[LINK] "French ISIL fighters want to return home, plead for clemency"

[rfmcdonald]

My sympathy for these and other foreign volunteers for ISIS, as described by Al Jazeera's Michael Pizzi, is limited. Let them return if they want to face the consequences of their actions. If not, let them rot in the polity they went to join.

Letters from disillusioned French fighters in Syria published by a French newspaper this week have revived a contentious debate in Europe about what to do with radicalized recruits to foreign wars who wish to lay down their arms and return home.

In excerpts published by Le Figaro on Monday, several of the estimated 376 French fighters with the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) reveal that they were bored, terrified or otherwise "fed up" with the grueling reality of their jihad in Syria.

Fighters complain of difficult conditions, especially as the winter cold sets in. Their concerns range from the practical, including a couple worried that their child, born in Syria, would not enjoy French citizenship, to the trivial. “I'm sick and tired. My iPod doesn’t work anymore,” one writes. “I have to return.”

Le Figaro reports that the fighters were stationed mostly in Aleppo and Raqqa, ISIL's de facto capital in Syria. ISIL, which has declared a restored Islamic “caliphate” straddling Syria and Iraq, has drawn thousands of recruits from across the globe thanks in part to a sophisticated propaganda machine touting jihad as an adventure and life under ISIL rule as paradise.

The reality described in many of the letters — days filled with disappointingly menial work — is a far cry from the dramatic violence that featured in ISIL’s YouTube videos. "I've done practically nothing but hand out clothes and food. I also clean weapons and transport dead fighters’ corpses," wrote one. "The winter is here. It's become very difficult."