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Riyadh: The last time Ahmad Al Shayea was in the news, he was in the hospital at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, being treated for severe burns from the truck bomb he had driven into the Iraqi capital on Christmas Day 2004.
Today, he says, he has changed his mind about waging jihad, or holy war, and wants other young Muslims to know it.
He wants them to see his disfigured face and fingerless hands, to hear how he was tricked into driving the truck on a fatal mission, to believe his contrition over having put his family through the agony of believing he was dead.
At 22, the new Ahmad Al Shayea is the product of a concerted Saudi government effort to counter the ideology that nurtured the 9/11 hijackers and that has lured Saudis in droves to the Iraq insurgency.
The deprogramming, similar to efforts carried out in Egypt and Yemen, is built on reason, enticements and lengthy talks with psychiatrists, Muslim clerics and sociologists.
Changing perception
Al Shayea says his change of heart began when he was visited by a cleric at Al Ha'ir Prison in Riyadh following his repatriation from Iraq.
He says he put two questions to the cleric: Was the jihad for which he travelled to Iraq religiously sanctioned? And were the edicts inciting such action correct in saying the militants should not inform their parents or government of their intentions? No and no, came the reply.
"I realised that all along, I was wrong," Al Shayea told The Associated Press in a two-hour interview at a Riyadh hotel. "There is no jihad. We are just instruments of death," he said.
Saudi Arabia's campaign against terrorism began in earnest after Al Qaida-linked militants struck three residential expatriate compounds in Riyadh in May 2003, killing 26 people.
The Interior Ministry sponsored programmes on government-run TV stations showing repentant jihadists warning youths against joining Al Qaida and clergymen trying to correct misconceptions about jihad and dealing with non-Muslims. Al Shayea has appeared on Al Majd, a Saudi religious TV channel. Three years ago it set up the prison programme.
"The aim is to reform the youths, to listen to them and talk to them," said Ahmad Jailan, one of the clerics. "We also try to instil a sense of hope in them by telling them they still have the chance to make up for what they lost if they follow true Islam."
Al Shayea said: "My school friend started telling me about Iraq, how Muslims are getting killed there and how we should go there for jihad. ... We didn't think of jihad as something that would lead to our death. It was a fight against occupiers."
Finally, the friend told him he was going to Iraq, and invited Al Shayea to join him.
He was told to shave his beard and pack Western clothes to avoid looking like a would-be jihadist. He got a passport and an airline ticket to Syria.
And he managed to save $1,600 (about Dh5,877) - travel fees, he was told, that would go to smugglers, weapons training and Al Qaida's coffers.
On a cool November night, he donned a black T-shirt and jeans and told his parents he was going camping in the desert with his friends.
He and his friend flew to Syria, a favoured transit point for Iraq-bound fighters because Syria doesn't ask visiting Arabs for visas, and its 360-mile border with Iraq is thinly policed.
A network of Al Qaida operatives sheltered him in Damascus, Aleppo and the border town of Abu Kamal, and about two weeks later he and 23 other men were smuggled into Iraq.
Al Shayea met his "emir", or leader, an Iraqi who told him his first assignment was to take a fuel tanker to a Baghdad neighbourhood to be collected by others.
"I felt scared. I didn't know Baghdad at all, and I also didn't know how to drive heavy vehicles," he said. Also, he says, he was never told that the truck would contain 26 tons of butane gas, rigged to explode outside the Jordanian Embassy.
"I saw the fire and ... I looked around me and I saw everything had melted. My hands had turned black. I jumped from the window and started running."
The world's first encounter with Al Shayea was on footage of his interrogation which was sent to Arab TV stations. Back in Buraida, his parents saw their son, face charred, head heavily bandaged, but alive. They were stunned. They had been notified he was dead.
In mid-2005, Al Shayea was flown home.
On a cool November night, he donned a black T-shirt and jeans and told his parents he was going camping in the desert with his friends. He and his friend flew to Syria.
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