If you’re trying to get back to Europe after fighting in Syria, it helps if you’re headed to Aarhus. In this lively Danish port town west of Copenhagen, authorities are giving its citizens-turned-foreign-militants a second chance.
“We see this as crime prevention,” says Jorgen Illum, the police commissioner who's in charge of Aarhus’s rehabilitation program for young jihadis. “We want to prevent young people from becoming radicalized to an extent that they might be a threat to the society.”
Around 100 Danish men — out of a country of just five million — have gone to the Middle East to fight, and more than a third of those fighters are from Aarhus alone. Illum says the city has recruited a network of psychologists, mentors and social workers to try and ease the returnees back into Danish society.
[For more of this story, written by Cheryl Brumley, go to http://www.pri.org/stories/201...ihadis-second-chance]
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