A pioneering therapy

ON MONDAY a young man in traditional white thobe and headdress walked out through the iron gates of an anonymous compound down a gravel lane behind a Lebanese restaurant, 30 minutes' drive from the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh.

Ali Saeed Al Ghatani, 17, headed home to the resort town of Abha - four months after he was arrested for making an attempt to join Iraqi militants fighting American forces. His incarceration may have been brief, but it will have been long enough for him to realise he had 'taken the wrong path'. "I was angry and I was seeking adventure," he said. "Now all I want is to study and get married."

In a few weeks or so it should be the turn of Hizam Al Ghatani to walk through the gates. Hizam, who has spent three years in prison and three months in the compound, went much further than Saeed, spending months fighting American forces near the Iraqi town of Falluja. Yet he too now insists he is reformed. "I am a very emotional man and I did not have a good understanding of Islam," he said. "Now I realise the wrong I did to my country and my family."

The compound is the latest weapon of the Saudi Arabian government in the 'war on terror', a rehabilitation centre where young men spend months being 'deradicalised'. The two Al Ghatanis will leave behind another 12 or so inmates - or 'students' as the psychologists, sociologists and clerics working with them prefer - who also travelled, or tried to travel, to Iraq.

Under treatment are another dozen men who have recently been repatriated from Guantanamo Bay. No one will leave the centre until they are deemed no further threat to society.

"To deradicalise them we need to gain their trust and we need to help them restart their lives," said Abdulrahman Al Hadlaq, a Ministry of Interior official involved in the programme, under which former radicals are found jobs and helped to pay for cars, marriages and accommodation. "This is not a reward. It is a necessary policy of containment."

Al Hadlaq has charted the lives of nearly 700 militants to help construct the programme. In common with other surveys of Islamic radicals, the Saudi research has revealed a very low level of religious knowledge, so lectures in jail concentrate on key theological areas - the Islamic theory of jihad, takfir, or ex-communication, and relations with non-Muslims.

On their release, the ex-prisoners are sent to the new rehabilitation centre - seven others are planned as well as a series of purpose-built prisons with capacity for 6,400 militants - where they undergo further religious instruction, psychological counselling, do team sports and even art therapy.

"The aim is to stop them reacting in such an immediate way to images they see on the television or internet by giving them different visual languages," said Awad Alyami, who runs the art therapy course.

According to Otayan Al Turki, a Swansea-educated psychologist working at the centre, many of the prisoners have very poor reasoning capacity and poor communication skills. "Most are young, many come from large families," he said. "Many come from a non-Islamic background. Some have led sinful lives and were looking for a shortcut to paradise."

The programme, which is just over a year old, is part of a wide range of such strategies in countries as diverse as Indonesia and Iraq, Egypt and Yemen. The UK and other Western nations are watching with interest.

Though few such initiatives are on the scale or have the resources of the multi-million-pound Saudi effort, all are part of a new approach by governments and intelligence agencies to extremist violence. After focusing first on Al Qaeda 'the organisation', then on Al Qaeda 'the ideology', they are now attempting to identify the factors drawing someone into extremist violence.

Research by agencies in the West and the Middle East has revealed the enormous range of factors involved - from a distant relationship with father to a failure to find a job that matches often relatively high educational achievement, from a predisposition to violence to a search for company and belonging.

Research has also focused on the impact of exposure to images of conflict in the Muslim world, via TV and the internet, and on the crucial role that group dynamics can play in reinforcing extremism. Poverty does not seem a factor. "Most are middle-class, some come from very rich, and a very few from poor, backgrounds," said Al Hadlaq. "In Saudi Arabia, they come from all over."

In recent years the profile of militants worldwide has also changed, with levels of religious education dropping even further. Research has shown that the reading material of newer radicals is as likely to be police thrillers as holy books and their heroes tend to be violent actors, not religious thinkers.

In Saudi Arabia, which suffered a wave of horrific extremist violence between 2003 and 2005, the aim of the programme is to protect the kingdom from 'blowback' from the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan as well as to counter radicalism at home.

Hundreds of young Saudis travelled to Al Qaeda's training camps run by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan prior to 2001 - 15 of the 19 hijackers on 11 September were Saudi - and similar numbers have headed to Iraq since 2003. One hundred returnees from Guantanamo have been through the new programme.

Abdul Hadi Abdullah, 26, is one. He was arrested in Pakistan shortly after the 9/11 attacks and, despite claiming he was merely a peaceful preacher, spent six years in Guantanamo. Though he may have learned to manage his anger against the US, he can barely hide his bitterness.

"When I left Guantanamo, I hated America," Abdullah said. "Do I hate them now? I live in Saudi Arabia. I have nothing to do with America or Americans. They have nothing to do with me. That is how I would like to keep it."

Admired though it may be among the counter-terrorist community, there are some misgivings. Though recidivism to date has been negligible, for the moment the programme is being used only with relatively easy cases.

The hard core of convicted terrorists responsible for strings of bomb attacks and shootouts in Saudi Arabia face decades of jail or execution, not rehabilitation, and it is far from clear the initiative would work with them.

The considerable sums that former prisoners receive have raised some eyebrows, as has the fact that they are not told jihad in Iraq is wrong in itself but that such an undertaking is only allowed by Islamic law with the assent of the sovereign ruler of the fighter's country, the ruler of the country for whom he is fighting, and his parents.

"The Saudis are approaching the problem of radicalisation in a systematic and serious way," said Mamoun Fandy, an expert on Saudi Arabia at the Institute for International Strategic Studies. "But it needs to be continued and broadened. If it is just to satisfy external opinion, it is not going to be successful."