Faced with a difficult war against insurgents in the remote northeast, Nigeria had decided on a new strategy to tackle extremism: a mixture of amnesty, demobilization, and reprogramming to whittle away jihadist recruits. The idea was to undermine Boko Haram through bloodless attrition, not just by slugging it out on the battlefield.

The program was designed and run by Fatima Akilu, a soft-spoken psychologist who had trained in the UK and the US. She drew on prison-based schemes under way in Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Australia, adapting them to Nigeria. The new approach involved changes across a range of policy areas: shifting the school curriculum to promote “critical thinking,” overhauling a sclerotic justice system, tinkering with the health services so that psycho-social care could be expanded.

“The solutions are as complex as the reasons for radicalism,” Akilu told me.

The most visible part of her strategy, though, was in Kuje. Directed at prisoners who were convicted or suspected terrorists, it aimed at more than just getting detainees to renounce violence. Its goal was thorough deradicalization: totally expunging extremist beliefs, values, and behavior.

This represented an immense cultural shift for Nigeria. Its jails are notorious for their neglect and abuse of inmates, but in Kuje’s “de-rad” wing—built with funds given to Nigeria by the European Union—the focus was different. The idea was to build a human connection between the alleged extremists—known as “clients” rather than inmates—and the wardens, who were retrained and renamed the “treatment team.” Their job was to assess the needs of the militants under their care, and to identify the most effective ways to deprogram them.

When I first met Aminu, he was dressed in a crisp white dashiki and seated in an air-conditioned classroom in a new wing segregated from the rest of the overcrowded and unsanitary jail. Here on the de-rad side, clients were treated differently. They could wear their own clothes and had access to a new mosque, a sports area, and properly equipped vocational training programs. Not surprisingly, they were roundly hated by the hundreds of long-suffering regular inmates.

“We try as much as possible to help them,” says Wahaab Akorede, the manager of the Kuje program. “We tell them we are not police or security—we’re doctors. That’s why it’s called treatment.”

Protect and prevent

“We try as much as possible to help them. We tell them we are not police or security—we’re doctors. That’s why it’s called treatment.”

Over the past 20 years, as detentions of terrorists have mounted around the world, a dizzying range of de-rad programs like the one in Kuje have sprung up in almost every major country. Authorities in Nigeria and elsewhere worried they were simply creating a revolving door if they released terrorists back into the community once their sentences had been served. Yet indefinite detentions, such those at Guantánamo Bay, weren’t a popular or legal way to deal with the problem either. So began the explosion of post-crime deradicalization schemes.

Prison-based initiatives vary, from monitored informal chats with a local imam (a technique favored in Victoria, Australia) to structured models like that run by the government in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi approach includes a prison-based counseling phase, rehabilitation therapy, and then post-release “after-care”—all touted as something of a gold standard.

Riyadh claims recidivism is extremely low, but independent researchers are skeptical of the official numbers: there have been at least 11 high-profile cases of participants who have returned to terrorism. Saudi methods have also been questioned. For a start, participants are usually low-level supporters of dangerous organizations rather than hard-core militants. The program is also focused on preventing domestic terror attacks. It may therefore turn a blind eye to the export of jihad abroad, which means deradicalization “is not truthfully being achieved,” wrote Tom Pettinger, a researcher at the University of Warwick, in a 2017 paper.

Other models, many of them in Europe, seek to prevent people from becoming radicalized in the first place. Britain’s Prevent program, for example, seeks both to educate communities on the risks of radicalization and to stage interventions. Public workers in schools, universities, and local councils are required to report on anyone who shows radical tendencies, a system that the government says has diverted more than 1,200 people from extremism.

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Increasingly, though, prevention efforts have focused on the internet. The web is seen as a dangerous shortcut to radicalization, providing “a cheap and effective way to communicate, bond, and network with like-minded movement members,” says Daniel Koehler, founding director of the German Institute on Radicalization and De-Radicalization Studies.

Looking at former right-wing German extremists, Koehler found that the perceived anonymity of the internet encouraged people to take more extreme positions. Being part of a radical echo chamber online “creates a kind of ticking time bomb: a rapidly decreasing amount of alternatives and options in combination with an increasing amount of ideological calls for action,” he says.

The argument is that the speed and saturation of online communication can easily accelerate radicalization. Stuck inside an information bubble, impressionable people are exposed to more and more extreme viewpoints until—finally—their activities shift to the next, horrifying level.

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have been visible parts of this machine, driven in large part by ISIS, which has placed great value in its social-media operations. At the height of the “caliphate” in 2014, it had teams devoted to creating and uploading ISIS-branded propaganda from Afghanistan to West Africa in a round-the-clock news cycle. In 2014, there were estimated to be between 46,000 and 90,000 active ISIS support accounts worldwide, both official and unofficial, in a variety of languages.

Most attempts to stamp out radicalism online have focused on shutting down the accounts of those who preach violence: Twitter claimed to have suspended more than 1.8 million accounts from 2015 to 2018. This has been effective when done rapidly and consistently. The ISIS presence on Twitter has diminished in quantity and visibility.