Foreign students a concern for Syria

Phil Sands, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: May 18. 2009 11:15PM UAE / May 18. 2009 7:15PM GMT

Baccalaureate students attend an Arabic language class at the Sheikh Ahmed Kuftaro Institute in Damascus. Phil Sands For The National

DAMASCUS // In the months leading up to the arrest of two British citizens in Damascus, accused of terrorist links, the Syrian authorities had placed Islamic schools under increased surveillance amid concerns that some foreign students were involved with militants.

Maryam Kallis and Yasser Ahmed have been held without charge since their detention by Syrian security on March 17. Mrs Kallis, 36, from West London, is a former student of the Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro Institute, a renowned school more commonly known as Abu Noor.
Mr Ahmed, from Surrey, was in his second year of a degree course at Abu Noor when he was separately detained. Both deny any wrongdoing.

Concerns about Islamic students had risen in the aftermath of a suicide bombing in Damascus last September that killed 17 and wounded more than a dozen others, the worst attack suffered by Syria in decades.
One of the men arrested by Syrian anti-terrorist forces, Abdul Baqi Hussein,
confessed to having spent two years studying at an Islamic academy in Damascus. In televised comments he described the Fatah Institute, where he had been schooled, as a magnet for Islamic radicals that drew in Arab and foreign students with “hardline” ideologies.
It was at the institute that his own militancy had been incubated, he said, and the place where he had contacted like-minded colleagues.
A senior official at a different leading Islamic school in the capital, interviewed two months after the blast, revealed that teaching staff were worried about students falling under the sway of extremists.

“The Syrian students are not so much of a worry,” he said on condition of anonymity. “And most of the foreign students live on campus so we know what is happening with them. But one-third of students live off campus and they are much harder to monitor. We don’t know where they go, who they meet, what ideas they are getting. We’d rather they all lived inside the academy.”

The official stressed that the majority of students were peaceful and that the institute taught a moderate brand of Islam with pupils acting as their own early warning system.
But foreign students, especially those living away from the school, pose a more difficult challenge, the official said, because they tend to stick together in cliques. That also made it harder for security agencies to keep watch on them, he said.

The bomb investigation exposed a series of potentially dangerous loopholes in regulations controlling privately run Islamic schools in Syria, such as Abu Noor. The government has since introduced a raft of reforms designed to help them track sources of funding, control the teaching curriculum and better vet foreign students who were getting visas without rigorous security checks.

One of the major proposed reforms, yet to be implemented, would stop all foreign students from going to Abu Noor or any other of the Syrian capital’s 32 private Islamic academies. Instead, they would all have to enrol in a centralised government-run institute.
Little information was given out publicly on the arrests of Mrs Kallis and Mr Ahmed. On May 11 the Syrian Embassy in London issued a statement saying interrogations of the pair suggested they were both working for “a terrorist network related to the al Qa’eda organisation”. Other arrests were made in connection with the case, the statement said.

The affair has been highly controversial, in part because of claims that British security agents were involved in the arrests, possibly tipping off their Syrian counterparts.
In November, David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, met President Bashar Assad and the two are reported to have agreed that Damascus and London would co-operate on antiterrorism investigations.

According to Syria’s London embassy, Mrs Kallis is believed to have received funds from an individual “who resides in the UK” and conveyed them to “a terrorist network related al Qa’eda”. That claim has been interpreted as implying she had been investigated by British secret services.
Fewer details are known about the allegations made against Mr Ahmed, the other detainee.

All allegations against the pair have been rejected by their families. Gareth Peirce, the British solicitor representing them, said: “The families are sure that they are being ill-treated. There could be no possible suggestion that they have been involved with al Qa’eda. This is nonsense and it’s dangerous nonsense. We want to know what part our intelligence services played in this.”

The British Foreign & Commonwealth office refuses to comment on intelligence issues. An FCO official said the British government expected the two detainees, who were being held in a Damascus jail, to be ether charged with a crime or released “as soon as possible”.
Both prisoners had been seen by British consular delegations, the FCO official said, and given care packages sent by their families. Neither showed any signs of physical mistreatment, the official added, although they were under stress.
As part of those consular visits an Urdu-speaking member of the British Embassy staff was sent to talk to one of the prisoners because they had limited English, said an FCO source who asked not to be named.

Masood Kallis, the husband of Maryam Kallis, has accused the British authorities of not doing enough to secure his wife’s release, and said he believed their race and Muslim faith were partly the reason. The FCO said it is going “by-the-book” and following normal diplomatic procedures.
The human rights group Amnesty International has said the prisoners’ safety is at risk because of the Syrian security services record of using torture. The FCO’s own annual human rights report raises similar issues. Citing torture allegations and arbitrary arrests and detentions, it says Syria’s human rights record is a “cause for concern”.

Mr Kallis and his wife moved to Damascus in 2002, where she enrolled for a year’s study at Abu Noor. After the couple separated a year and a half ago, Mr Kallis returned to London with their eldest child. His wife remained with their three youngest children, sharing an apartment with her sister in the Ruken al Deen neighbourhood, not far from Abu Noor. Since the detention, they have had their passports confiscated and remain in Damascus.

The academy is highly popular with foreign students wishing to take theological classes and learn Quranic Arabic. According to Abu Noor’s administrators, it has an annual budget of almost US$5 million (Dh18.4m) and typically has as many as 8,000 students enrolled at any one time, some 300 of whom are non-Arabs from Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia and the former Soviet Union, Pakistan, Algeria, Morocco and the United Kingdom.

psands@thenational.ae