Freed detainees gradually step back into normal life

Riyadh: Juma Al Dossari is returning to his life the way a photograph in a darkroom gradually takes shape on paper.

He is home after surviving six years and more than a dozen suicide attempts as a US prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Courtyard walls have replaced barbed-wire fences, and Al Dossari has completed what the Saudi government describes as a "soft approach" rehabilitation programme to cleanse his mind, find him a wife, buy him a car and keep him happy so he doesn't drift back toward fanaticism and jihad.

It is a strange, erratic journey toward self-discovery; Al Dossari says he can Google his name and find descriptions of a man he no longer knows, but he's still unsure about what kind of man he will become.

"We can't go immediately from getting off a plane from Cuba to living in society. Everything has changed," said Al Dossari, 34, nervous and wiry in a checkered kaffiyeh.

Big changes

"There are more streets, bridges and buildings here than I remember. I was gone a long time. My driver's licence expired while I was in Guantanamo. My father died. Now, I'm trying to get things back on track."

The other day, Al Dossari sat on a long couch at the centre with fellow released Guantanamo detainees. They wore pressed white tunics. Some spoke in broken English learned from their former captors; others were thin and still recovering from what Saudi doctors described as torture and trauma. Several of the men smiled as if posing for a family portrait, disguising the rage and bewilderment of lost years and wondering how to fit back into their native land, which was welcoming but suspicious.

For three years, the Interior Ministry has been trying to turn impressionable militants from radicalism through six weeks of psychological counselling, religious re-education, job training and art therapy. Those who complete the programme, such as Al Dossari, receive outreach counselling and are kept under surveillance.

"We have to deal with the minds and the emotional passions of the extremists," said Turki Otayan, a psychologist at the Care Rehabilitation Centre, which has treated 1,500 alleged militants, including more than 100 released this year from Guantanamo. "Fixing minds is like fixing a building with 60 floors. It's not easy."

Most of the men in the programme were arrested in Saudi Arabia or in neighbouring countries while attempting to travel to Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2003, terrorist attacks across the kingdom, some aimed at Western targets, have killed nearly 150 people. A recent nationwide raid captured 208 alleged militants, some of whom were planning attacks on oil installations.

The new rehabilitation programme is aimed at militants who haven't entirely crossed over to nihilism. The programme is calculated to restoring dignity and confidence to misguided young Islamists who then can help lead others away from radical websites and bloody international ventures.

"We start building trust between us and them," Gen. Yousuf Mansour, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said while sitting near a former militant who had been burned and disfigured in an Iraqi bombing. "There's no need for handcuffs. These guys are broken inside."

The rehabilitation centre's message - Osama Bin Laden is castigated with fervour here - was part of its pervading mantra: The militants were led astray by corrupted ideals, and only state-approved imams and shaikhs can interpret the true meanings of the Quran. The government has been spreading the same theme to villages and rural outposts in hopes of undercutting the allure radical Islam has for young men with limited opportunities.

No proper education

"Bin Laden doesn't have the proper religious education to control so many people," said Mohammad Fozan, a computer technician who was arrested in Syria in 2005 on his way to build websites for Islamic militants in Iraq.

He was extradited to Saudi Arabia and placed in the rehabilitation programme.

Today, he works as a computer programmer in the Transportation Ministry while he fixes up a house and waits for his family to choose his bride.

"I just want to get on with my life," he said, eating fish and chicken with shaikhs and security officials, the likes of whom years earlier he despised as supporters of the West's war against Islam.

"When I adopted that radical way of thinking, it was without analysis. I just took it because I felt a responsibility for all those Iraqis dying."

He glanced down at his plate and smiled. "You could say the government cleaned the hard drive of my mind. There were bad viruses and things in there."