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FEATURE: Saudis offer therapy to ex-jihadists

Today a young man in traditional white robe and headdress will walk out through the iron gates of an anonymous low-rise compound down a gravel lane behind a Lebanese restaurant, 30 minutes' drive from the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh.

Ali Saeed al-Ghatani, 17, will head home to the resort town of Abha -- four months after he was arrested making an attempt to join Iraqi militants fighting US forces. His incarceration may have been brief, but it will have been long enough for him to realize he had "taken the wrong path."

"I was angry and I was seeking adventure," he said. "Now all I want is to study and get married."

In a few weeks or so it should be the turn of Hizam al-Ghatani to walk through the gates. Hizam, who has spent three years in prison and three months in the compound, went much further than Saeed, spending months fighting US forces near the Iraqi town of Fallujah, Iraq. Yet he too now insists he is reformed.

"I am a very emotional man and I did not have a good understanding of Islam, " he said. "Now I realize the wrong I did to my country and my family."

The compound is the latest weapon of the Saudi Arabian government in the "war on terror," a rehabilitation center where young men spend months being "deradicalized." The two al-Ghatanis will leave behind another 12 or so inmates -- or "students" as the psychologists, sociologists and clerics working with them prefer -- who also travelled, or tried to travel, to Iraq.

Under treatment are another dozen men who have recently been repatriated from Guantanamo Bay. No one will leave the center until they are deemed no further threat to society.

"To deradicalize them we need to gain their trust and we need to help them restart their lives," said Abdulrahman al-Hadlaq, a Ministry of Interior official involved in the program, under which former radicals are found jobs and helped to pay for cars, marriages and accommodation. "This is not a reward. It is a necessary policy of containment."

Al-Hadlaq has charted the lives of nearly 700 militants to help construct the program. In common with other surveys of Islamic radicals, the Saudi research has revealed a very low level of religious knowledge, so lectures in jail concentrate on key theological areas -- the Islamic theory of jihad, takfir (excommunication) and relations with non-Muslims. On their release, the ex-prisoners are sent to the new rehabilitation center -- seven others are planned as well as a series of purpose-built prisons with capacity for 6,400 militants -- where they undergo further religious instruction, psychological counselling, do team sports and even art therapy.

"The aim is to stop them reacting in such an immediate way to images they see on the television or internet by giving them different visual languages," said Awad Alyami, who runs the art therapy course.

According to Otayan al-Turki, a Swansea-educated psychologist working at the center, many of the prisoners have very poor reasoning capacity and poor communication skills.

"Most are young, many come from large families," he said. "Many come from a non-Islamic background. Some have led sinful lives and were looking for a shortcut to paradise."

The program, which is just over a year old, is part of a wide range of such strategies in countries as diverse as Indonesia and Iraq, Egypt and Yemen. The UK and other Western nations are watching with interest. Though few such initiatives are on the scale or have the resources of the multi-million-dollar Saudi effort, all are part of a new approach by governments and intelligence agencies to extremist violence. After focusing first on al-Qaeda "the organization," then on al-Qaeda "the ideology," they are now attempting to identify the factors drawing someone into extremist violence.

Research by agencies in the West and the Middle East has revealed the enormous range of factors involved -- from a distant relationship with father to a failure to find a job that matches often relatively high educational achievement, from a predisposition to violence to a search for company and belonging.

Research has also focused on the impact of exposure to images of conflict in the Muslim world, via TV and the Internet, and on the crucial role that group dynamics can play in reinforcing extremism. Poverty does not seem a factor.

"Most are middle-class, some come from very rich, and a very few from poor, backgrounds," al-Hadlaq said. "In Saudi Arabia, they come from all over."
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