Warning on ‘human bombs’ as prisons fill with ISIS fighters
By Souad Mekhennet and Joby Warrick
BRUSSELS: A few months before his killing rampage, convicted robber and prison inmate Benjamin Herman had a jailhouse conversion of a sort. A white suburban teen and a nominal Catholic when he was first incarcerated, he emerged in late May as an avowed Islamist who would murder three people within hours of gaining freedom on a work-release programme.
Herman fatally stabbed two female police officers during his hour-long attack in the Belgian city of Liege, and then used one of their pistols to kill a passing motorist.
One biographical detail stood out: Herman, a product of Belgium’s French- speaking middle class, had come under the sway of a group of radical Islamist inmates in prison.
“Never have so many people been arrested on charges related to terrorism, and never have we seen so many of these guys in prison together,” said Thomas Renard, a Belgian terrorism expert and researcher at the Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations in Brussels. “In bringing them together, we are facilitating their ability to recruit. And that is something that will stay with us for a long time.”
Across Europe, prisons are the latest battleground in the evolving fight against Islamist inspired terrorism. Beginning five years ago, Western countries saw thousands of their citizens migrate to Iraq and Syria to join the Islamic State or other Islamist groups. Since 2016, hundreds have returned, but the mood at home has changed. Traumatised by terrorist attacks and a swelling refugee crisis, European countries since 2016 have taken a hard line on returnees, enacting tough laws that require criminal charges and incarceration for anyone who travelled to the Middle East or sought to support Islamists groups abroad.
Europe has seen fewer deaths from terrorist attacks since the policies went into effect. But now European officials are grappling with a new problem: how to prevent prisons from becoming training and recruitment centres for future terrorists. From Belgium and the Netherlands to Germany and France, law enforcement officials are experimenting with markedly different approaches to the problem, including reeducation programmes and the near-total isolation of the most radicalised inmates.
“They come to the end of their sentence, and we have no choice but to release them,” said a Belgian official who helps supervise the treatment of Islamist inmates in that country’s largest prisons. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity out of concern that former inmates might target them.
“Some of them,” the official said, “could be human bombs.”
Ittre Prison, a walled, highsecurity complex southwest of Brussels, is one of Belgium’s most notorious.
Today, Ittre is known as one of two Belgian prisons with special isolation units for dealing with the most radical of the country’s jailed Islamists. Called DeRadex, the unit is home to men regarded by Belgian officials as particularly dangerous.
The inmates in the section are allowed to socialise with others within the isolation unit only during certain hours and under close supervision. Isolation is, in fact, the essential ingredient in Belgium’s new approach for dealing with radicalised prisoners: Although they may not be able to separate inmates from their extremist ideas, prison officials can at least prevent them from contaminating others.
Not all of DeRadex’s inhabitants have been convicted on terrorism charges or even have a history of violence. But they are known and feared for their charismatic personalities and ability to draw others to the radical Islamist cause.
“Every time we put them with the rest of the detainees, they engage in recruitment activities,” said Valérie Lebrun, a 49-yearold Belgian criminologist who is the head of Ittre. “They become the imam. They push others to pray and change behaviour.”
During a recent tour of the facility, the DeRadex prisoners sat in solitary cells or carried blue yoga mats to the exercise yard as makeshift prayer rugs. Some wore their prison pants cuffed above the ankle, in the jihadist style. In several cells, inmates had scratched Islamist graffiti onto walls and cell windows, including the name “Bel Kacem,” a reference to Fouad Belkacem, founder of the extremist organisation Sharia4Belgium. Belkacem is serving a 12-year sentence in another Belgium prison. Many of his recruits travelled to Syria and joined the Islamic State.
Said Valerie Lebrun, a 49-yearold Belgian criminologist who is the head of Ittre: “It’s extremely difficult to change someone’s ideas. However, trying to convince them not to resort to weapons in order to defend their ideas is much more attainable.”
Some in Belgium argue that the prison officials simply aren’t trying hard enough.
“The prisons are trying to quarantine the virus, but they don’t really address the problem,” said Ilyas Zarhoni, a Brussels imam who runs community programmes that seek to counter extremist ideology. “We need experts in ideology, experts in psychology. The costs will be high, but it’s nothing compared to what we could be dealing with when these people get out.”
Already, Zarhoni said, juvenile detainees who spent time in Iraq or Syria are being released to schools and neighbourhoods while still loyal to the radical Islamist cause. Among their peers, they are more likely to be viewed with admiration than with reproach.
“They’re seen as heroes,” Zarhoni said. “They’ve used weapons - how cool is that?”
Visitors to the prison in June observed as a manager demonstrated how guards are taught to look for warning signs in inmates’ appearance, behaviour and personal belongings.
Poking through one prisoner’s duffel bag, the officer set aside a strand of prayer beads and a mat - both regarded as acceptable items for a practising Muslim - but then paused to examine a copy of the Quran.
“Here we have a Quran, which is normally not an issue at all,” said the official, who requested anonymity as a condition of the interview.
“However, this is a Lies Stiftung edition, which has been banned and we can therefore not allow it.” Lies Stiftung qurans contain commentary associated with Salafism, a conservative form of Sunni Islam.
As the visitors watched, the problematic Quran was removed and replaced with a plain one.
A CD was also confiscated, because, as the official explained, it contained sermons by a cleric regarded by the prison staff as radical.
A green Saudi flag in the prisoner’s belongings was seen as a problem. Prison officials worry that nationalist symbols could trigger conflicts. Because
of its religious symbolism, a Saudi flag in the possession of a non- Saudi also could suggest ties to the Salafist movement.
Followers of the Islamic State adhere to an extreme variation of Salafism.
“This suggests that the prisoner may have been radicalised,” the officer said.
“We have to observe him carefully - his contacts, what he reads - and try and get as much information on him as possible.”
The Hessian program, called Network for Deradicalisation in the Penal System, or NeDiS, seeks to change inmates’ thinking.
“Every radical Islamist convict will be released from the correctional facilities some day,” Eva Kuhne-Hormann, the Hessian minister of justice, said in an interview.
“If we do not use the terms of imprisonment to influence this group of persons by taking the corresponding actions for deradicalisation, we run the risk of releasing radical Islamists, who are devoid of any personal perspective, into German society.”
Inmates can still choose to either accept or reject the moderate messages they are given, and some Islamist inmates no doubt will leave prison with the same views, or perhaps with even more extreme ones, officials acknowledged.
Among inmates, there is grumbling about the newly intense scrutiny and scepticism about its effectiveness.
One Hesse inmate, an avowed admirer of former al- Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, said he was harassed by prison officials after leading a prayer group inside the prison.
The inmate, who identified himself by his nom de guerre Abu Shaheed, was convicted of robbery in 2014, a crime he acknowledges was part of a foiled attempt to obtain money for a move to Syria to join the Islamic State. The inmate was interviewed with permission of prison authorities.
“My mistake was not asking the officer beforehand,” he said about the prayer group. “Then an officer arrived and said I should stop. I was almost done, and others said to him that he should wait. But he’d already pressed the alarm buzzer. Beep, beep, beep.”
Several officers then scuffled with him in a corridor, injuring his shoulder, he said.
Abu Shaheed said he opposes violence and thinks his decision to join the Islamic State was a mistake.
But he clings to the same ideology, now infused with anger about what happened to him after the prayer meeting.
Never have so many people been arrested on charges related to terrorism, and never have we seen so many of these guys in prison together. Thomas Renard, Belgian terrorism expert
“They put me in the special lock-up, the entire night and the next day,” he said. “For what? Because I wanted to pray?”
Since the founding of the Islamic State in 2014, several of Europe’s biggest terrorist attacks were led by former prison inmates, some of whom became radicalised while behind bars. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the leader of the deadly attacks on Paris in November 2015, grew up in an immigrant neighbourhood in central Brussels and was jailed multiple times for assault, burglary and receiving stolen goods. In prison, the one-time street hustler became an acolyte of an older inmate, an Islamist who the prisoners dubbed “Papa Noel” because of his bushy grey beard.
Abaaoud adopted the older man’s religious dogma and, after his release from prison, left for Syria to join the terrorists.
Months later, some of Abaaoud’s Belgian friends and former prison mates would participate in the March 2016 attack on the Brussels airport, the act that awakened Belgians to the scale of the country’s Islamist problem. It was that event that prompted Belgium to join Germany and other European countries in adopting stricter laws that made it a crime to travel to Islamic State territory or offer support to Islamist militant groups.
Since then, returnees from Iraq and Syria have been systematically arrested and put behind bars. Thus, while the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate no longer exists, the number of arrests related to “jihadist terrorism” continues to climb, from 395 in 2014, to 705 last year, according to statics released in June by Europol.
But many who are now in prison will be soon be free. According to last month’s Europol report, the average prison sentence in Belgium for inmates convicted of supporting terrorist groups is five years.
“We had a problem: Young people were going to the caliphate. And now we have a different problem: They are coming back,” said Brahim Laytouss, an Antwerp, Belgium, imam and director of the Islamic Development and Research Academy, a non-profit group that seeks to re- educate radicalised inmates.
“There are hundreds in our prisons here in Belgium, and probably 150 that could be considered dangerous. And my organisation only has the resources to deal with 10 at a time.” — Washington Post