Setting aside bombs and missiles, guerrillas may eschew military confrontation in favor of targeted killing and taking prisoners. Sometimes derided as assassination, targeted killing is a common tactic that often allows insurgents to aim at isolated enemy soldiers and officers, informants, collaborators, and high-ranking enemy civilians without exposing themselves to great risk. The idea has also caught on among state armies who avidly pursue militants in Gaza, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Both targeted killing and assassination suffer from the same deficiencies. First, victims may include military and civilian targets thereby leading to charges of indiscriminate harm. Second, targeted killings cause collateral harm that may be disproportionate. Third, these tactics smack of extrajudicial or summary execution, which not only eliminates enemy assets but conveniently purges informers, collaborators, and rivals.

While assassination kills, taking and housing prisoners usefully disables enemy combatants and provides coin to exchange for one’s own. The second half of this chapter considers the ethical challenges that arise when guerrillas apprehend and detain prisoners. Guerrilla attempts to take prisoners of war are often met with disdain. Viewing guerrillas and insurgents as little more than criminals or unlawful belligerents, some commentators disparage guerrilla tactics as nothing more than kidnapping or hostage taking. But the exigencies of war and the injunction to minimize harm may sometimes demand prisoner taking. Still, prisoners of war present special problems for non-state military organizations. Many guerrilla armies have no facilities to house prisoners or to meet the barest conditions of reasonable treatment. As a result, they usually take few prisoners, mistreat others, and demand lopsided exchanges, all to the frustration of state armies. But the treatment of prisoners varies enormously among contemporary guerrilla armies, just as it does among the states they fight.