For most of his 20s, Badr al-Enezi wanted to become a jihad fighter. After getting in touch with former Guantanamo Bay prisoners who had returned to militancy, he began plotting how to take up arms.
But then, he was caught by Saudi authorities and spent six months in prison which proved to be far different. He dabbled with art therapy, played soccer and enjoyed perks like an Olympic-size pool and a sauna at >a rehabilitation centre for convicted extremists.
Gourmet-style meals were prepared for him at the palm tree lined complex on the outskirts of the Saudi capital, Riyadh, his laundry was taken care of, was treated ‘like a brother’, and was challenged to think differently about Islam, he said.
After successfully completing the de-radicalization program and renouncing any notion of fighting abroad, he serves as a mentor for new entrants to the centre, named after Saudi Arabia’s powerful interior minister, Crown Prince Mohammed bin-Nayef.
“The secret is that the ideas we carry cannot be cured by weapons only. It also requires an ideological cure,” the 30-year-old said of the facility, which in many ways serves as the centre-piece of Saudi Arabia’s counter-terrorism strategy.
As the kingdom faces a new domestic threat from the Islamic State group, that has killed 40 Saudi civilians and security personnel since November, it is reviving the groundbreaking program, which rehabilitates extremists through months of indoctrination by moderate Islamic clerics, sociologists and psychologists.
The effort is complicated by the kingdom’s regional competition with Shiite rival Iran, which has stoked anti-Shiite rhetoric from conservative Saudi clerics and fuelled attacks on the country’s Shiite Muslim minority.
“For this new generation of home-grown extremists, the Islamic State group’s ideology is attractive because its fighters are on the ground, battling Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq,” says Abdulrahman al-Hadlaq, director of ideological security at the Interior Ministry and a founder of the rehab centre.
Prince Mohammed bin-Nayef , who founded the centre in 2007, was also a target of several assassination attempts. With hundreds of militants filling up the kingdom’s prisons, the centre’s focus is to prevent those, who had served their sentences from taking up arms again. It has treated some 3,000 men convicted of terrorism-related crimes, including those released to Saudi custody from Guantanamo Bay.
At the centre, inmates who are called ‘beneficiaries’ by staff are housed in a complex of low-rise buildings, whose resort-like appearance is belied by the concrete walls, barbed wire and armed guards that surround it. Contact with family is encouraged, and participants are given access to private, fully-furnished apartments for visits with spouses.
If an inmate is deemed to be mentally fit for release, by the centre’s team of experts, they help him find a job, rent a house, buy a car and assimilate back into society.
al-Enezi also said the program, which he completed in 2012, helped him understand religious doctrines through a prism, different from what he’d learned online. Clerics explained the Quran to him in a way that led him to believe whoever fights in jihad abroad is “serving a foreign agenda”.
John Horgan, author of ‘The Psychology of Terrorism’ said the Saudis took the idea of de-radicalization seriously and used creative techniques at a time, when the West was increasingly relying on torture and drone strikes.
