HDP Group Deputy Chairperson and Istanbul MP Filiz Kerestecioğlu submitted a written inquiry to be answered by Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu about ISIS members crossing into Turkey, like reported by anfenglish.com.

Kerestecioğlu said, “According to US based think tank Soufan Center’s report titled Foreign Fighters and the Threat of Returnees, 5.600 foreign national ISIS member terrorists in Iraq and Syria have returned to their countries.”

“THEY RETURN TO TURKEY WITHOUT A HITCH”

“There are claims that a significant portion of ISIS members from Europe, North America, Russia and Central Asia cross over into Syria through Turkey and return to their countries over Turkey again,” said Kerestecioğlu and added:

“This study cites the number of Turkish nationals who joined the ISIS terrorist organization to fight in Syria and Iraq as 1500. Those with Turkish passports are at first place among those who fight in the name of ISIS in Syria and Iraq and return to their countries. Some 900 ISIS militants have been reported to have returned to Turkey without encountering any obstacles. Recently, there have been operations against ISIS as well. As part of these operations, 32 people have been detained in Istanbul while 172 out of 245 suspects with active arrest warrants have been detained in Ankara.”

“HOW MANY ISIS MEMBERS HAVE BEEN RELEASED?”

HDP’s Kerestecioğlu demanded answers for the following questions from Minister Soylu:

“How many ISIS members have entered Turkey in the last year? Have you conducted any work on this?

How many people detained in ISIS operations in the last year have been arrested? How many have been released?

What precautions have been taken against ISIS members returning to Turkey? What efforts are in place for border security? What does your Ministry have in the works for this?”

At least 20 people were killed and 40 wounded when a suicide bomber set off a truck bomb near a crowded marketplace in the northern Iraqi town of Tuz Khurmatu, police and medical sources told Reuters on Tuesday.

An interior ministry spokesman confirmed that a “violent explosion” took place near a vegetable market in Tuz Khurmatu, south of Kirkuk, but did not immediately provide casualty figures.

Most of the casualties were civilians, the police and medical sources said. The death toll was expected to rise because many of the wounded were in critical condition.

The bombing took place in a mainly Shi’ite Turkmen area.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but suicide bombings are a trademark of Islamic State militants.

Iraqi security officials have said Islamic State is likely to wage an insurgency in Iraq after its self-proclaimed caliphate collapsed and the militants were dislodged from the territories they held in the country.

Iran-backed Shia paramilitary forces operating in northern Iraq have been accused by a Kurdish parliamentarian of engaging in “flagrant injustice” toward Christians in the region which until earlier this year was in the grip of ISIS terrorists.

Wahida Yaqo Hormuz — a Christian representative in the parliament of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) — said she had alerted the Vatican and international human rights groups to what she called the “Shia-ification” of the Nineveh Plains, where the northern Iraqi city of Mosul is located. Conquered by ISIS in 2014, Iraqi government forces retook the city in July.

“This is a flagrant injustice done to Christians,” Yaqo Hormuz said, commenting on reports that the Hashd al-Shaabi paramilitary, a coalition of armed Shia groups supported by Iran, was preventing the return of Christians who fled during the recent assault on KRG-controlled territories in northern Iraq.

The Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah is preparing to pull its cadre of commanders and military advisers from Iraq, with the group’s leader saying Monday it had achieved its goal of defeating the Islamic State in the Middle East country, like reported by washingtontimes.com.

During a televised address from Beirut, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said its operations against ISIS in Iraq were coming quickly to an end, and the group needed to redeploy those commanders and advisers “in any other arena that needs them.”

Hezbollah fighters in Iraq will remain in place, for the time being, until Baghdad gives the official word that their forces are no longer needed in the country, Mr. Nasrallah said.

“Daesh is essentially done. Iraqi forces have made their way to the Syrian-Iraqi border. But we are waiting for the final victory. It is not far off that this will be announced or completed,” the terror group leader said Monday, using the derogatory Arabic term for ISIS.

“If we find that it’s over, that there is no need for the presence of these brothers, they will return,” he added during the televised address.

Mr. Nasrallah’s comments come days after Iraqi security forces and members of the Shia paramilitary groups known as Popular Mobilization Forces or PMFs, backed by American airpower, retook the northern Iraqi city of Rawa on Friday.

U.S. officials are spotlighting Iran’s efforts to spread its influence across the Middle East with what they describe as a “large-scale” counterfeiting operation, sophisticated enough to fool some European regulators, like reported by voanews.com.

Treasury officials in Washington exposed the counterfeiting ring Monday, sanctioning a network of individuals and companies, including two based in Germany, linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and its elite Qods Force.

The department said Iran used the German-based front companies ForEnt Technik and Printing Trade Center (PTC) to trick European regulators in order to acquire watermarked paper, specialty ink and machinery.

The export of those items to Iran is currently banned.

‘Destabilizing activities’

As a result, officials said, Iran may have managed to print hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of Yemeni bank notes, which the IRGC then used to “support its destabilizing activities.”

“This scheme exposes the deep levels of deception the IRGC-Qods Force is willing to employ against companies in Europe, governments in the Gulf, and the rest of the world to support its destabilizing activities,” said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, calling Tehran’s actions “completely unacceptable.”

“This counterfeiting scheme exposes the serious risks faced by anyone doing business with Iran,” he added. “The IRGC continues to obscure its involvement in Iran’s economy and hide behind the façade of legitimate businesses to perpetrate its nefarious objectives.”

‘Knee-deep in counterfeit business’

U.S. officials have long accused Iran of supplying arms to rebel Houthi forces battling for control of Yemen. But Monday’s sanctions help highlight the scope of what Western officials commonly describe as the IRGC’s far-reaching and malign activities.

“Iran itself, together with its proxy, Lebanese Hezbollah, is knee-deep and has been knee-deep in the counterfeit business for quite some time,” said Matthew Levitt with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Exposing this is kind of a two-for one, both exposing the organization’s terrorist activity and also exposing the nature of the criminal activity that it engages in.”

Levitt, a former Treasury Department intelligence official, also said the U.S. announcement could hurt Iran, especially as it tries to get better access to the international financial systems and get off a global blacklist of high-risk countries.

The new U.S. sanctions may also send a message to some U.S. allies who want to maintain the Iranian nuclear deal and have been hesitant to follow the lead of the Trump administration, which has advocated taking a much tougher stance with Tehran.

“This sends a pretty strong political statement that it is in Europe’s interest to care,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior Iran analyst at Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “It’s European jurisdiction and European technology.”

A small group of Iraqi hackers figured they could do a better job fighting ISIS online than most governments—and they did. And do. With a vengeance.

Six young Iraqis are taking a strategy straight out of the Kremlin’s mischievous playbook, but with no thanks to Moscow. They’re using hacked accounts to attack the so-called Islamic State and fake news to disrupt its “virtual caliphate”, like reported by thedailybeast.com.

Given the dangers they face, the six people who make up the little group calling itself, with conscious irony, “Daeshgram”—its name melding the Arabic acronym for ISIS and Instagram—are forced to live something resembling double lives. Four of them work professionally in information technology and cybersecurity, one is an engineer, the other a student—all of them live in Iraq. Their families and friends know nothing of their efforts to push back against ISIS.

If the streets of Mosul were Iraq’s physical frontline against the jihadists, then surely it is the social media channels and encrypted messaging applications that serve as the front line against the cyber caliphate, and these young geeks are deep in the trenches.

Nada and Ahmed are two of those six. They formed Daeshgram around a year ago.

“We started thinking about how we could fight them online,” says Nada. “We were always messing around on the internet with each other anyway. ISIS are still a threat to Iraq, to Syria, even the world. So we started looking into exactly what might be effective on social media, and on Telegram. Back then, ISIS could do whatever they wanted on Telegram, we wanted them to know we were going to fight them on there too.”

As Twitter and Facebook began clamping down on extremist material, the encrypted messaging app Telegram became the group’s new hangout and means of distributing propaganda amongst its members across the globe.

It all began with “infiltrating their Telegram channels” says Nada, “we spent months observing, and pretending to be ISIS members. We studied how they behaved, the sort of language they used, and tried to take note of the unwritten rules.”

Even in the apparent safety of their own homes, where they gathered as Daeshgram on the weekends and after work, they would receive death threats “every now and then on Twitter, and Telegram from ISIS,” explains Ahmed. “‘We will find you, we will kill you.’ We just accepted that it is a part of our activities,” he adds. “We are IT experts, we take our cybersecurity extremely seriously.”

But, ISIS wasn’t the only danger—so genuine-looking was much of the media Daeshgram was publishing, and so deeply embedded within the jihadists’ online activities were they, that there were fears the Iraqi government might also be a threat.

Had they been caught, Daeshgram’s activities likely would have been difficult to explain to the Iraqi authorities. Much of their work has a nuance and patience misunderstood even by counterterror experts on ISIS. “I’m not sure they would have understood what we were doing, so we had to be extremely careful with our security,” said Ahmed.

The group was operating in a murky area and without government sanction. People have been jailed for far less when it comes to participating in such groups online. But despite committing hundreds of thousands of men from the Iraqi army, special forces, and various militias to fight ISIS on the ground in Mosul, Fallujah, and elsewhere, the Iraqi government made no provision for fighting the group online.

Telegram often served as a means of delivery, it allowed for proliferation of the group’s high-quality media output, everything from radio broadcasts and written statements to half-hour cinematic battle videos.

Some of Daeshgram’s early efforts saw them photoshop a pornographic scene into an image announcing the opening of a new media center in Wilyat Al-Khayar, an area that roughly correlates to Deir az-Zour in eastern Syria. The scene is amusing, if a little crass, but it served an important purpose.

“It let Daesh know that we were capable of replicating their media to a very high standard, it was the first seed of doubt,” explains Nada. However, they soon learned that to have the effect they desired “our output had to be subtle, and believable.” Nada adds, “We wanted to create items that ISIS members would not question and would share widely”—believability was key, as with all fake news.

In one effort some months ago, the group released an official-looking video warning that Amaq, ISIS’ official news agency which has become the go-to source for information on the group’s activities, had been hacked. It hadn’t, but so legitimate-looking was the warning that moderators on various Telegram channels began marking Amaq output from the day as fake, and warning members off it.

The confusion was growing.

In another instance, seeing a rumor that ISIS’ radio station Al-Bayan had been destroyed in an airstrike, the group produced a perfectly branded and edited audio statement in the style of Al-Bayan denying it had been taken offline. Their Al-Bayan piece was ambitious, but it appeared to work: It was downloaded without question almost 800 times, and it included information about ISIS losses on the battlefield, and the increasing number of ISIS fighters who were working as informants for Western governments, or outright defecting—topics official ISIS media outlets would never include.

Another effort saw the group create the fake Al-Adnani news channel, which at its peak had some 500 members. Controlling the channel gave the group nearly complete control over exactly what was posted and shared between members.

This tactic of imitation and subtle manipulation became the focus of their efforts; “We took their templates, and we started to manipulate the information on there, it was almost impossible to tell which statements were ISIS and which we had made,” said Nada.

Are they aware of just how controversial the rise of fake news has been, and is it ever an ethical strategy to adopt?

“Naturally we’re aware of the discussions across the globe about fake news and the harmful impact it has had on countries, especially in their elections,” says Nada. “Fake news has been used to destabilize functioning democracies.” But she claims the strategy is justified: “While the tactics we have used are indeed similar, we—in contrast to other actors—openly acknowledge that we are purposefully creating confusion to delegitimize and discredit Daesh propaganda.”

Just this past week, the group pulled off what they described as “a major operation,” the culmination of weeks of preparation with other groups.

Dubbed #ParalyzingAmaq the operation saw the main Amaq website taken down by a hack, and perhaps equally as significant, the website’s Firefox plugin, which automatically redirects followers to the latest incarnation of Amaq, was thwarted.

With the site down, the group began uploading some of the more than 40 duplicate Amaq sites it had created—many of them barely discernible from the original—even to the best-trained eye. These duplicate sites are being bandied about among dozens of Telegram sites as genuine, with ISIS members vouching for their authenticity.

The Telegram phenomenon has given birth to an industry of analysts and experts. Navigating the groups and channels which frequently shut down and respawn is not especially complex, but it is time consuming and requires near constant attention.

Some analysts were quick to criticise last week’s efforts to disrupt ISIS’ activities labeling it “a publicity stunt.” Others said it was “just annoying.”

When I put it to Nada and Ahmed that their operation largely flopped, Nada said the purpose of the operation was never merely to take down Telegram accounts, as some appear to have expected. It was “to sow discord and confusion, and to undermine the credibility of Amaq among ISIS supporters, particularly Arabic speakers,” said Nada. “We achieved that goal.”

Indeed a look at some of the popular channels frequented by ISIS suggests they are right: In one chat several ISIS members are seen bickering following Amaq’s hacking. “This channel is not official,” says one. Another replies, “How do you know it’s not official?” A third member interjects, “No, give your evidence.” Only for the first to respond, “You should be careful what you say to me.”

Ahmed points out that ISIS enforces stringent anti-discord rules on Telegram, as it does in the real world. Arguments, and the questioning of authority, will often see members banned.

“That discord, or fitna [the Quranic term used by ISIS] includes doubting any credible news outlet,” says Ahmed. He adds that, following Friday’s operation, “We made them break their own rules, we made them engage in debates regarding what was real, and what wasn’t.”

Nada concludes: “Journalists and analysts are not our target audience. Daesh supporters themselves, especially the Arabic speaking ones, are our target. Our main objective was to create confusion and discord, and we were able to do that. What Western analysts think is not really relevant to our work.

“ISIS supporters don’t know which Amaq sites to trust,” she said, so, “they don’t trust Amaq anymore.”

In the fight against the virtual caliphate, that is no small victory.

In a resolution long on criticism but short on concrete steps, Arab foreign ministers who convened in Cairo Sunday delivered a tirade of criticism against Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, warning that Tehran is destabilizing the region.

The emergency meeting was convened at the request of Saudi Arabia, with support from the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kuwait, to discuss means of confronting Iran’s regional interventions, like reported by israelhayom.com.

They said they were planning to “brief” the U.N. Security Council on Iran’s destabilizing policies in the region, particularly its support for Shiite rebels in Yemen, and planning to submit an anti-Iran Arab resolution at a later stage.

In what is perhaps the only concrete measure to emerge from the emergency meeting, the ministers said Arab telecommunications satellites would ban Iranian-financed television stations. The reason for the ban, they said, was that the networks exacerbate sectarian and ethnic tensions and pose a threat to Arab security.

“We are not declaring war on Iran at this stage,” Arab League chief Ahmed Aboul-Gheit said. “We have not taken a decision to ask the Security Council to meet, but we are just briefing the council and maybe the next stage will be for us to meet and call for a Security Council meeting and submit a draft Arab resolution [against Iran].”

Lebanon, where Hezbollah is a key member of the coalition government, and Iraq, a majority Shiite nation bound by close political and religious ties to Iran, voiced reservations about the harsher parts of the resolution, including one branding Hezbollah a “terrorist” organization. The draft also blamed the Shiite group for supporting “terrorist groups” across the region and supplying them with weapons, including ballistic missiles.

Hezbollah, both a military force involved in Syria’s war and a political movement, is part of a Lebanese government made up of rival factions.

Lebanon’s Arab League representative, Antoine Azzam, objected to the declaration accusing Hezbollah of terrorism and said it was part of Lebanon’s government, the Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Manar television channel reported.

While not mentioning Iran by name, he said Lebanon condemned all attacks against Arab nations, but blamed exploitable inter-Arab divisions that allowed international and regional powers to promote their interests.

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, a Saudi ally, resigned from the premiership on Nov. 4 in a surprise announcement in Riyadh, in which he accused Iran and Hezbollah of spreading strife. Subsequently, Lebanese President Michel Aoun and other politicians accused Saudi Arabia of coercing Hariri to resign and holding him hostage, an allegation denied by both Saudi Arabia and Hariri.

Saudi Arabia, a Sunni powerhouse, has significantly sharpened its anti-Iran rhetoric since intercepting a ballistic missile fired by Iranian-backed Shiite rebels in Yemen on Nov. 4. According to the Saudi Defense Ministry, the missile was intercepted over Riyadh’s international airport. The Saudis said the missile was Iranian-made and declared the attack an act of war by the Iranians.

Iran denies arming the Yemeni rebels, known as Houthis, who say they produced the missile locally.

Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir asked fellow Arab nations to take a “serious and honest” stand against Iranian “aggression” and “meddling” in the internal affairs of Arab countries.

“Showing leniency toward Iran will not leave any Arab capital safe from those ballistic missiles,” he told the Arab foreign ministers’ meeting.

“Today we must take a serious and honest stand … to counter these belligerent policies,” he said.

He said his country had been targeted by a total of 80 ballistic missiles fired by Yemen’s Shiite rebels since 2015, when the kingdom formed and led a coalition to fight the rebels in Yemen alongside forces loyal to the internationally recognized government there.

Saudi Arabia will not stand idly by in the face of Iran’s “blatant aggression,” Al-Jubeir told the assembly, adding, “We must stand together.”

Aboul-Gheit also spoke during the session, which was broadcast live. The Arab League chief was just as critical of Iran as the Saudi minister. Alluding to the Nov. 4 attack, he said it delivered a message to Arab nations that their capitals were within the range of Iranian missiles.

“We say it in clear terms that Iranian threats have exceeded all boundaries and are pushing the region toward the abyss. … [Iran’s] missile program poses a danger to the region,” Aboul-Gheit said.

According to the final statement, the ministers said they supported any action to be taken by Saudi Arabia to protect its national security, within the boundaries of international legitimacy.

Bahrain’s foreign minister, Sheikh Khalid Bin Ahmed Al Khalifa, urged strong action by the Arab League against Iran. In the absence of such support, his country would have no choice but to rely on the protection of its Western allies, he said, citing the U.S. 5th Fleet headquartered in Bahrain and naval ships patrolling the Persian Gulf.

Meanwhile, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused the Saudis of sowing division. On the sidelines of a meeting in Antalya, Turkey, Zarif told Iranian state media, “Unfortunately, countries like the Saudi regime are pursuing divisions and creating differences, and because of this they don’t see any results other than divisions.”

On Sunday, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry to discuss, among other things, regional tensions over Lebanon, the foreign ministry said in a statement.

More than 1,000 Iranians have been killed in Syria, with senior members of Guards among them, like reported by middleeasteye.net

A commander in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards and a lower-ranking Iranian fighter were killed fighting the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria in recent days, Iranian media reported on Sunday.

The Revolutionary Guards, Iran’s most powerful military force, which also oversees an economic empire worth billions of dollars, have been fighting in support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for several years.

An Iranian official told the Tasnim news agency last year that more than 1,000 Iranians have been killed in Syria. Senior members of the Guards have been among those killed.

Kheyrollah Samadi, a Guards commander in charge of a unit in Syria, died on Thursday in fighting in the Albu Kamal region, bordering Iraq, according to Fars News, a news agency.

Samadi was killed in clashes with IS, according to the Ghatreh news site. Iranian media have previously reported on fighting in that area between Iran’s Shia militia allies and IS.

The Syrian army and its allies took complete control over Albu Kamal, IS’s last significant town in Syria, a military news service run by Hezbollah said on Sunday.

Samadi, who fought in the Iran-Iraq war during the 1980s and had retired from the Iranian military before signing on to go to Syria, was killed by a mortar explosion, Fars News said.

Iranian news sites posted pictures on Sunday of Samadi with Qassem Soleimani, head of the Guards branch responsible for operations outside Iran.

Clashes with Islamic State

The lower-ranking Iranian fighter, Mehdi Movahednia, was killed on Saturday in clashes with IS in the town of Mayadin in eastern Syria, Fars News reported.

The Revolutionary Guards initially kept quiet about their role in the Syria conflict. But in recent years, as casualties have mounted, they have been more outspoken about their engagement, framing it as an existential struggle against the Sunni Muslim fighters of IS who see Shias, the majority of Iran’s population, as apostates.

On web sites linked to the Guards, members of the organisation killed in Syria and Iraq are praised as protectors of Shia holy sites and labelled “defenders of the shrine”.

US President Donald Trump last month gave the Treasury Department authority to impose economic sanctions on members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in response to what Washington calls its efforts to destabilise and undermine its opponents in the Middle East

Tens of Islamic State members were killed during operations in north of Kirkuk, a commander said according to iraqinews.com.

“Security troops carried out an operation in north of Hawija, which left tens of militants killed,” Maj. Gen. Ali Fadel Mahran, commander of Kirkuk Operations Command, said in a statement on Sunday.

“Rest houses of IS and suicide belts were also destroyed during the operations,” he added.

Operations were launched in late September to liberate Hawija, southwest of Kirkuk, before Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi announced freeing the town in October.

In late October, operations were launched to liberate Qaim and Rawa towns, west of Anbar. Both have been held by the extremist group since 2014, when it occupied one third of Iraq to proclaim a self-styled Islamic “Caliphate”.

Brig. Gen. Yehia Rasool, spokesperson for the Joint Operations Command, announced on Friday, achieving “great victory” in Rawa, after the War Media Cell said operations launched on the dawn of Friday for the “liberation of Rawa”.

Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi announced, earlier this month, liberation of Qaim, in west of Anbar, in record time. Troops also freed Ebeidi and Krabla regions in western Anbar.

A government campaign, backed by paramilitary troops and the coalition has been fighting, since October 2016, the militant group, which declared a self-styled “caliphate” from Mosul.

The war against IS has so far displaced at least five million people. Thousands of others fled toward neighboring countries including Syria, Turkey and other European countries, since IS emerged to proclaim its self-styled “caliphate”.

With ISIS on the retreat in parts of northern and eastern Syria, activists and civil society organizations are refocusing their efforts on counter-extremism and establishing deradicalization programs, hoping to erase the militants’ entrenched ideology, like reported by albawaba.com.

“After ISIS was militarily expelled from areas under its control, civil society groups entered into a confrontation with the ideological remnants of the group,” said Aghiad al-Kheder, a member of Sound and Picture Organization, an opposition-run media network that covers developments in Raqqa and Deir Ezzor and is spearheading deradicalization efforts in former ISIS areas.

When ISIS established its so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria, it also began a widespread campaign to disseminate its ideology among the population living under its control. In the course of its three-year rule, these efforts particularly targeted children and adolescents: ISIS established schools, training camps and a new curriculum based on its way of thinking.

A 2016 study by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy which examined ISIS textbooks found that children were being taught how militants identify “unbelievers” and what measures should be taken against them. Even the study of mathematics and chemistry involved an ISIS twist. For example, one textbook included the question: “If the Islamic State has 275,220 heroes in a battle and the unbelievers have 356,230, who has more soldiers?”

ISIS also spread its ideology among the broader population through various publications and media productions. They included weekly newspapers such as al-Naba’a, the al-Bayan Radio, which used to broadcast in ISIS territories, and the notorious Dabiq magazine, which it tailored toward foreign recruits. The militant group’s sermons in mosques also espoused a hardline Salafi-jihadi interpretation of Islam and encouraged violence against non-believers.

So far, the most concerted attempt at countering ISIS’s widespread dissemination of its ideology has taken place in Aleppo’s countryside. Activists and Islamic scholars established the Syrian Counter Extremism Center (SCEC) last month after hundreds of ISIS-affiliated militants and defectors flocked to opposition-held areas in northern Syria, Hussein Nasser, the center’s director, told Syria Deeply.

The organization “seeks to spread awareness and remove extremist ideology from the minds of ISIS members, while trying to promote tolerance in society,” Nasser said.

He said this is achieved through courses and workshops delivered by SCEC staff, which includes a diverse group of experts, such as media professionals, psychologists, and specialists in the field of Sharia, who promote a moderate interpretation of religious teachings.

The SCEC operates both as a Free Syrian Army-run detention facility and a “rehabilitation” center. It is currently “treating” around 100 individuals who in one form or another have been indoctrinated into extremist ideology, Nasser added.

The center has tailored its curriculum and activities for three different kinds of former ISIS recruits: Syrian members who are not fighters and were not accused of violations against civilians, Syrian fighters involved in violence against civilians, and foreign militants, he said.

For each of these categories, there are workshops and seminars in a different part of the center’s headquarters, which has been divided into three lecture halls. Among those receiving “treatment” are defecting ISIS members who surrendered to the FSA, militants who were arrested by the FSA and foreign fighters from the Middle East and Europe.

Nasser, and other members of local initiatives, said they had already run into difficulties, notably a lack of funding and experienced specialists and access to former ISIS areas.

The SCEC is funded “independently,” through donations by activists, the FSA, and other local civil society groups, according to Nasser. It receives no foreign funding.

This financial gap has created significant challenges for the center, primarily the lack of experienced specialists. Lack of funds means the SCEC has to contend with hiring a limited number of specialists and “media professionals.” Nasser adds that more experienced specialists are needed, especially when dealing with hardened ISIS loyalists who have radical extremism ideology “planted in them.”

Limited financial support also meant that the center can only accept a limited number of people, Nasser said.

While SCEC focuses on known affiliates of ISIS, the activist-run Sound and Picture Organization focuses on civilians who lived under its rule and could be susceptible to the ideology.

Al-Kheder said that his group is largely focused on awareness campaigns targeting people who fled militant-held territory toward camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) near Raqqa and Deir Ezzor.

It has carried out one campaign targeting young men and women between the ages of 18-26, and another targeting younger children. During these sessions, activists work on “reminding these people of our social values and … the negative impact of extremism in everyday life,” al-Kheder said.

This is mainly done through workshops and seminars delivered in the camps.

Because its operations are largely ad hoc and sporadic, the Sound and Picture Organization cannot determine their impact, but al-Kheder believes it has been limited – mainly because of who is in charge of liberated areas.

Former ISIS strongholds in northern Syria, such as the city of Raqqa, are now under the control of the United States-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.

The Kurdish-led force refuses the presence of organizations that do not fall under its jurisdiction, al-Kheder said, explaining that it has been challenging to access camps and population centers in areas under SDF control.

International assistance to areas liberated from ISIS mostly goes through the SDF, which leaves groups like his without any form of financial support.

“We are trying our best. But without support, there is little we can do.”

It remains unclear whether foreign governments will fund local deradicalization efforts. But many, including France, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia have already contributed significant financial and logistical support to similar programs within their own countries. Despite these efforts, little is known about their success rate. (In France, some deradicalization centers failed and closed down within a year.)

What is clear, however, is that ISIS and al-Qaida’s broad influence has made extremism a rampant problem that is likely to persist in Syria without concerted counter-extremism efforts extending beyond the current attempts by activists.