MOST wars have two sides. If you are on the winning side then you get the benefits of winning. If you are on the losing side then you pay the price for losing.

But the UK Government’s Independent Overseer on Terrorism Legislation, Max Hill QC, has come up with a new idea

4 Twisted. . . home-grown jihadis, from left, Reyaad Khan, Nasser Muthana and Ruhul Amin, all died fighting for IS Credit: AFP

If you are on the winning side you get to win. And if you are on the losing side then you win as well.

In an interview with the BBC, Hill argued that people who went to fight for IS in Syria and Iraq — there are around 850 linked to the UK, we learnt this week — might have been “naive” and maybe “brainwashed”.

Hill worried these poor souls — 425 of whom are now feared heading back to these shores, according to former MI6 chief Richard Barrett — might return “in a state of utter disillusionment”.

Rather than prosecution, he argued: “Really we should be looking at ­reintegration”.

He hammered home this message on Tuesday night at a speech in London where he criticised government plans to give harsher jail terms for terror offences, such as Amber Rudd’s proposal to slap up to 15-year sentences on those who watch terrorist propaganda videos.

4 Rudd thinking . . . Amber says that we should jail slap anyone who watches a terrorist with a 15 year sentence Credit: Rex Features

There is a multi-volume work to be written on Hill’s stupidity.

First is the idea that people joining IS could have been naive. The Syrian civil war has been a brutal and bloody affair with wrongs done on many sides.

But people who volunteered to go to fight with IS knowingly joined a ­terrorist group. From the start there was not a grain of doubt that whereas the Kurds, for instance, were fighting against the worst jihadists, IS in fact were the worst ­jihadists.

From the moment the group emerged, their way of war was one of unimaginable terror, as this newspaper reminded us yesterday in its uncomfortable report on former IS stronghold Raqqa.

4 Yazidi women were held and routinely raped by ISIS Credit: Andy Bush - The Sun

It involved chopping off the heads of dozens of captives and filming the ­killings.

It involved the slaughter of Yazidi men and the enslaving and raping of ­Yazidi women. It included the most nearly completed genocide of our time.

Anyone attracted to join IS was attracted because of all this. Because they are sadists and extremists, perverts and jihadists. Many things, but not naive.

And even if they were, so what?

If you or I chose to join a ­terrorist group which gang-raped, ­massacred and beheaded its way across two countries, would we be allowed to turn around and say “Oops”? Should people forget all about it if we said we had thought we were joining the Sisters Of Mercy?

Apart from being absurd, the idea is also vilely offensive to the victims.

Why should people who have plagued the peoples of Iraq and Syria be forgiven by the British authorities?

4 Deluded . . . Hill is being too soft on potentially serial criminals Credit: PA:Press Association

If the Iraqi or Syrian authorities gave sanctuary and amnesty to people who had carried out such attacks in Britain, we would be furious.

As for the idea that we should be ­“reintegrating” such people?

If these IS terrorists had been “integrated” in the first place they would not have joined the jihadist group.

There is no “re”-integration to occur.

With stupidity at such depths we should be doubly grateful to the Conservative MP Rory Stewart for saying what needed ­saying.

Responding to Hill this week, he said: “These are people who have essentially moved away from any kind of allegiance towards the British government. They are absolutely dedicated towards the creation of a caliphate.

“These people are a serious danger to us, and unfortunately the only way of dealing with them will be, in almost every case, to kill them.”

Of course various groups who pretend to be moderate have condemned Stewart for speaking this truth.

They claim that he is “lumping all ­Muslims together” and issuing similar fibs when in fact he could not be clearer.

Journalist Stuart Ramsay gives gruesome tour of ISIS torture and murder chamber inside Raqqa football stadium

Muslims who follow our laws, traditions and customs can be as British as anyone else. But if you leave the country and chop people’s heads off for a few years you can’t come back and pretend ­everything is fine, despite what Hill and also Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn seem to believe.

In his speech on Tuesday, Hill doubled down by announcing that there appeared to be “one law for Muslims, and another for the rest”. A claim that is divisive as well as ­precisely upside down.

He went on to claim people who spread hate should not be harshly ­prosecuted.

A further wild mistake given that extremist groups such as al-Muhajiroun — which was allowed to operate in the UK for years — was directly linked to 56 per cent of convictions for al-Qaeda and IS terror offences in the UK between 1998 and 2015, according to the think tank The Henry Jackson Society.

Perhaps Hill would be interested in other news yesterday, when the Crown Prosecution Service warned that it had a shortage of prosecutors to cope with the number of terrorism cases now emerging in the UK.

It is possible the CPS will get its way.

Or perhaps Hill will get his, and no trials ever need be considered so long as we pretend nobody did anything wrong.

It is certainly one way to declare the war on Islamist extremism over.

And one of the first wars in history where there is no price for being on the wrong — and losing — side.

Douglas Murray is the author of The Strange Death Of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam.