Morocco aims to de-radicalise Daesh prisoners

SALE: As a combatant for the Daesh group who let his native Morocco to join what he felt was a holy fight in Syria, Mohsin said he saw all the horrors of war. “A terrifying experience,” he said.

Now a prisoner, the 38-year-old claimed he is no longer the fanatic he was then, enraged with a murderous hatred for non-muslims. Captured in Turkey and extradited to Morocco, he is serving a 10-year prison term on terrorism charges.

Now the former fighter has graduated with 14 other prisoners convicted of terror offenses from a Morocco de-radicalisation programme that might make them more eligible for an early release.

The Associated Press and other media were invited to observe their graduation ceremony on Thursday in a prison in Sale near the Moroccan capital, Rabat, and to interview some prisoners under monitored and controlled conditions. Prison administration officials picked out three men they said were willing to be interviewed. Officials stipulated that the inmates shouldn’t be identified by their full names and that their faces mustn’t be shown, citing privacy reasons.

But prison officials didn’t listen to the interviews or intervene to shut down media lines of questioning or inmates’ answers.

The 15 inmates in crisp shirts and trousers stood solemnly for Morocco’s national anthem and were handed certificates. Prison officials said the de-radicalisation programme consisted of three months of classes in prison on religion, law and economics, and that inmates also received training on how to start a business. These most recent graduates were the ninth batch since the programme started in 2017.

Moulay Idriss Agoulmam, the director of social-cultural action and prisoner reintegration at Morocco’s prison administration, said the programme is entirely voluntary and works with inmates “to change their behaviour and improve their life path.”

“It enables prisoners to form an awareness of the gravity of their mistakes,” he said.

Graduating from the programme doesn’t make inmates automatically eligible for early release, but does increase their chances of geting a royal pardon or a reduced sentence. That’s been the case for just over half of the programme’s 222 graduates so far, the prison administration says. Since 2019, the training has also been offered to women convicted under Morocco’s Anti-terrorism Act. Ten women have graduated so far — all of them since released, including eight with pardons.

Called “Moussalaha,” meaning “reconciliation” in Arabic, the programme is offered to prisoners who have demonstrated a readiness to disavow extremism.