Hostages

It’s quite a mystery what happened during the abduction of eight Turkish soldiers by PKK militia a bit more then two weeks ago. They have now been released, but were soon afterwards arrested because questions arose about their loyalty to the Turkish state. Were they really kidnapped, or were some of them moles for the PKK, telling them of their whereabouts? Did they really, as they themselves say, run out of ammunition and thus become unable to fight on? Or did they disobey orders from their commander to keep on fighting and by doing so endanger the lives of their fellow soldiers? Nobody knows, and only an investigation into the matter can tell.
In the meantime, some of the public have already formed an opinion. The soldiers are not only accused of being moles and cowards, but of actually collaborating with the enemy. They are supposed to have not behaved like real hostages, for example, because they had tea with their captors. It irritates me, to say the least, that people can so easily judge a situation they don’t know anything about. The fight against the PKK makes some people lose their ability to think in shades of grey. You are either on the good side or the bad side, and the smallest things are sometimes used to label somebody as a friend of the terrorists. Luckily, public opinion doesn’t decide whether the soldiers neglected their duty or not.