Saudi Arabia Hails Project To Reform Fighters

Taken from The Telegraph, UK, 03/04/2007
By David Blair

As American jets bombed his last stronghold in the mountains of Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden ordered a young supporter from Saudi Arabia to flee to safety.

Aged only 27, the young man had already spent seven years as a "holy warrior" in countries as far flung as the Philippines and Afghanistan.

He obeyed his leader's command and retreated over the border into Pakistan - where he was swiftly captured.

That was in December 2001. Abu Suleiman (not his real name) was to spend the next four years in Guantanamo Bay and a further 12 months in Saudi jails.

Yet his life could hardly be more different today. Recently married, he now drives a smart car and works as a financial analyst in Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh.

The 33-year-old is among 700 Saudis who have passed through a "rehabilitation course" run by the kingdom's interior ministry.

"When I was going to Afghanistan, I was going to help the Muslims around the world," says Abu Suleiman, the first of the reformed extremists to speak to western media. "When you are young - I was only 20 - you have no responsibility. You think you can help and so you go."

Videos of the carnage in Bosnia turned him into a radical. These tapes - widely distributed in Riyadh - convinced him that the West was waging a war on Islam and that his duty lay in defending his fellow Muslims.

First he travelled to the Philippines, where he joined Islamist guerrillas in the southern islands.

Then, in 1997, he ventured to Afghanistan for military training in an al-Qa'eda camp. He went back there before September 11 attacks - only to be captured near Tora Bora.

Each of those on the Saudi rehabilitation course once stood accused of involvement in domestic or international terrorism, usually linked to al-Qa'eda. Abu Suleiman's own rehabilitation included talks with religious scholars about Muslim doctrine. The Koran, they pointed out, prohibited the killing of citizens regardless of their religion.

In addition, psychologists helped him overcome the trauma inflicted by his time as a "jihadist" and by his four years in Guantanamo.

Finally, last year, the authorities gave him his freedom, a job and a car. And when he married last month, a representative of Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the minister who began the programme, attended the ceremony.

"I don't like thinking about what happened in the past. It was destroying my life," says Abu Suleiman.

"When I first went to Afghanistan, they weren't talking about fighting the Saudi government, it was just about fighting the Americans. But over time, it became more extreme. They fought anyone who opposed us."

Abu Suleiman met bin Laden several times and remembers his leadership with bitter disillusion.

Bin Laden, he says, fled Tora Bora, leaving his followers at the mercy of American bombs.

Bin Laden hails from a wealthy Saudi family and the kingdom has provided numerous recruits for al-Qa'eda.

The Saudi royal family is one of the terrorist group's principal targets, thanks to its alliance with the West and its invitation to US troops to enter the country after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

A wave of terrorist bombings in 2003 and 2004 targeted government ministries, oil refineries and compounds housing westerners.

But the number of attacks has fallen dramatically since. Western diplomats in Riyadh believe the terrorist threat has been greatly diminished by the crushing of most of the al-Qa'eda cells inside the kingdom.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former ambassador to London and Washington, is one of many hailing the rehabilitation project's contribution as a "major success".

"We believe the struggle is one of mind over matter," he says. "It's a struggle of ideas."