For Jihadists, Denmark Tries Rehabilitation.

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ghulam muhammed
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For Jihadists, Denmark Tries Rehabilitation.

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Unread post by ghulam muhammed » Mon Dec 15, 2014 5:26 pm

For Jihadists, Denmark Tries Rehabilitation

In many parts of Europe, he would now be in jail. But here in Denmark’s second biggest city, the young man, a 21-year-old of Turkish descent who spent 13 months in Syria fighting in the name of Islam, passes his days playing soccer, working out at the gym and waiting anxiously to see if he has secured a place to study engineering at a well-regarded local university.

“I feel at home. I have no problems here,” the former jihadist warrior, who spoke on the condition that he be identified only as Osman, said. Since his return to this tranquil port city from the battlefields of Syria, he has been part of a pioneering program that treats onetime fighters not as criminals or potential terrorists but as wayward youths who deserve a second chance.

The program, closely watched by authorities around Europe, involves counseling, help with readmission to school, meetings with parents and other outreach efforts. It was first developed in 2007 to deal with far-right extremists linked to an Aarhus soccer club.

Now, with neo-Nazi hooliganism on the wane and alarm over European jihadists on the rise, it has been redeployed to address one of Europe’s most hotly debated issues: How to deal with hundreds of young Muslims who have gone to fight in Syria and now returned home.

“We cannot afford not to include them back in our society and make sure that their path of radicalization is changed, so they can be an active part of our society,” said Jacob Bundsgard, the Social Democrat mayor of Aarhus, a city which is the pioneer of the softer approach.

“What we are doing seems to be working,” said Jorgen Ilum, the chief of police for the region, describing the program as a “crime prevention” exercise that seeks to “protect society from extremists,” not to mollycoddle jihadists. The police chief acknowledged that full “rehabilitation” of returnees is extremely difficult, and that “none of them are completely normal,” but added that none had veered off into militancy since coming home.

A 2013 study by Thomas Hegghammer, a researcher at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, involving 945 jihadist fighters who returned from previous conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia and elsewhere, found that a maximum of one in nine former fighters came home to plot or carry out attacks in the West.

In Aarhus, the returnees are screened by the police with help from the domestic security service, known as P.E.T., but so far none of the 16 who came home have been arrested. Instead, they have been offered a “mentor” whose task it is to convince them that militancy has no place in mainstream Islam.

Preben Bertselsen, a psychology professor at Aarhus University whose theories help underpin what is known as the “exit program for radicalized citizens,” said returnees had “lost their moral compass” but “only become ticking bombs if we don’t integrate them” back into society. Aarhus’s approach, he said, aimed to prevent criminal acts by former fighters, not to purge their beliefs. “I am not the political or religious police,” he said.

Erhan Kilic, a Turkish-born Aarhus lawyer and observant Muslim who acts as a mentor, said the biggest hurdle was winning trust. If this can be done, he said, “You can move their ideas in a moderate way” by exposing the flaws in their interpretation of their faith.

“The problem is not the message of Islam; it is individuals who cause all the problems,” he said, noting that young recruits to militant Islam often know little about their faith and pick up their views from watching videos of incendiary preachers on YouTube or from schoolyard chatter about the West’s humiliation of the Muslim world.

Mohammed agreed to accept counseling and, he said, slowly came to see that “I can be a good Muslim, maybe even a better Muslim, in this society.”

Full Article :-

http://www.newageislam.com/islam-and-th ... n/d/100484