The school that makes beekeepers of Taliban terrorists

The school is thrown out on a plain surrounded by guard rails, tall barbed-clad walls and jagged mountains. Inside the walls, hundreds of young men sleep, live, eat and study with dark memories and blood on their hands. But instead of suicide bombers, they should now become everything from car mechanics to beekeepers.

"Everyone stays here for at least half a year, but the hardest must be here for two or three years before they can be released into society," says the school's principal, Lieutenant Lieutenant Ghazanfar Anin.

The idea of ​​rehabilitating arrested terrorists was born ten years ago. The army had no effective countermeasures against the Taliban's perhaps most effective weapon: children and young people who stepped into a roadblock and detonated themselves and about 20 soldiers in the air. The children were taken as compensation to the Taliban when they demanded poor farmers for money the families did not have. The children were indoctrinated in the Taliban's ideology of violence. And since most could neither read nor write, they were grateful victims.

The radicalization of the Taliban takes place in an environment characterized by the war in neighboring Afghanistan, very conservative values ​​and extreme poverty. As parents are fully occupied with providing food for the day, the children grow up in an emotional void without confidential conversations and emotional attachments to parents.

In the Taliban, the emotional void is filled with simple messages: life on earth is unworthy and a suicide mission a shortcut to heaven and a better existence.

In 2009, a psychologist was commissioned by the army to deradicalize twelve Taliban children arrested by the military in the Swat Valley in northern Pakistan. It was the start of the Sabaoon project. Sabaoon means dawn in the local language Pashto. To date, around 1200 young people and young adults have been de-radicalized.

"After several years in overcrowded prisons, the Taliban are more militant and aggressive than before the verdict. Therefore, Sabaoon is a better alternative for both society and the Taliban, "says Sabaoon's chief psychologist Zia ul-Hasan when I ask if it is possible to forgive terrorists who killed civilians who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

An important part of de-programming is the teaching of Islam. The Taliban are then brainwashed with the notion that Islam equals violence, a violence blessed by Allah for eradicating sin and apostasy, a justified violence with a noble purpose.