American Jihadists

To Kill or Not to Kill Part 4

"What'll we do man. We got to fucking run," I said. "We can't just murder those men and one's practically a boy of 15 or so. We can't!" I insisted.

"We can and we must," Gustave said. "This is war. This is survival. We wanted to be here. Now we're here! They will kill us for certain if we don't obey. We cannot escape! We have no fucking chance, don't you see? And either way, the fucking morons are going to kill those poor bastards who are up against the wall. They're dead already, done for, decided before we showed up. They fucking ran and they got caught. If you run away from these crazies, you have to be smart about it. You just don't run. You wait for a good opportunity. We're in it now, deep! We have to do what they ordered us to do. We go back. We tell them that we've never done this before. And we tell them we decided that we need to follow orders and that that is why we joined Islamic State. Then we go up to the wall, tell them, 'sorry guys,' and kill them as soon as possible so they won't suffer much. We have to do this. Now, let's do it! There's no choice here man!"

"You're wrong. It's murder and we'd only be thinking about ourselves," I said. "I say we run right now and keep running all the way back to Turkey and then get to hell home. We cannot kill them. We would never live it down and that kind of criminality would follow us the rest of our lives. Let's take the weapons and go now while we still have a chance."

"You're nuts," Gustave said. "They've got soldiers all over Aleppo and the first thing they'll do is kill those guys anyway! Look, we can't debate this right now. Like the man said, this isn't a democracy. We came here knowing we were going to have to kill people. Killing anyone is not easy and it's messy at the ground level. But it's necessary. Don't you get it?"

"I won't commit murder. They can kill me but I won't do it!" I said.