Saudis claim 80% success in re-educating al-Qaida militants
· Programme finds jobs and wives for former jihadists
· Anti-extremist schemes in schools and mosques

Ian Black

Saudi Arabia claims to be winning its domestic “war on terror” with the help of a programme of re-education and rehabilitation for hundreds of repentant al-Qaida militants once led by Osama bin Laden.

Officials in Riyadh say they have seen an 80-90% success rate in a “counter-radicalisation” campaign designed to wean extremists detained by the security forces off the “takfiri” ideology that permits the killing of fellow Muslims and motivates Saudis involved in jihad in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some 140 members of al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula have died in clashes with security forces since attacks began in May 2003.

wo thousand men had been through the programme, with 700 released and a negligible rate of re-offending, said General Mansour al-Turki, the government security spokesman.

Abu Suleiman, 33, has seen the error of his ways. “I got involved in jihad when I was 20,” he explained in the American-accented English picked up during four years spent in Guantánamo Bay after his capture at Tora Bora in late 2001. “Bin Laden is a quiet guy but he can work magic with people when he talks,” said the holy warrior-turned financial analyst. “Being in jail gives you a lot of time to think. I had good intentions. I wanted to help Muslims round the world, but I felt I was being used for other purposes. This programme is working for a lot of people.”

Prisoners undergo social and psychological profiling, take part in 10-week courses and are helped to find jobs and even wives as part of intensive after-care support that includes cash handouts for their families. Some refuse to participate. “But we don’t force them,” Gen Turki said….

Ian Black was one of the very few journalists I respected who worked for The Guardian when I was at the US Embassy in London. He did his homework and had a far lighter hand in editorializing on the news pages. As a result, I tend to trust what he writes.

Here he goes into the details of the program the Saudi government has established to teach Saudi jihadis the error of their ways. The program isn’t perfect, but an 80% success rate is pretty good. And as the article notes, a military solution is only a partial solution. ‘Hearts and minds’ is still where the hardest fighting resides.

UPDATE: The Korea Times coincidentally has an article on the same subject today: Saudi Arabia Battles Holy Warriors

This article, originally published by Yale University, has been updated to include discussion of the February attack on French citizens in the KSA. Its author, Fahad Nazer a fellow at the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, D.C., and coauthor of an upcoming monograph entitled “Inside the Kingdom: Saudi Arabia’s People, Its Politics and Its Future,” goes deeper into the history and philosophic/religious issues than does Black in the piece from The Guardian. Definitely worth reading.