With Arab tribal support, program to rehabilitate Daesh dregs

Ahmed Sultan

A recent article published by the New Yorker revealed that a pilot rehabilitation program in al-Karamah, a town near Raqqa, for ex-Daesh fighters who had not engaged in major felonies to their communities.

“This region is agricultural and tribal and very traditional,” Mohammed al-Zeeb, a sheikh in the Afadla tribe, one of the largest around Raqqa, told the newspaper.

Al-Zeeb heads the local rehabilitation program. He said, “Most of our people were with Daesh, frankly.” Some four hundred men from al-Karamah joined the jihadi movement.

According to General Mazloum Kobani Abdi, the promise of rehabilitation was a key building block in beating Daesh.

“I met with all the tribes before any campaign for liberation,” Mazloum explained. “I asked them to pull out their people in the tribes from Daesh. And we promised them that anyone who is returning from Daesh, we will give him a credit for his life and will not punish him or treat him badly. Secondly, because we are liberating Raqqa or tribal land, the tribes should give a lot of people to join the S.D.F. This is one reason for our success. We recruited about three thousand people from Raqqa.”

For the last brutal months of the war, tribes in Deir Ezzor recruited about ten thousand Arab fighters to join Mazloum’s force.

The survivors were held in a rehab center instead of a prison, most for at least a year. They went through retraining on Islam, but treatment and socialization were just as important.

Mazloum also pointed out that a graduation ceremony was organized to celebrate thirty-eight men. Most were young. All were dressed in sweatsuits with shaved heads.

Ayman Hussein Essa, a strapping, muscular twenty-five-year-old who could have been a fullback, had graduated from the program five days earlier. He had been in rehabilitation—he called it jail—for a year and a half. He claimed to have repented.

“We have paid the price,” Essa told the newspaper. “We were in jail, so I guarantee we will never go back to Daesh, no matter what happens.”

“All of those who have been released,” Essa said, “are still waiting for a job opportunity—or any opportunity.”

Sheikh Al-Zeeb further added that these prisoners will go back to their families and go back to help with the rebuilding of this county. “They will not ruin this country because they have become different. They were imprisoned, but not imprisoned like arrested or humiliated. We raised them and embraced them, the tribal men and leaders, to bring them back to the correct path.” Each of the graduates made his way down a receiving line, shaking hands with each elder.

Rehabilitation hasn’t worked for everyone who went through it. The S.D.F. released a thousand captured Syrians who collaborated with Daesh. But dozens simply turned around and went back to Daesh. “We just start step one,” Al-Zeeb said. “The first step needs to lead to a thousand steps to correct them.”