FINALLY SOME "WINNING HEARTS & MINDS"

Yemen and Saudi Arabia have had programs to rehabilitate jihadists for several years and finally the U.S. is doing the same in Iraq.

A 'battlefield of the mind' in Iraq

Detainees at a U.S. facility in Iraq often receive religious instruction from imams who emphasize the Koran’s admonishments against killing the innocent, even non-Muslims.
Using the Koran as a tool, a new strategy is aimed at turning suspected insurgents into model citizens.

By Alexandra Zavis, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer November 16, 2007

"The travesty, the failure in leadership that led to Abu Ghraib can never be allowed again," Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas Stone said in a recent interview. "The recruiting value of something like that to the extremists is so meaningful; it's a war-fighting imperative that it never be allowed to happen." Since May, when he took charge of U.S. detention operations in Iraq, Stone has opened internment facilities to greater outside scrutiny and given inmates a chance to discuss their cases with military authorities. He also has introduced a battery of programs aimed at turning suspected insurgents into model citizens. Teachers, clerics, psychologists and other specialists use the Koran to moderate inmates' views, and provide counseling and basic education to rehabilitate the mostly poor, uneducated detainees, some of whom have been exposed to extremist indoctrination.

Stone said that none of the more than 1,000 detainees who had been through his programs had been arrested again. But he acknowledged that it was too soon to tell whether that would remain the case. He estimated that 30% of the detainees may be impervious to the efforts of the $254-million rehabilitation program.

"I think it would be a surprise to most Americans to find out . . . the detainees themselves do not seem to have deep understanding of the Koran," Stone said. "They are more or less following what their local mosque imam is telling them to do." The imam who led the recent "enlightenment" class said many of his students were shocked when he showed them passages forbidding the killing of the innocent, even if they are not Muslims. "If [a detainee] killed someone before now, after the program he will think 1,000 times before killing again," he said. "But it will depend on where he is released, because the conditions are very difficult outside. There is too much violence."