As terrorist organizations continue to suffer defeats in some conflict-hit countries such as Syria, Iraq and Libya, some of their fighters return to their home countries, prompting warnings against potential dangers posed by them to security and stability. Programs developed by involved countries in recent years to rehabilitate and reintegrate returning foreign terrorist fighters gained momentum and special significance as an active mechanism for addressing potential threats posed by this phenomenon.
Nonetheless, this does not negate the fact that various obstacles can still block rehabilitation and reintegration efforts being made by involved countries. These include new shifts in the phenomenon of terrorism, an increasing number of returning foreign fighters as well as the conflicting ideologies of their terrorist organizations.
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On September 17, 2017, relevant Tunisian authorities revealed a new plan for rehabilitating fighters who have returned from Syria, Iraq and Libya, and committed funds for the execution of the plan. However, terrorists who were involved in killings, slaughtering and other actions labelled as crimes against humanity were excluded from the new plan.
Although such programs are not new to this region, where some countries have already made success in tackling the issue of returning fighters, they developed two key features. The first is that such plans are no longer limited to the returning fighters. Due to the fact that the so-called "family terrorism" has recently become a new and increasingly severe issue, the families of these fighters became the focus of rehabilitation programs. Some terrorist attacks that hit European countries were carried out by terrorists belonging to the same family. The development promoted the municipal council of Iraq's Mosul City to expel families of ISIS militants on June 27, 2017 to rehabilitation camps.
The second feature is that rehabilitation programs became a global effort that goes beyond the Middle East region. For instance, Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city, in December 2014, announced a new program to rehabilitate fundamentalists in a bid to prevent them from carrying out terrorist attacks or violent acts. Then, Denmark was the Western country with the second-highest number of returning fighters per capita.
In October 2016, British newspaper The Independent noted that the local authorities in the Swedish city of Lund were trialling a program to rehabilitate former ISIS fighters and other extremists with housing, employment, education and financial support. The aim was to reintegrate returned jihadists into society and prevent them from reverting to former networks.
But nonetheless, such efforts in general continue to face no easy obstacles of which the following stand out:
1- Large numbers. According to some estimates, the number of foreign fighters who joined terrorist organizations in this region is estimated between 27,000 and 31,000 of which 30 percent returned to their home countries. Undoubtedly, this causes more issues for government efforts to deal with the phenomenon. The reason is that large financial resources and non-traditional mechanisms are required to rehabilitate large numbers of returning fighters.
2- Overlapping and conflicting ideologies and organizational mindsets. Because returning foreign fighters belong to multiple terrorist organizations embracing various extremist ideologies, it is difficult for involved states to rely on just one-fits-all rehabilitation program. That is, some organizations pursue different approaches to many issues of special interest for them. This situation makes it even more important to develop various rehabilitation programs to address the multiplicity of organizational and ideological mindsets of the involved returning fighters.
3- Rooted propensity to violence. According to several views, some returning terrorist fighters pursue severely violent approaches to carry out the ideology of their organizations. This means their rehabilitation can require long periods of time, due to the fact that the problem does not only arise from their organizational approaches but also from the violent mechanisms they previously used during their participation in armed confrontations in areas under the control of their organizations.
4- The phenomenon of returning foreign women fighters. This phenomenon exacerbated when ISIS seized control of some territory in Syria and northern Iraq in mid-2014. The situation forced government to design special rehabilitation programs for female members of terrorist organizations that provide for their social conditions in particular, especially because some of them married terrorists and had children. The involved governments had to speed up relevant measures to prevent these organizations from recruiting these children in their ranks.
5- The problem of concealing religious beliefs. There were warnings that some returning terrorist fighters tend to deliberately pretend that they gave up their extremist ideology they used to embrace when they were active operators of terrorist organizations. This problem requires new mechanisms to enable relevant authorities running rehabilitation programs to gauge their efficiency in changing these ideologies.
6- Social pressure. Reintegration of returning terrorist fighters in their original societies appears to be no easy task because the returnees are rejected over their organizations’ appalling violations, which reduces the ability of these programs to achieve their set goals.
That said, overall, the new transformations in the phenomenon of terrorism require involved states to develop non-traditional programs to deal with the problem of fighters returning from conflict zones. The aim is to increase the ability to dissuade these returnees from extremist ideology while also addressing, in a positive way, the resulting social and economic repercussions.
