GLOBAL JIHAD WATCH:Saudi Turns His Back on Jihad

RIYADH,Saudi Arabia-The last time Ahmed al-Shayea was in the news, he was in the hospital at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, being treated for severe burns from the truck bomb he had driven into the Iraqi capital on Christmas Day, 2004.Today,he says,he has changed his mind about waging jihad,or holy war,and wants other young Muslims to know it.He wants them to see his disfigured face and fingerless hands,to hear how he was tricked into driving the truck on a fatal mission,to believe his contrition over having put his family through the agony of believing he was dead.At 22,the new Ahmed Al-Shayea is the product of a concerted Saudi government effort to counter the ideology that nurtured the 9/11 hijackers and that has lured Saudis in droves to the Iraq insurgency.The deprogramming,similar to efforts carried out in Egypt and Yemen,is built on reason,enticements and lengthy talks with psychiatrists, Muslim clerics and sociologists.The kingdom still has a way to go in cracking the jihadist mind-set.Most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis,and Saudis make up nearly half of the foreign detainees held in Iraq,according to Mouwaffak al- Rubaie,Iraq's national security adviser.They number hundreds,he said this month following a visit to Saudi Arabia.Dozens more are fighting alongside al-Qaida-inspired militants at a Palestinian camp in Lebanon.Several hundred prisoners,as well as returnees from Guantanamo,are thought to have passed through the rehabilitation program.Al-Shayea says his change of heart began when he was visited by a cleric at al-Ha'ir Prison in Riyadh following his repatriation from Iraq.He says he put two questions to the cleric:Was the jihad for which he traveled to Iraq religiously sanctioned?And were the edicts inciting such action correct in saying the militants should not inform their
parents or government of their intentions?
No and no, came the reply.
"I realized that all along I was wrong,"al-Shayea told The Associated Press in a two-hour interview at a Riyadh hotel before returning to an Interior Ministry compound that serves as a sort of halfway house for ex-jihadists rejoining Saudi society."There is no jihad.We are just instruments of death,"he said....
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As in the days of Noah...