The Media Line Rescue Me: A Conversation with the Yamout Sisters re Prison Rehabilitation

Join Anne Speckhard and Nancy and Maya Yamout to talk about their work in Lebanese prisons countering terrorism and violent extremism.

ICSVE Panel Discussion featuring:

Maya Yamout, Rescue Me
Nancy Yamout, Rescue Me
Anne Speckhard, Director ICSVE

11:00 AM EST

December 2nd, 2020

Join via Zoom Meetings

For ten years, Lebanese sisters Nancy and Maya Yamout have in-depth interviewed hundreds of male and female militant jihadi terrorists and victims of terrorism in Lebanon, studying the social factors that contribute to violent jihadist extremism. Driven by personal experiences and intellectual curiosity, the Yamout sisters gained access to Beirut’s Roumieh prison, where they built trust and rapport among convicted terrorists. Using their empathetic approach, the Yamout sisters founded Rescue Me, an NGO which provides rehabilitation to incarcerated offenders and support to newly released terrorist offenders and works to counter radicalization in neighborhoods the sisters have found to be especially vulnerable.

At ICSVE’s eleventh Zoom event, ICSVE director Dr. Anne Speckhard will facilitate a discussion between Nancy and Maya Yamout regarding their important prison rehabilitation work and how it can be applied to efforts to prevent and counter violent extremism, as well as to rehabilitate and reintegrate terrorism offenders, in Lebanon and perhaps internationally.

Nancy Yamout is the President and Maya Yamout is the Co-Founder and Vice President of Rescue Me, an NGO focused on crime and violence prevention plus trauma rehabilitation. Nancy Yamout and her sister Maya also conduct forensic social field research related to terrorists and victims of terrorism. Over the past 10 years, they have interviewed hundreds of cases of men and women inside and outside Roumieh prison in Beirut, Lebanon. Many of the cases relate to terrorism and violent crimes and involve efforts at rehabilitation and reintegration upon release. The NGO develops a behavioral analysis profile of these individuals and the information is then integrated into psycho-social programming with youth when funding becomes available.

Dr. Anne Speckhard is Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) and serves as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown University School of Medicine. She has interviewed over 700 terrorists, their family members and supporters in various parts of the world including in Western Europe, the Balkans, Central Asia, the Former Soviet Union and the Middle East. In the past five years, she has interviewed 257 ISIS defectors, returnees and prisoners as well as 16 al Shabaab cadres and their family members (n=25) as well as ideologues (n=2), studying their trajectories into and out of terrorism, their experiences inside ISIS (and al Shabaab), as well as developing the Breaking the ISIS Brand Counter Narrative Project materials from these interviews which include over 200 short counter-narrative videos of terrorists denouncing their groups as un-Islamic, corrupt and brutal which have been used in over 150 Facebook and Instagram campaigns globally. She has also been training key stakeholders in law enforcement, intelligence, educators, and other countering violent extremism professionals, both locally and internationally, on the psychology of terrorism, the use of counter-narrative messaging materials produced by ICSVE as well as studying the use of children as violent actors by groups such as ISIS. Dr. Speckhard has given consultations and police trainings to U.S., German, UK, Dutch, Austrian, Swiss, Belgian, Danish, Iraqi, Jordanian and Thai national police and security officials, among others, as well as trainings to elite hostage negotiation teams. She also consults to foreign governments on issues of terrorist prevention and interventions and repatriation and rehabilitation of ISIS foreign fighters, wives and children. In 2007, she was responsible for designing the psychological and Islamic challenge aspects of the Detainee Rehabilitation Program in Iraq to be applied to 20,000 + detainees and 800 juveniles. Her publications are found here: https://georgetown.academia.edu/AnneSpeckhardWebsite: and on the ICSVE website http://www.icsve.org Follow @AnneSpeckhard

This is the eleventh discussion in this series of panels discussing ISIS Foreign Fighters and terrorist rehabilitation. The first panel, “Issues of ISIS Prisoners & Repatriations in a Time of COVID,” can be reviewed here. The second panel, “Can an ISIS Terrorist be Rehabilitated and Reintegrated into Society?” featuring Redouan Safdi and Moussa Al-Hassan Diaw, can be reviewed here and the report that was inspired by this panel can be found here. The third panel, “Can We Repatriate the ISIS Children?” can be reviewed here and the report that was inspired by this panel can be found here. The fourth panel, “Terrorist Rehabilitation in the Dutch Prison System,” can be reviewed here. The fifth panel, “Into and Back Out of ISIS: An ISIS Defector Speaks Out,” can be reviewed here. The sixth panel, “Fighting ISIS Online: An Introduction to Breaking the ISIS Brand,” can be viewed here. The seventh panel, “Talking Terrorist Propaganda with a Pro,” can be viewed here. The eighth panel, “Terrorism Prevention, Intervention, and Rehabilitation with Juveniles,” can be viewed here. The ninth panel, “Community-Focused Interventions Against Terrorism,” can be viewed here. The tenth panel, “Are We Losing a Valuable Feminist Project in the Middle East?” can be viewed here.

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