Former MMA fighter reintegrates Muslim terrorists
LONDON — Usman Raja, a burly 40-year-old and one-time pioneer of bare-knuckled mixed martial-arts fighting, was back for a few rounds of sparring at his home gym in a town south of London. But before stepping into the ring, he wanted to talk instead about his new vocation: the rehabilitation of Islamist militants.
“The biggest things these extremists get from it is community,” Raja was saying, ticking off the names of the convicted terrorists now working with him. “They treat each other with love, and they hate everybody else.”
These are boom times for Raja’s new line of business. The retreat of the Islamic State from its last Syrian strongholds is raising alarms about militants returning home to Britain and the West, and the British government has enlisted Raja to work with at least 30 Islamic State returnees. Groups as far-flung as the Los Angeles Police Department and the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point have sought out his advice on how to deal with violent extremists.
That is part of the reason he was back at the gym. “I can’t lose my Spartan-warrior reputation,” he said. “That is my legitimacy in the prisons.” Usman Raja, left, trains with Lyubo Kumbarov, a Bulgarian cage fighter and instructor, at the Fight Science Gym in Aldershot, England. Raja, who was a pioneer of mixed martial-arts fighting, has earned attention in the United States for his unusual method of rehabilitating jihadists.
Over the past eight years, Raja and his group, the Unity Initiative, have helped reintegrate more than 50 released prisoners who had been convicted of terrorism offenses. He has counseled more than 180 young Muslims to shun radicalization, all of them referred to him by either members of their communities or law enforcement. None has gone on to commit a terrorist act.
“Usman has taken on some of the most hardcore, extreme cases that the U.K. has to offer, and he has a very good success rate at getting them back into productive roles in society,” said Douglas Weeks, a scholar who studies radicalization and provides unpaid advice to the Unity Initiative.
Most other counterextremism or rehabilitation programs try to argue militants out of their ideology, often by disputing interpretations of the Quran. Raja works the other way around. He forms relationships with the young men at risk, usually spending five to eight hours a week, one-on-one, with each, sometimes meeting five days a week. He builds their sense of engagement in a community, and then watches for the ideological or religious arguments to fall away.
“That is where the mixed martial arts come in,” Weeks said. “It gives him street cred, and a starting point to have some of these conversations.”
Raja might pass for one of convicts he works with. He shaves his head, trims his thick beard back to his jawline, and wears a braided leather cord close around his neck. A silver ring on his right hand is shaped like a talon, to double as a weapon.
Raja is the son of Pakistani immigrants and was raised by his single mother in a predominantly white, working-class town near the gym in Aldershot. He speaks in a thick East London-Cockney accent, and his words gush out in a jumble of enthusiasm, hopping from musings about the human condition to reflections on the history of Islam and anecdotes about the many jihadis he has known.
An example is Ali Beheshti, a former top leader of a London-based extremist group, Al Muhajiroon. Beheshti once set fire to the house of a publisher who had produced a novel about the Prophet Muhammad. That earned him four years in Belmarsh prison, which is where Raja encountered him.
“Ali has a tattoo on his forearm that says, ‘Only God can judge me,’” Raja said. Most Muslims scholars say that Islam forbids tattooing, but militants often pick and choose the scripture that fits their purpose.
Raja met with Beheshti five days a week for a year and a half, trained him in fighting and eventually brought him to the gym to spar with a white British soldier.
“From Ali’s point of view, ‘This is one of the guys I have been preaching to kill for years,’” Raja recalled. But the soldier told Beheshti, “Congratulations, we are really proud of what you are doing.”
Now, Beheshti volunteers to help the Unity Initiative, although he is not yet ready to help police. “He is still street-respect-oriented in that respect,” Raja said.