MMA trainer rehabilitating Jihadi terrorists
Usman Raja has counseled more than 180 young Muslims to shun radicalization; so far, none has gone on to commit a terrorist act.
For generations, combat sports have played so large role in turning around lives that were downbound that it’s worth mentioning when a boxing champion emerges from a privileged background. Mixed martial arts has replaced boxing as the dominant combat sport, and today some of the troubled youth are not potential robbers and drug dealers, they are potential terrorists.
Over the past eight years, Usman Raja at Fight Science gym in Aldershot, England, has helped reintegrate more than 50 released prisoners convicted of terrorism. Although he’s retired from fighting, Raja still trains hard.
David D. Kirkpatrick has the story for the New York Times.
The biggest things these extremists get from it is community, Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
Over the last eight years, Mr. Raja and his group, the Unity Initiative, have helped reintegrate more than 50 released prisoners convicted of terrorism offenses. He has counseled more than 180 young Muslims to shun radicalization, all of them referred to him either by members of their communities or law enforcement. None, so far, has gone on to commit a terrorist act.
Usman has taken on some of the most hard-core, 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 counter-extremism or rehabilitation programs try to argue militants out of their ideology, often by disputing interpretations of the Quran. Mr. Raja works the other way around. He forms personal 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, Mr. Weeks said. It gives him street cred, and a starting point to have some of these conversations.
Wahabi Mohammed, who was convicted in 2005 of withholding information about his brother’s failed attempt to bomb the London Underground, said in an interview that when he was imprisoned he met with numerous counselors who tried to argue him out of his extremist convictions.
I felt like a guinea pig, he said. I gave them two hours a visit, and it never went further than that.
He had heard from other prisoners about Mr. Raja’s cage fighting before he met him. In prison, it definitely helps, Mr. Mohammed said. It says: ‘I am not just somebody from a university. I am from the streets, my perspective comes from a valid experience.’
So he was surprised to get a hug from Mr. Raja the moment they met, in 2010, in a room in the prison. I wasn’t sure how to take it, but it felt nice, Mr. Mohammed recalled.
They began talking as peers, about the shared problem of how to be a Muslim, and how do you fit in the modern world? Mr. Mohammed recalled.
Mr. Mohammed was released on probation in 2013 and now works in construction. He lives with his wife and five children in West London, and he, too, helps the Unity Initiative.
Image courtesy of CNN
