For jihadis, Denmark tries rehabilitation

Frydenlund, a middle-class residential area on the outskirts of Aarhus, Denmark, is home to a number of men who fought for the radical Islamic State group in Syria.

By Andrew Higgins
Sunday, December 14, 2014

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AARHUS, Denmark — In many parts of Europe, he would be in jail. But here in this nation’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,” said the former jihadi warrior, who spoke on the condition that he be identified only as Osman.

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 developed in 2007 to deal with far-right extremists linked to an Aarhus soccer club.

Now, with alarm over European jihadis 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 returned home.

In much of Europe, the answer has been to lock them up, or at least put them under investigation by prosecutors. Denmark, with the second-highest number of foreign fighters per capita, has gone in the other direction, shunning punishment in favor of rehabilitation.

“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 mayor of Aarhus.

According to the police, 31 Aarhus Muslims, all of them younger than 30, have traveled since late 2012 to Syria to support forces battling the government of Bashar Assad, but only one of them went this year.

“What we are doing seems to be working,” said Jorgen Ilum, the chief of police for the region.

While proud of the results so far, some caution the real test will come if more hardened fighters who have stayed in Syria and joined the Islamic State militant group start coming home.

“If they have returned to Denmark already, they are not real extremists,” Ilum said.

Mohammed, a 25-year-old resident of Somali descent who asked to be identified only by his first name, illustrates how counseling can dissuade at least some young Muslims from extremism.

He said he never planned to fight in Syria but did intend to abandon his studies and move to Pakistan after falling in with a group of young radicals who offered friendship and comfort after the death of his mother and a dispute with his high school principal.

Together, he said, they watched videos of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born jihadi preacher killed in 2011 in Yemen by a drone attack, and convinced one another that “you can never be a good Muslim in Denmark, where you will always be a stranger, and must move to a Muslim country to get respect.”

After the police, tipped off about the group’s growing radicalism, visited his house, 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.”

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