“They called me all sorts of names, like ninja, garbage bag or scarecrow,” said Rejan, who did not want to be photographed or have her real name made public.

Now 27, she has since returned to Bosnia and Herzegovina from territory in Syria controlled by the so-called Islamic State, and agreed to tell BIRN via WhatsApp about her journey to the Middle Eastern conflict zone, the time she spent there and her subsequent return.

Rejan said she “covered herself up” for the first time at the age of 14, when she was told to wear the hijab at the madrassa (Islamic school) that she was attending at the time. But she stopped doing so a year later, she explained.

“I switched schools because they teach you something at the madrassa but hardly anyone abides by those rules. We all know that music is considered haram [forbidden] in Islam, but when walking down the madrassa’s corridors, one could hear all the types of music the girls listened to,” she said.

Rejan started wearing the hijab again in 2012, and then the niqab. She said that very few members of her family supported her, while her friends and everyone around her condemned her decision. Although she felt lonely and rejected, and even experienced insults, she still thinks that she made the right choice.

On a friend’s recommendation, Rejan met the man who would become her husband, and they got married in 2012. She said she got both love and support from him, and they left for Syria the following year.

In Syria, she thought she would finally be able to devote herself to her faith, and to help suffering women and children in the war-ravaged country.

“For some time I worked at a local hospital for women and children. I saw dead and injured people. They died in my arms,” she recalled.

While in Syria, she was exposed to shelling and was injured, while her husband was killed while attempting to get out of the country.

“Since then I have been struggling alone, with faith in a better future, knowing that all that has happened to me comes from Allah,” she said.

“Just like many other people, my husband did not go there to be a terrorist; we went for different reasons. Our idea to go there came even before the so-called Islamic State,” she continued.

“If helping women and children makes you a terrorist, then we are all terrorists. I would tell people who call me a terrorist: ‘If [Skopje-born Catholic nun Mother] Theresa had the right to follow her faith and go as far as India, why don’t we?’ We all have the right to choose.”

She returned from Syria via Turkey earlier this year, and said she was anxious about coming back to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“I returned mainly to take a rest from everything, because of my family. My return looks just like I imagined it – the same old story. I still see a lot of prejudice, given that I live in a small community,” she said, adding that she is now trying to finish high school and reintegrate into Bosnian society.

While Rejan was sitting with BIRN’s journalists, a woman spoke to her rudely, saying: “You in black, don’t hang around next to me.” Rejan said this was just one of the examples of discrimination she faces every day, but that she is trying not to pay too much attention to such comments.

Rejan is not the only person who left Bosnia for the Syrian conflict zone during their school years or right after they finished school, or whose intentions to do so went undetected by the country’s institutions.

Over the past two years, BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina has published a series of investigations into extremist influences on young people, covering topics like the Salafi lecturers advocating ideas that contravene democracy and human rights, and the neo-Nazi groups that operate openly in the cities of Prijedor, Mostar, Sarajevo and Tuzla.

Despite the fact that a number of these groups target minors, responsibility for identifying behaviour in the educational system that may be linked to radicalism is usually left to teachers and lecturers to assess on their own.

Teachers play key role

Jelena Brkic-Smigoc Photo: BIRN BiH

According to psychologist Jelena Brkic-Smigoc, puberty and adolescence, when children are seeking to create their own identities, are risky periods, but good teachers can play an important role in helping them.

“Within our teaching curriculum, we have certain school subjects that serve the purpose of monitoring asocial behaviour. Through the homeroom teaching concept [which assigns a teacher to oversee pupils throughout the school year], we also have the opportunity to act,” Brkic-Smigoc said.

“When it comes to individuals, I would say that school teachers and psychologists are of key importance if risks emerge. I would not rule out all the other teachers either, because we do not only educate, but we also raise children,” she added.

The importance of working with schoolchildren to help them reject extremist influences is well-established, said Julie Coleman of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague.

“I think that in the countries that we see, whether it’s Mali or the Sahel region or the Balkans or here in the EU and the Netherlands, young people often are just more vulnerable to radicalisation because they are at a different stage in life,” said Coleman.

“But there are also often risk factors like feeling marginalised from society, not really feeling that you are contributing member of society,” she added.

Esmir Salihovic, a school teacher from Sarajevo, argued that schools must prioritise the fight against radicalisation. At the moment, schools are not implementing any programme for the prevention of radicalisation, he said, but it can be spotted in several ways, for instance by observing if a child becomes asocial and expresses problematic ideas, or by reading the child’s essays.

“Schools cannot do it on their own. They must have partners in that fight, a team working for the benefit of children. When I say partners, I mean parents, social work centres, non-governmental and healthcare organisations and police,” Salihovic said.

The Sarajevo Canton Social Work Centre said it has had a few cases recently in which schools have reported radicalisation issues.

“One or two cases in which we had the suspected radicalisation of some children, which were reported by schools, demonstrate that schools are ready to work on prevention seriously within the framework of their competencies,” said Mirsada Poturkovic of the Sarajevo Canton Social Work Centre.

However, she added that schools and social work centres have a huge problem with the lack of resources and expertise.

Five years ago in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a programme for the prevention of unacceptable behaviour in school-age children was created. Elmedin Muratbegovic, a professor of criminology at the University in Sarajevo, was involved in drawing up the programme. Muratbegovic explained that a referral mechanism for when signs of radicalisation are spotted was set up too.

“The referral system would more or less start with a teacher noticing such behaviour and reporting it to a homeroom teacher, who is the first person to talk to the child’s parents,” he explained.

“If it is in the best interests of the child, to help the child in the most appropriate way, a teacher is called, who informs the parents about what has been observed and tries to work with the schoolchild. If the parents object, the teacher seeks advice,” he added.

The pilot project has been partially implemented over the past five years in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Federation entity, in the Sarajevo Canton in particular, but due to a lack of resources, it has never been integrated into the school system across the entire country, BIRN Bosnia and Herzegovina has been told.

Insufficient training and human resources

Esmir Salihovic. Photo: BIRN BiH

Experts believe that schools can handle these issues, but they also say that they lack the necessary resources and that practical training courses are needed.

“In terms of the fight against radicalism, we need a working group to design a couple of handbooks and practical training courses for all age groups, starting from pre-school to high school levels. Through homeroom meetings – perhaps by holding two homeroom classes per week – we could discuss this issue through workshops,” Salihovic said.

According to Brkic-Smigoc, the fight against radicalisation and extremism requires courageous teachers, lecturers and psychologists, particularly in communities in which the existence of such phenomena has still not been recognised.

“Both the schools and our social work centres face a series of problems, including problems related to human resources, among other things. Human resources, training and support for schools would definitely be important for prevention, but also for the detection of radicalisation and involving other organsations in preventing it,” Poturkovic said.

“None of my colleagues at social work centres, I mean those in the Sarajevo Canton, has been prepared to deal with this phenomenon. In Sarajevo, we have social workers in educational institutions and we cooperate with them, of course, and it seems, at least as far as I know, that it’s not only our colleagues in the schools but also teachers and psychologists who are insufficiently trained,” she said.

Experts say that cooperation between all the relevant institutions in a unified system to protect minors is of key importance if there is to be a successful fight against extremism. However, some institutions often fail to take into account the age of people who are prosecuted for involvement in extremist activity.

Branko Peric, a judge at the Bosnian state court, mentioned the example of the verdict in the case against a man called Amir Haskic. The state court sentenced Haskic to one-and-a-half years in prison for planning to go to Syria, despite the fact that he changed his mind and gave up on the idea of going to join Islamic State.

Peric explained that Haskic was a young man who had just turned 21 when the incident happened and had just started a family, and that he was “expecting society to accept his deradicalisation as something good and useful for the society” – but the court came to a different conclusion.

“This is a good example of how a court can become a social risk factor, not thinking about the repercussions of its decisions. The court acted as if it was functioning outside society and social currents. The punitive goal of the verdict and its influence on others and general prevention could and would have been far better if it wasn’t a conviction,” Peric said.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Federation entity, an action plan for preventing and countering terrorism exists, but it was only adopted last year – five years after it should have been. Among other things, it specifies activities that should be implemented in elementary and high schools.

Miroslav Juresic, the Federation’s assistant minister for labour and social protection, said that according to the action plan, the educational system is of key importance when it comes to prevention.

But Juresic pointed out that on the state level, the national strategy for preventing and countering terrorism is about to expire, and a new one has still not yet been adopted.

“The issue of terrorism will not last only for as long as the strategy lasts. The problems associated with it cannot be linked to some official document like that,” he warned.

“We thought it was good to adopt an entity action plan, irrespective of the existence or non-existence of a state-level strategy, so the system could continue functioning,” he added.

A lack of focus on developing critical thinking among children is a particularly deficiency of the current educational system, experts believe.

“Through its curriculums, the educational system should offer critical thinking and nurture it as something that does not exist in radical groups where an opinion is either black or white,” said Brkic-Smigoc.

Returnees from Syria pose new problems

Mirsada Poturkovic. Photo: BIRN BiH

There are still around 100 women and children in Syria awaiting their return to Bosnia, living in camps that were set up after the fall of Islamic State.

When they return, a large number of children who have spent years in the conflict zone will enter the educational system in Bosnia. Experts argue that this shows how important it is to develop mechanisms for working with them.

“We have some experiences in working with families returning from foreign battlefronts and those experiences have been rather positive so far, but only due to the fact that the Social Work Centre has really mobilised staff members involved in working with those families,” Poturkovic said.

“We don’t have a large number of such families. I think that because of this additional or, let’s say, personal engagement by staff members at our social work centres, we manage to handle those problems. I must say that if we will be facing a larger number of families and with serious needs, I am not sure that the centre could satisfy even the minimum needs of those families,” she added.

Although the Federation entity’s action plan was adopted several months ago, Poturkovic said all the institutions involved in counter-radicalisation have still not been integrated yet.

Meanwhile, according to reports from international organisations, the living conditions in the camps in Syria are becoming increasingly dire for the women and children who are living in them.

Among the women in the camps who is waiting to be sent back to Bosnia and Herzegovina is Elma, who answered BIRN’s questions via WhatsApp. She said that she went to Syria after she watched videos about Islamic State and thought that it was the place of her dreams, after she had experienced discrimination for wearing the niqab in the European country where she was living at the time.

Elma explained that life in the camps is not safe for the women and children who are still living there, and after spending years in the conflict zone, she wants to return.

“I want to go back to my parents,” she said.