Last Friday, in the video report for PBS embedded above, the writer Robert Lacey looked at the Saudi government’s intensive but mild-mannered effort to reeducate Islamic militants who have returned to Saudi Arabia from the battlefields of Iraq or Afghanistan, or from the detention center at Guantánamo Bay. Mr. Lacey’s visit to a Saudi government rehabilitation center outside Riyadh, where ex-jihadists attend a two-month program and are gently encouraged to abandon violent holy war, lasts about 4 minutes (look for it at the 6:15 mark of the [linked] video). It includes footage showing how warmly several former detainees were welcomed home to Saudi Arabia after their release from Guantánamo.As Katherine Zoepf explained in The New York Times Magazine last November: “Though the Saudi government tends to explain its rehabilitation program in purely Islamic terms, as an effort to correct theological misunderstandings, the new program also addresses the psychological needs and emotional weaknesses that have led many young men to jihad in the first place.” Mr. Lacey calls the approach “soft policing,” but Ms. Zoepf described it as an “experiment in counterterrorism as a kind of social work.” As a result, the deprogramming center in Riyadh Ms. Zoepf and Mr. Lacey were allowed to visit looks more dull than fearsome — something like a college campus, or an Islamic seminary.
Ms. Zoepf reported:
On arrival, each prisoner is given a suitcase filled with gifts: clothes, a digital watch, school supplies and toiletries. Inmates are encouraged to ask for their favorite foods (Twix and Snickers candy bars are frequent requests). Volleyball nets, PlayStation games and Ping-Pong and foosball tables are all provided. [...]
Upon release, each former jihadist is required to sign a pledge that he has forsaken extremist sympathies; the head of his family must sign as well. Some also receive a car (often a Toyota) and aid from the Interior Ministry in renting a home. Social workers assist former jihadists and their families in making post-release plans for education, employment and, usually, marriage.
According to a report on the program in Small Wars Journal by Lawrence E. Cline, a retired U.S. Army Military Intelligence officer, Saudi government sources have pointed to the 700 men they say have gone through the program and been released after renouncing jihad. Mr. Cline notes, however, that this year when the Saudi interior ministry released a list of 85 men who were wanted for joining foreign jihadist groups, 11 of them “were former detainees at Guantánamo Bay who had gone through the counseling program.”