Were you afraid?

He was unarmed and his hands were tied behind his back, yet even so, we’ve been nurtured on this image of the ISIS boogeyman, and I think it affects all of us — aside from his physical presence, just the idea of what these people had been capable of. But the more I talked to him, the more that went away. I had that impression with a lot of the guys I talked to. They start out kind of scary-looking, but once you talk to them you reduce them to just another person.

It was just dawning on them that what was going to happen to them was that they were going to a court, and probably to jail for having been in ISIS. And this guy was concerned. His wife was very pregnant, about to have their first child, and he realized in the course of my talking to him that he was not going to see his wife. He was pretty beaten down by that.

So he has some human feelings after all.

They’re human beings — human beings that took an ugly path, but still human beings.

The question I think a lot of people have is: Is ISIS finished? Are we seeing the end of them?

I think, in some ways, yes. The ISIS prisoners we talked to said they had been ordered by their leaders to surrender themselves and to escape. They were also very bitter and their morale was at a real low point. They felt that they had been betrayed by ISIS leadership, that their leaders were just saving themselves and that the whole organization was finished. And it’s true that they have basically lost all their important territory.