Six months after 9/11, the firefighter was back. “Jihad Rehab”Meg Smaker, filmmaker, left her job in the Bay Area as a firefighter to go to the Middle East to understand better the world she lived.
After making a pitstop in Afghanistan Smaker made a move to Yemen to learn Arabic and Islam. He was offered a job at a firefighting academy.
“So I was a head fire instructor, teaching Yemeni men to fight fire in Yemen, which is where I was when I first heard about the rehab center, when I was living in Yemen and teaching a firefighting like course,” Smaker tells Sharon Waxman at The Wrap’s Sundance Studio. “I overheard some guys talk about this rehab center, and that was back in 2007.”
The Mohammed bin Nayef Counseling and Care Center, based in Riyadh Saudi Arabia, is the rehab center. Over 3000 terrorists or extremists have been treated at the center since 2007, with the aim of helping former jihadists return to Saudi culture.
The majority of the documentary is at the center. They have arrived in Saudi Arabia through an American-Saudi arms deal, which saw the Saudi government accept to take them. They came to the conclusion that other men like them could be reformated. The program taught them how to manage finances, court women, deal with people who are different from them, and how to engage without resorting to violence.
Smaker was fascinated with the story of this rehab center. “It was just really interesting that, that this place even existed back then,”She spoke.
Accessing the facility was difficult for a year. “I think because of my time in Yemen, one thing I realized living there is the way to get something done is usually not to go through official channels, it’s through back-channeling,”Smaker was added. “Through building relationships, through kind of understanding who’s in charge of what, and to have a relationship with those people.”
Smaker encountered many hurdles during the year she tried to gain access to the rehabilitation center. While she could not give any details, she stated that her persistence paid off.
“The way that a lot of these government’s work is they’ll never tell you ‘no’ but they’ll just put up all these hurdles in front of you that make it like after a while, you just kind of give up and and it was like that for a year and then it got to the point where the the person that I was talking kind of acquiesced,”Smaker explained.
She was finally granted access, but she had to convince the men that they would be filmed the day she met them. At the center, she encountered resistance from former Al-Qeada soldiers and ISIS soldiers. However, Smaker’s time in Yemen would finally pay off.
“But then what did happen is serendipitously that was the first time that Saudi Arabia accepted the first batch of non-Saudi nationals through this rehab program, and those were the next people that I’ve met with, and they happen to be from Yemen,”Smaker was added. “And so when I started speaking, their heads popped up, and they’re just like, why do you speak their mother tongue and I told them I used to live there for almost five years.”
Smaker built a relationship with the Yemenis and was able to find the subjects of her documentary. She stated, “I wound up interviewing about 150 to 200 of these guys and then follow this small group of them for three years.”
You can watch more of Smaker’s interview in the embed below.
“Jihad Rehab”The film will make its world premiere at 2022 Sundance Film Festival as part the US Documentary competition.
’s Sundance Studio is presented by NFP and National Geographic Documentary Films.