DIBIS, Iraq -- The prisoners were taken to a waiting room in groups of four, and were told to stand facing the concrete wall, their noses almost touching it, their hands bound behind their backs.
More than a thousand Islamic State fighters passed through that room last week after they fled their crumbling Iraqi stronghold of Hawija. Instead of the martyrdom they had boasted was their only acceptable fate, they had voluntarily ended up here in the interrogation center of the Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq.
For an extremist group that has made its reputation on its ferociousness, with fighters who would always choose suicide over surrender, the fall of Hawija has been a notable turning point. The group has suffered a string of defeats in Iraq and Syria, but the number of its shock troops who turned themselves in to Kurdish officials at the center in Dibis was unusually large, more than 1,000 since Oct. 1.
The fight for Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, took nine months, and by comparison, relatively few Islamic State fighters surrendered. Tal Afar fell next, and more quickly, in only 11 days. Some 500 fighters surrendered there.
[THE ISLAMIC STATE: Timeline of group’s rise, fall; details on campaign to fight it]
The Iraqi military ousted the Islamic State group from Hawija in 15 days, saying it had taken its forces only three days of actual heavy fighting before most of the extremists grabbed their families and ran. According to Kurdish officials, they put up no fight at all, other than planting bombs and booby traps.
Seen up close, the fighters' pretense of bravado soon disappears.
Their shoes were taken from them, their pockets emptied and their belts discarded, and, as they stood facing the wall, the backs of their robes were stained with the evidence that some of them had not been to a toilet in days.
Kurdish interrogators allowed a dozen of the surrendered fighters to be interviewed by a reporter as they arrived at the local headquarters of the Asayish, the Kurdish intelligence service, in the town of Dibis, near the Kurds' front lines opposite Hawija. Officers monitored all interviews.
Many of the fighters claimed to have been just cooks or clerks. So many said they had been members of the Islamic State for only a month or two that interrogators suspected they had been coached to say that. Gone was the contempt for the world's opinion, spewed out in one violent video after another -- many of them made in Hawija, where grisly killings, especially of Kurdish prisoners, were the norm during their three-year reign over that Sunni Arab city in northern Iraq.
Most of the prisoners, though, claimed to have never seen a beheading, or even heard of such a thing.
At first, one fighter seemed an exception, admitting defiantly that he had been fighting for the group for two years, alongside family members. He readily gave his name: "Maytham Muhammed Mohemin," he said, practically spitting it out.
During the interview, he grew nervous. He said he was from Hawija and had joined the Islamic State because he believed in its cause, because his elder brother had, and because the $100 a month pay was better than anything else around.
He had arrived in Dibis on Thursday afternoon with eight companions, seven Iraqis and an Egyptian, after they dropped their weapons in Hawija that morning. Since the beginning of the Iraqi offensive two weeks earlier, they had spent most of the time burrowed in foxholes to escape the relentless U.S. bombing and shelling by advancing Iraqi forces, and had passed days without sanitary facilities or food.
Finally, the Islamic State wali, or governor of Hawija, told the men to turn themselves in to the Kurdish forces, known as the peshmerga, and to flee the advancing Iraqi army and its Shiite militia allies, the Iranian-trained Hashed al-Shaabi, notorious for killing not only Islamic State prisoners but also their entire families.
"The governor told us each to 'solve your own problem and find your own solution for yourself,'" Mohemin said. "He said, 'Go to the peshmerga, not to the Hashed.'"
The interrogator, Lt. Pisthiwan Salahi, said Mohemin was not only an Islamic State soldier but also a member of an elite suicide squad known as the Seekers of Martyrdom, according to informers.
Kurdish officials have been perplexed by the number of fighters who have surrendered. Many of the militants said they were ordered by their leaders to turn themselves in to the Kurds, who were known to take prisoners instead of killing them. But Capt. Ali Muhammed Syan, chief of the Asayish interrogators in Dibis, said even the fighters did not seem to know why their leaders were telling them to quit. "Maybe it's some deal," he said. "Maybe it's just bad morale, I don't know."
The lieutenant did not take his eyes off Mohemin for a second. "They're just planning to go underground and make sleeper cells," he said.
Mohemin shook his head. "This is the end of this state," he said. "I believe if the governors are telling us to surrender, it really means that this is the end." He swore to God that he was telling the truth.
A Section on 10/09/2017