojava. But even if we don’t, there are important things we can accomplish by taking action and valuable opportunities we will miss if we do not.

The invasion of Rojava is taking place against a global backdrop of intensifying nationalism, strife, and authoritarianism. We have to understand this as a single battle in a much larger conflict. Situating it in the context of the larger worldwide struggles taking place right now, we can identify several objectives that are absolutely within our reach:

  • We can show the complicity between nationalists like Trump and Erdogan and ISIS, and delegitimize them in the public eye by associating them with each other.

  • We can advance an anti-state position as the only reliable form of solidarity with targeted peoples against state oppression and colonialism—not just US imperialism, but also Turkish, Russian, and Chinese imperialism, among others.

  • We can legitimize and popularize forms of direct action as the only way to effectively pressure the authorities. When electoral politics has failed to offer any meaningful progress towards social change, we have to accustom people to other approaches.

If ISIS is able to escalate its activity again—if there is no peace or positive prospect in the Middle East for another decade—we want everyone in the world to know whose fault it is and that we did everything we possibly could to stop it.

The stakes are high, but if we fight hard, we can come out of this nightmare one step closer to a world without wars. Or, failing that, a world in which we are at least fighting in conflicts of our own choosing, not senseless tragedies like this.

A solidarity action in Flensburg, Germany opposing the Turkish invasion.


we get it matters, but we can't do anything from here

"can't do anything from here"
so... no Turkish embassy near you? no Turkish government owned or sponsored businesses? no Turkish banks? no Turkish travel agencies? no Turkish journals/journalists? no US based banks that have subtantial investments in Turkey? really bro, you're not trying very hard

you know, funny how the answer to all of those is "no" for me. i shouldn't have said "we" just i.

right, mister not we, just i. i'm also not going to organize any solidarity demos in front of any of those targets, because i'm not a get shit done type of moralistic activist, but you've been exposed as a mealy-mouthed sanctimonious nihilistic piece of shit. you would have done more for your pathetic self-absorbed cause if you'd just kept your know-nothing thoughts to yourself.

okay, lesson learned.

these and some other things that can be done are said at the end of this podcast:


Turkish targets are available globally. Survivors of the Armenian Genocide have been hitting them all over the world for a century now. Hell, just bringing up the Armenian Genocide makes the current Turkish regime shake shit bricks.

a statement from Revolutionary Anarchist Action

The Kurds fought Isis on the Turkish land they renamed Rojava, and then cunningly claimed it as their own, exiling the poor Turkish families who formerly called it their home.
Cut through all the Kurdish imperialism they call anarchism and see it for what it is, a centuries old ethnic rivalry that has already extinguished the lands of the Armenian people by a Turkish and Kurd alliance 100 years ago!

so because there were some Kurds complicit in the Armenian Genocide due to "a centuries old ethnic rivalry" we should then not give a shit about Turkish imperialism and their drive to create a Kurdish Genocide? two wrongs don't make a right, but three do? fuck off

No, the Kurds and Turks are equally imperialistic, have been for hundreds of years. Let's face it, the Middle-East is a rotten mullagatawny of religious, tribal and ethnic intolerance and hatred which other countries shouls avoid like the plague. Get the hell outta there its no place for genuine indi idualist anarchs!

Rage typo individualist anarchs!

maybe you should avoid rage posting too

Shall we discuss the aesthetiçs of rage, passion and spontaneous honesty?

Also, tantrums are not spontaneous, they are premeditated acts of ressentiment!

You're talking out of your ass. Let's reconsider your views and read one or two books before pretending to know anything about history.

Read history? The Kurds from the region formerly known as Kurdistan were an opportunistic mercenary collection of tribes who allied themselves with the neighbouring Persian Empire in antiquity and more recently with the Ottoman Empire.

Or even more recently with the USA Empire.

Kurdistan is a land project based on a national identify, dumbo, not an empire. I concede this can be seen as another form of nationalism or nation-building, but do you fucking know what "imperialism" is?

The closest thing to it was the Median empire. But it didn't exist for roughly 2500 fucking years! Duh. History, dude. 600 BC was not 1918 AD.

I would add that the whole Middle East is a heterogeneous sectarian region dominated by patriarchal Abrahamic religious authorities which anyone with any basic sociological awareness knows. People don't just suddenly become ruling "anarchs" in any Middle Eastern region unless they are puppets of a larger hegemony. They know they are on thin ice expecting to carry on this masqueŕade of autonous anarchist sovereignty. Western idealists and libertarian socialists will eventually face the monolithic force of Abrahamic authority.

They crucify rebels in this region like they did 2,000 years ago!

You must be referring to the jihadists who seek to establish one of another kind of supermacho male-dominated despotic rule based on some fundamentalist interpretation of Islam.

i.e. Salafists.

Quite as much "rebellious" as Neonazis are!

Noooo, not jihadists duh, they are just extremists of the existing paradigm. Who I mean by "rebels" are those who seek to replace the existing paradigm. Jesus was the one I was referring to as the 2,000 yr old rebel who was crucified for attempting an insurrectionagainst the ruling Abrahamic authority.
Yòu're obviously caught in the binary leftist/neonazi paradigm to not know this glaring fact!

could someone give me the tl;dr version? thanks

"the Kurds have prisons, but they're the best prisons in the region" - crimethinc. 2019

I don't think they need our help guys, they've already got plenty from their ol' buddy down south https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/14/russian-shadow-falls-over-... (though it's worth noting they've had a working relationship with the butcher for a long time)

"there are even ISIS women and children in the prison and thats kinda understandable"
-Crimethinc 2019

"Did the Kurds betray the revolution? Maybe, but you can't say this unless you fought against Assad in Syria, plus maybe things would have been worse with Assad out of power" -crimethinc. 2019

Congratulations on misreading three sections of that article.

shh, don't encourage them!

Where is the misreading?

They give a weak defense of Kurdish detainment camps by comparing it to other things that could have happened to the prisoners - the section is filled with qualifiers such as "Relative to the brutality carried out by most of the other actors in the region, the SDF and related groups in Rojava have been comparatively restrained" and "The detainment of ISIS fighters along with women and children from the Islamic State is hardly the worst thing that could have happened."

Sure they preface it by giving a largely unelaborated mention of having qualms with what's going on in Rojava, but this hasn't been articulated at all by crimethinc. at any point in the many years that this has been going on. A charitable reading of their apology for not being "courageous or organized enough" to support the general fight against Assad primary by the poor Sunni majority in the country is that they include under lacking courage their (and many other anarchists) not really being invested in anything outside of the Rojava bubble for many long years.

Ok so you epic-failed at coming up with a ludicrous claim on the Kurds being imperialists... then you move on to the next article of shaming that might ring something to anarchists: the Kurd prisons.

Alrite, so I also know that there's several women, known as the "ISIS brides" who more or less willfully, after a load of indoctrination, went all the way to Syria to espouse those brave macho men so they put them at their right places (i.e. being house/sex slaves or breeding machines). This failed. These people are a bunch of fanatical losers, LED AND FUNDED BY FOREIGN REGIMES.

They are grown into mafia-like families of Salafist fanatics who take money from foreign intel agencies, that train them to be cold-blooded killers who make a sport of beheading civilians, raping women and children and go after anyone that put their doctrine into question. Even to many Muslims they are not to be considered Muslim. As much as Hitler was a "Christian".

You root for the wrong mother fuckers, you fucktard.

In an ideal anarchist revolution (that I don't believe in) there would be a huge bunch of people in this society who'd be the reactionary enemies (not just you, not just the cops). The sniveling scum who'll look down upon you as a Nazi would do to a Jew. These cowards indoctrinated by classism, who see everyone in terms of status and prestige. There's a lot of awful people in here, even if there's also lotsa good but confused, misguided people. What would we do with the first category?

While I'd be more for the option of executing them all, this would bring us way too close to Maoist China, I'd be much better to reprogram them in some way. Which still means enforcing a kind of control over them, and holding them in a form of slavery or detention.

Prisons are not the biggest problem with Rojava, or the best critique that can be thrown at it. It's something else. It's the socialism and statism that they yet didn't take out of their equation. Their statist form has made them cling ultimately to a bigger, stronger State for their own collective defense.

They side with Russia and Assad out of necessity for survival. Like people here vote as necessity for having better people put in charge instead of demented tools like Trump. They'd like to have a better choice, but it hasn't been offered to them.

The Turks WILL do a genocide of Kurds if they aren't stopped with the help of these States we despise.

Let's looks at the Daesh detainee situation by resetting it to a chaotic US in which the government has collapsed. Suppose we are fighting to defend our own area against a "christian state"/neo-Confederate alliance that is killing all of our people they can catch. Now let's say we defeat a bunch of them in battle, and they choose to surrender rather than fight to the death. We now are stuck with them.

We can do any of several things:

1: We can disarm and release them (as Fidel did in the Cuban revolution), hoping they don't come back. That works well with conscript soldiers, who in Cuba soon surrendered in droves and became the insurgency's primary source of weapons. It does NOT work with ideologically-driven terrorists or enemy officers. This method also gives the best possible propaganda. Do expect to have to fight some of them multiple times, but so long as you are NOT up against a whole army of motivated, ideological opponents can be made to work

2: Opposite extreme: we can execute them all. We guarantee they don't return to the battlefield, and in the case of Daesh that's what happens if your surrender to them. Unknown if we would face this from Christian State here. If we do this, the world howls as we commit a war crime and no doubt catch up conscripts, family members of fighters, and even the occasional tourist caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Look at who the US put in GITMO and how some of them were sold to the US by bounty hunters, in some cases over nothing more than local beefs.

3: We can detain them until the end of the war, hoping the war stays over when they are released. This can be a real problem in an endless war, and if the tides of battle sweep over the detention camps we have to fight them a second time. This method is currently the global standard for dealing with soldiers who surrender. Remember, those who would rather be executed than imprisoned always have the option to fight to the death on the battlefield, thus screening out of the population of POW's those most severely harmed by imprisonment. You see this too in every war.

Also leftist 20 somethings full of testosterone and revolutionary ressentiment are involved here.

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