RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Nobody was residence on the dusty brown campus of the reintegration heart for recovering Islamic extremists. The swimming pool was nonetheless. The lights have been on on the gallery of artwork remedy works, however there have been no guests. Not a slip of paper was misplaced on the psychological and social providers unit.
The beneficiaries of the Saudi authorities program, which helps prisoners re-enter society, have been on furlough for household visits for Eid al-Adha, the season of the Feast of the Sacrifice, leaving the place eerily empty, like a U.S. school campus on Christmas break.
Only a portray within the gallery provided a glimpse of the non secular tolerance that may be a hallmark of this system: It was of a lady smelling a flower, her hair uncovered and flowing, towards the evening sky.
The program, with its campus in Riyadh, and one other in Jeddah, grew from a counterterrorism campaign that began in 2004 to re-educate residents who had made their means residence from jihadist coaching camps in Afghanistan and others influenced by them.
About 6,000 males have gone via some type of this system, amongst them 137 former detainees of the U.S. navy jail at Guantánamo Bay, none of whom have been convicted of struggle crimes.
The final Guantánamo detainee was despatched to this system in 2017, simply earlier than President Donald J. Trump dismantled the workplace that negotiated transfers.
Now the query is whether or not and the way the middle suits into President Biden’s efforts to shut the jail at Guantánamo, which opened greater than 20 years in the past to maintain terrorism suspects seized across the globe within the aftermath of the Sept. 11 assaults.
Over the years, the United States has held about 780 men and boys at Guantánamo Bay, with about 660 there at its peak in 2003. Saudi residents have been of explicit curiosity as a result of 15 of the 19 hijackers within the Sept. 11 assaults have been Saudis.
The Trump administration launched only one prisoner from Guantánamo, a confessed Qaeda operative who’s at present serving a jail sentence in Riyadh beneath an Obama-era plea settlement. The Biden administration repatriated another Saudi citizen in May, however beneath an settlement to ship him for psychiatric remedy for schizophrenia, not jihadi rehabilitation.
More than half of the detainees at present at Guantánamo have been cleared for launch however should anticipate the Biden administration to discover a nation keen to take them in with safety preparations. Most are from Yemen, one in every of a number of international locations Congress considers too unstable to obtain males from Guantánamo.
Other detainees are in plea negotiations with discussions about whether or not convicts may serve their sentences in international custody.
The Obama administration had tried to shut down the jail, and Saudi Arabia was one of many international locations that figured prominently within the resettlement plans. Another was Oman, which acquired 28 Yemeni males in a extremely secretive undertaking that discovered them wives and houses and jobs, as long as they didn’t inform their neighbors that they’d performed time at Guantánamo, in accordance to former detainees.
None of these males who have been resettled have been ever tried for struggle crimes.
The Obama administration despatched 20 prisoners to the United Arab Emirates, largely Yemenis but additionally a number of Afghans and a person from Russia. But the nation primarily jailed them after which abruptly repatriated all however the Russian, drawing human rights protests that the returnees risked persecution.
With that program deemed a failure, the Biden administration has been on the lookout for different choices for cleared captives, chief amongst them the Yemenis.
A current go to to the dusty brown campus within the outskirts of Riyadh highlighted one risk.
The program was based by and named for Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, a former inside minister who had shut ties to U.S. intelligence businesses. When he was forced out by the kingdom’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, this system was renamed the Center for Counseling and Care.
As described by managers, this system blends courses on nonviolent interpretations of Shariah legislation with bodily health, recreation and counseling geared toward returning those that graduate to their households.
Or, as one employees member referred to as it, undoing “the brainwash that happens” when a younger man is drawn to non secular extremism.
A library options really useful studying about profitable Saudis, “the right people, in order to avoid the wrong role models, not the way that turns you into darkness or death,” Wnyan Obied Alsubaiee, this system’s director, who holds the rank of a significant common, mentioned via an interpreter.
One e book recounts the story of a Saudi man who studied in New York within the Nineteen Seventies and rose to prominence in civic life again in his homeland, together with a task in a Saudi-American dialogue after the assaults of Sept. 11. Another is a biography of a former authorities minister, “Building the Petrochemical Industry in Saudi Arabia.”
General Alsubaiee mentioned two former prisoners of Guantánamo within the Saudi jail system can be accepted into this system as soon as they accomplished their sentences. One is Ahmed Muhammed Haza al-Darbi, the confessed Qaeda terrorist launched by the Trump administration. The id of the opposite just isn’t identified.
The director bristled at portrayals of the program as a five-star lodge for extremists.
“This is not a prize,” he mentioned. “They are not prisoners anymore. They have to go back to society. We want them to feel accepted, and that this is another chance.”
Of the 137 males despatched to Saudi Arabia from Guantánamo, some by means of Saudi jail, 116 rejoined society and have stayed out of bother, 12 have been recaptured, eight have been killed and one is “wanted,” in accordance to a program truth sheet.
None of the boys have been recognized by the Saudi authorities in the course of the go to. But among the lifeless are identified, notably those that have been despatched in the course of the George W. Bush administration after which fled to Yemen, the place they joined Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
In Riyadh, this system’s members reside in pods, particular person bedrooms organized round a courtyard with a mosque, kitchen and small open air range for making tea on cool desert nights.
As described by program directors, the Saudi members’ first visits residence are quick however evolve into long-term stays with household — for instance, the two-week vacation furlough that nearly emptied the middle in July.
The nation’s safety equipment is unseen however current. The director is a navy official and safety staff and care suppliers costume identically within the basic white gown and crimson checked head masking favored by authorities employees and businessmen. In the fitness center, a information gestured to a digital camera in a nook of the load lifting space and defined that facial expressions there have been beneath surveillance.
But on this go to, Saudi transparency solely went to date. Nobody would say how lots of the program’s 200 slots have been occupied, or when the latest individual or longest resident arrived.
At the gallery, an artwork therapist, Awad Alyami, described his program as a chance for the boys to categorical their emotions and for program sponsors to consider them.
One portray was an expressionist take of the crowds circling the Kaaba in Mecca, Islam’s holiest website, however clockwise fairly than the ritualistic counterclockwise. Program employees members have been involved in regards to the depiction of the holy website, and had the artist meet with a cleric.
One part of the gallery showcases the work of former Guantánamo prisoners.
“A lot of weird stuff here,” Dr. Alyami mentioned.
The part has no signal however stands out for its picture of a guard tower, razor wire and males in orange uniforms. Other program members’ artwork tended towards desert scenes and different Saudi themes.