Five Somali-American men arrested by authorities for plans to join the Islamic State stood before a U.S. district court judge last week, expecting to face harsh retribution from government prosecutors. Instead, the judge said he would allow the Minnesota-based men to swap prison for a halfway house should their lawyers come up with a “creative release” plan — basically, an extremist rehabilitation program.
Months earlier, another man from Minnesota’s Somali community — Abdullahi Yusuf — had faced the same judge after also trying to link up with the Islamic State, also called ISIS or ISIL. But prosecutors fought the judge’s suggestion that Yusuf could undertake a kind of rehab program.
“Someone who wanted to kill innocent people and is willing to travel abroad to do so needs to serve prison time,” Andrew Luger, the U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, told the New Yorker at the time. “How do we lower the number of people travelling to Syria to fight? My first answer: You’ve got to prosecute people. Part of the reintegration in the community is serving time for what you did.”
It seems though that Luger and his office are opening up to new alternatives and agreed to the idea of rehabilitation this time. While there are no official statistics about the number of Americans fighting with groups like the Islamic State, National Intelligence Director James Clapper estimated that around 180 Americans have tried to travel to fight in Syria, for various groups.
Rehabilitation programs aim to reintegrate these citizens accused of having been radicalized into society. At least a dozen countries have experimented with such programs to date with mixed results. One of the most prominent of these programs that the U.S. could try to emulate is in Denmark’s second largest city Aarhus.
With 100–150 Danes currently fighting in Syria, Denmark has the second largest European presence (after Belgium) there. Many of the people who have gone to join groups like the Islamic State are the children of immigrants who have faced racism and xenophobia. The solution, the Danes believe, is to help them feel accepted by society.
“What motivates these young people is not that far from the motivation the rest of us have: a decent life,” Preben Bertelsen, a professor of psychology at the University or Aarhus, told Newsweek. “For them, joining Isis is fighting for utopia, fighting for a place where they’re wanted. In that sense they’re not that different from other young people.”
Another country that claims to have implemented a successful rehabilitation program is Saudi Arabia. Here, Islam is the state religion and the offenders are often not immigrants so the challenges faced are completely different from Denmark. The Saudis in rehab take classes on religion and listen to lectures that officials hope will steer them away from “extremist tendencies” or violence. While the Saudis boast an 88 percent success rate some — like al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Chief Nasir al-Wuhayshi — have rejoined radical groups.
Rohan Gunaratna is Head of International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) in Singapore and has written extensively on extremist rehabilitation. He believes in a multi-faceted approach that combines religious/spiritual, psychological, social, vocational and creative arts therapy.
“Terrorists are not born, but are products of circumstances. Therefore, it is necessary for governments to invest in soft countermeasures –delegitimising the radical ideology and addressing roots of grievances — along with the kinetic response,” Gunaratna wrote in “Counter Terrorist Trends and Analysis”, a journal published by RSIS, in April. “These soft measures include terrorist rehabilitation and reintegration, community engagement and promoting moderation in beliefs (counter-ideology). In other words, to fight terrorism in the long-term, it is necessary to develop programmes to both rehabilitate and reintegrate terrorists and extremists as well as community engagement initiatives to build societal resilience to prevent individuals from joining or supporting terrorist groups.”
Rehabilitation could be the new way forward for the U.S. as it faces its own struggles with countering potential extremism.