Rehabilitation of Terrorists

As of 2010, there were more than 100,000 convicted and suspected terrorists languishing in penitentiary and detention centers around the world, from Europe to the Middle East to Asia. Although vocational and educational programs exist to rehabilitate criminals, there are very few initiatives to rehabilitate terrorists. Despite significant study into terrorist mindsets and the ideologies driving them, terrorist rehabilitation remains the exception worldwide and has not become the norm.

Egypt pioneered the idea of religious rehabilitation in the 1990s. Scholars at al Azhar University and other counselors, as well as the historical leadership of Gama'a al Islamiyya (Islamic Group) in Egypt, began to influence detainees and inmates to abandon violence and build peace. Programs for rehabilitating communist terrorists in Malaysia and Singapore were developed in the 1960s and 1970s, but these were not elaborate. Communism in Asia was not a global threat, and religion was not the basis for the ideological mindset in that era.

After realizing the scale of the threat following the al Qaeda attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, a number of countries—including Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia—developed national rehabilitation programs. Since then the process of detainee and inmate rehabilitation has been gaining popularity worldwide. As a new frontier in counterterrorism practice, rehabilitation programs have provided degrees of success in countries that have adopted them. Some programs, such as those in Singapore, have been developed with community participation. Clerics and scholars have volunteered to counsel detainees and other well-meaning individuals, and institutions have provided for the detainee families. In such counterterrorism and extremism initiatives, the participation of the community is an important first step in the right direction.

In the early twenty-first century, the world's most comprehensive terrorist rehabilitation program was established in Saudi Arabia, where the Saudi Interior Ministry spent 1.7 billion riyals to construct five modern high-tech security prisons. Ultimately, nine centers for rehabilitation were established. In addition to special facilities for housing families and meeting visitors, high-tech classrooms and libraries for reading and studying were built. A special committee oversaw specialists in security, sports, Islamic law, social science, and psychology, drawn from government and universities. [Page 504]The program prepares militant jihadis to engage gradually with the rest of society. The compounds, each with a capacity for 1,200 people, support reintegration back to Saudi society. The “beneficiaries,” as they are called, are able to swim and play football, table tennis, and TV games. In an air-conditioned tent converted into a dining hall that serves traditional food, they engage in dialogue.