ISIS fighters in northwestern Syria are being given short prison sentences and therapeutic art classes in an effort to rehabilitate them.
While prisoners in Iraq are held in squalor, subjected to torture, and even killed, Syrian Kurdish authorities take a different approach to justice that includes papier-mâché models of birds and flowers. The Kurds hope the unique rehab program will prevent a resurgence of the terrorist group after the fall of its land caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
“If I sentence a man to death, I am spreading hate. We want to give people reasons to trust us,” Khaled Barjas Ali, a senior judge in the Kurdish administration’s courts, told the Washington Post. “If you take revenge, people will be radicalized. But with reconciliation we are sure we can finish the problem.”
A prison holding 400 inmates is located in Qamishli, a Syrian city close to the Turkish border. The Kurds took control of the city and prison in 2012 after Syrian rebels declared the independence of Rojava, which makes up most of northwestern Syria. Officially, the Kurdish authority is not a recognized government, meaning the prison has limited resources, but inmates are provided medical and dental care, as well as an in-house barber shop.
The Kurds have installed a de facto court to pronounce sentences, which often run about two years. The toughest sentences extend to 20 and are reserved for the few fighters guilty of the most heinous crimes. No prisoners have been sentenced to death, a reflection of the Kurds’ left-wing ideology. A classroom in the prison features books by Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK , to which Turkish officials have accused Syrian Kurds of having ties.
How to rehabilitate members of one of the world’s most violent terrorist groups remains an open question. Adding to the problem is the resiliency of ISIS itself. While the group’s land caliphate has been defeated, it persists in small pockets across Syria and Iraq. Authorities in both countries continue to encounter sleeper cells, some of which still carry out attacks. Terrorism experts are concerned that the group is reverting back to its roots as an insurgency in preparation for a future offensive.
“To me, they’re not isolated pockets of surviving ISIS remnants but rather a reconstituting insurgent force akin to the force, for instance, that the U.S. faced in Iraq during the [2007] surge,” Jennifer Cafarella, research director for the Institute for the Study of War, told the Washington Examiner.
There are concerns that some of the ISIS prisoners in Qamishli could be part of such a resurgent ISIS.
“Of course there are some who still love Daesh,” Haval Mohammed, the prison’s director, told the Post, using an Arabic name for ISIS.
