To deprogram a Jihadist

News last week that Said Ali al-Shihri, a former inmate of Guantánamo, has emerged as al-Qaeda’s deputy leader in Yemen intensified debate on how to deal with prisoners held at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba. But al-Shihri’s narrative raised other interesting questions as well. In 2007, the U.S. released him to Saudi Arabia, where he underwent a much-trumpeted religious “deradicalization” program for jihadists that clearly didn’t take. In the past, Saudi authorities have consistently claimed that none of the program’s graduates have returned to terrorism in the five years since the program was established. But after al-Shihri’s story began unfolding, authorities admitted that nine others have been rearrested. Despite the failure, Time has reported, the Pentagon won’t change its policy on repatriating Gitmo’s most dangerous detainees to the kingdom even though the Saudi program has been called into question.

Saudi Arabia is one of several countries running ambitious deradicalization programs in which Islamic scholars try to lead radicals to moderation. Similar initiatives are running in Egypt, Singapore, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Jordan, Malaysia, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Indonesia. Canada could be next. Omar Khadr’s lawyers have filed a proposal with the military commission at Guantánamo to have the alleged terrorist undergo a specialized deradicalization program should he ever return to Canadian soil; they’ve asked Hamid Slimi, chair of the Canadian Council of Imams, to create a rehabilitation plan. Even without a request from Stephen Harper for Khadr’s repatriation, the proposal (which includes years of psychological treatment and a formal education) is a step closer to reality now that Guantánamo will close. Khadr’s fate may be discussed when President Barack Obama visits Harper in the coming weeks.

All of which raises a question: deprogramming a bomb or a missile is possible—but can you deprogram an extremist? Andrew Silke, a leading forensic science expert who has worked with agencies like the FBI and London’s Metropolitan Police, believes it’s possible—in some cases. “Most extremists are mentally stable people. They are from a variety of backgrounds, [people] who feel their violence is a just reaction to provocative global events like civilian deaths in Iraq,” he says.

In the aftermath of 9/11, when the West became captivated by the psychology of suicide attackers, Silke says a good portion of terror research funding was directed at defining the personality profile of a terrorist. “A profile is something governments want as a simple solution to the complex problem,” he says. The problem is, there’s no indication one exists. Instead, current research examines how environmental and psychological factors combine to radicalize people in the first place. “It’s a gradual process,” says Silke. “For most, radicalization takes two or three years.” Undoing that process should also be a matter of social and environmental factors. And there is evidence, Silke says, that rehabilitation is possible for soft-core members.

The largest deradicalization initiative is the coalition-run program in Iraq, which began in 2007 to handle more than 24,000 detainees. Singapore’s program, though, is regarded as the most successful, and the model on which the others are loosely based. The initiative began in the face of a rising internal security threat from Jemaah Islamiyah (an al-Qaeda arm in Southeast Asia) in 2002, after volunteering imams set out to stifle recruitment to the group. Detainees are encouraged to better themselves with access to a library and academic courses.

But of any of the soft-power experiments to disarm human bombs, the Saudi program has by far been the best-funded and most ambitious. Even the most violent militants housed at the Hayar Care Centre, an Interior Ministry prison-turned-halfway-house an hour outside of Riyadh, enjoy table tennis, PlayStation video games, soccer, swimming, room service and art therapy in exchange for attending religious education classes where clerics challenge their deep-rooted ideology. For the ones repatriated from Guantánamo, the privileges are shocking compared with life at the U.S. naval base, where hunger strikes and suicide are familiar.

Family members of Saudi detainees are included in the rehabilitation process—the graduate and the head of the family both have to sign a pledge renouncing extremism. What’s also unique is the thousands of dollars given to some graduates to encourage the prospect of a new life; it helps pay for weddings, furniture, a new Toyota.

One of the poster boys of the Saudi program is Ahmed al-Shayea, a failed suicide attacker who killed nine people and maimed over 60 more—including himself—in Baghdad using a truck bomb five years ago. Al-Shayea says he began to change his thinking when a cleric told him the jihad he went to Iraq for wasn’t religiously sanctioned. “There is no jihad. We are just instruments of death,” Al-Shayea told the Associated Press in 2007.