More sympathetic “give ISIS a chance” from our journalists can be found in this piece right here. Washington Post writer, Sebastian Meyer claims that his best friend was kidnapped by ISIS in the summer of 2014. Meyer was filming on location as a journalist in Iraq when his friend disappeared. Despite this, Meyer claims that he “couldn’t hate” Islamic State fighters when he came face-to-face with them.

In his write-up “ISIS kidnapped my best friend. But when I met its fighters, I couldn’t hate them-Its young men were lost souls coerced or duped into service“, Myers gives a detailed account of his arranged meeting with a captured fighter named “Ali”:

When I met him, Ali wore an orange jumpsuit and plastic sandals. He sat hunched in his chair as a guard lit a thin cigarette and passed it to him. He took it with both hands, his wrists cuffed together, and inhaled deeply. (In Islamic State territory, smoking is forbidden.) This sight was a far cry from a propaganda photo I saw of him dressed in black, standing commandingly behind a Kurdish peshmerga soldier he says he subsequently executed.

Meyer recounts Ali stating that he joined ISIS in 2008, when he was 13 years old. Ali claimed the deaths of four Iraqi police officers in Mosul, eight or nine men in battle and beheaded five individuals.

I asked him to tell me about the peshmerga soldier whose head he cut off. In a soft, compliant voice, he told me he had pushed the Kurdish soldier belly-first onto the ground in front of him. He placed his knee in the man’s back and then severed the neck with a bayonet. Did Ali have a message for the families of the peshmerga he’d beheaded? He went quiet for a second, and then his face screwed up very tightly and he began to sob.

Is any one here passing around the world’s smallest violin just yet? Or am I only one playing this tiny little instrument as I scroll through? Sobbing? Really? Why? Because he’s behind bars and can’t behead anyone else?

…the men who carry out these crimes are not the two-dimensional caricatures they’re painted to be. They are human beings, many indoctrinated at the most impressionable age and coerced into service.

A few weeks after the interviews, I saw a photo taken after a battle between the Kurds and the Islamic State near Sinjar, Iraq. In the lower left-hand corner is the body of a militant, his head just out of the frame, blood pooling by his left shoulder. His name is Abdul Aziz Faraj Yusuf, age 16. I’ve seen a lot of photos of dead Islamic State fighters, but as I reread the boy’s age, I felt something different. Gone was the sense of retaliatory satisfaction. This was a dead child. I wasn’t angry anymore. I was heartbroken.

So, sobbing, terrorists sitting in a jail cell are just wayward young boys (who happen to be grown men now) who were just “coerced” and “duped” into service with ISIS? It’s not Ali’s fault that he beheaded someone’s father, son, brother or best friend…he was just misguided. And he’s sobbing now because he was brought along this path against his will.

You know what I say to Ali’s soft-compliant voice and to Meyer’s inability to hate the men who took his best friend? I call rubbish. While Meyer was lucky enough to not have feces, urine and sperm thrown at him while he had a nice little chat with Ali (unlike some of our Marines at GITMO), I feel sorry for Meyer for being so deceived despite the evil he saw firsthand and came face-to-face with. My sympathies lie with this man who Meyer is a human being and has been indoctrinated to drink the same liberal journalist Kool-Aid that allows him to sympathize with a savage who chopped people’s heads off. Poor misunderstood ISIS inmate. Meyer is so heartbroken. We are, too. Especially when we have American journalists sympathizing with the very entities who want to kill off our brave men and women who go into these battles.