Small Wars Journal

Center in Syria Offers Rare Effort to Rehabilitate Young ISIS Recruits

Sat, 06/01/2019 - 12:10am

Center in Syria Offers Rare Effort to Rehabilitate Young ISIS Recruits by Raja Abdulrahim with Photographs by Cengiz Yar – Wall Street Journal

In a library with nothing but empty shelves, four new arrivals took turns standing against the wall for a mug shot. Their names, alleged crimes and how each was captured were written down in a notebook with a message inscribed on the cover: “Look to the future.”

The program, run by the local U.S.-backed Kurdish administration, aims to rehabilitate young, mostly Syrian former Islamic State fighters and help them reintegrate into society. Only a few such re-education programs are operating in Syria, where tens of thousands of former Islamic State militants and their families are being held in prisons or camps.

The center at Tal Marouf, in Syria’s northeast, is part juvenile detention center, part school. Residents are serving sentences, in some cases yearslong. An armed guard patrols the roof and security cameras are mounted in every room. But psychiatrists counsel the young men and a structured schedule of activities such as classes and sports aims to steer them away from Islamic State ideology…

Read on.