When six Somali refugees were convicted of planning to board a flight to Syria to join ISIS, a US federal judge in Minnesota tried to enrol one of them in the experimental terrorist rehabilitation program.
Developed in Europe and operating on the principles of 'counting violent extremism' or CVE, this program is also a part of UN-supported Strong City Networks.
Instead of going to prison, Abdullahi Mohammed Yusuf was sent in November to a 20-year supervised release, said a report. He was sent to live in a halfway house, was counselled, asked to report to probation officer all the while when he was wearing an ankle monitor.
In less than six months, he was back in federal custody last week after he failed a polygraph test and watched a documentary about ISIS in Europe.
In a report from the US probation officer, Yousuf had failed a polygraph test and had confessed that he had watched the CNN's documentary called 'ISIS: Behind the Mask" about a Belgian ISIS soldier at his halfway house.
The terms and conditions of the 20-year supervised release included a provision where Yusuf should not "possess, view, access, or otherwise use material that reflects extremist or terroristic views or as deemed to be inappropriate by the U.S. Probation Office."
A star-tribune report read that it was a part of 'unique approach to supervising federal terrorism cases'. The essence was to 'deradicalise' the young Jihadist.
This program is based on evaluations from German researcher Daniel Koelher. He had concluded that Yusuf had "a medium to low risk of future offending and a comparatively advanced stage of disengagement," according to court filings reported WND.
Philip Haney, who spent a lot of time screening for Jihadists at the US department of homeland security told that this is not the first experiment where the idea of rehabilitating the terrorist was being put to action.
He went on to add that it was tried at many places and many times including the one at Guantanamo Bay detainment camp.
"Rehabilitation of terrorist has been a part of CVE," says Haney and adds that these programmes failed. This had started with Saudi Arabia trying the same on Gitmo prisoners, only to achieve the opposite results.
Sweden and Denmark turn out to be the ones next in line to have engaged in the effort to rehabilitate the jihadists.
Haney said that such attempts completely ignore the original source of inspiration behind the Islamic violence- the words of and deeds of Prophet Muhammad.
