RAN in the WBs Study Visit - Management of Returnee Foreign Terrorist Fighters and their Family Members, Berlin 28-29 April 2022

The process of managing the return and rehabilitation of foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs) and their family members returning from (formerly) Daesh-affiliated territories in Syria and Iraq concerns a variety of different actors. It is clear that setting up structures and processes to facilitate multi-professional exchange and multi-stakeholder cooperation with regard to specific cases is crucial to allow for concerted action when it comes to managing individual cases, particularly when children are involved. This means that stakeholders, including security actors, law enforcement, social and youth services, (mental) health services, prison and probation staff, civil society organisations and providers of deradicalisation programmes as well as representatives from education and employment support, with oftentimes divergent perspectives and different levels of information, must work together in a trustful cooperation framework.

This paper captures the main insights from a study visit to Berlin, where expert participants from the Western Balkans (WBs) entered into exchange with their Berlin counterparts and with each other. During the meeting, participants discussed the prerequisites for the successful management of FTFs and their family members in a multi-agency setting and drew lessons based on comparative analyses of the Berlin approach and the different WB experiences.

Some overarching conclusions and lessons learned are:

• Most WB countries have already established functioning cooperation models and significant experience within these settings. However, the integration of civil society actors into these models remains scarce.
• Familiarity between all institutional points of contacts in a cooperation model is key to enable effective cooperation. However, to date, staff and responsibilities tend to change often, creating difficulties and additional need for lengthy trust-building processes.
• Apart from the management of FTFs returning from Syria and Iraq, there is a growing concern about the departure, return and low level of prosecution of returnees from Ukraine with a violent rightwing extremism (VRWE) background. A transfer of experiences from the work with Islamist extremist returnees to the right-wing extremist context is necessary.