How I was de-radicalised...

It's become known as the Aarhus Model, a programme designed in Denmark's second city to dissuade young people from going to fight for al-Qaeda or Islamic State. Thirty travelled to Syria in 2013 but only two so far this year - and only one in 2014. Ahmed is one young man who was convinced, a few years ago, to draw back from the first step on a path that could have ended in jihad.We meet in a large, loud, busy Turkish restaurant on the edge of the city, but we don't stay long.

There are two of them - we'll call them Ahmed and Mahmoud - and what we have to talk about demands a measure of privacy. Mahmoud drives us to a large hotel, where we sit down in a quiet room. Ahmed is 25, he says, born in Somalia, although he's lived in Denmark since he was six.Ahmed then tells his story, describing an unexceptional childhood - he was a "normal kid" growing up in the Aarhus suburbs, who liked playing football, doing well in school, learning Danish fast. "Everything was good for me at that time," he says. Then, when he was in his teens, his father announced that he was taking him on the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. They call me a terrorist? I will give them a terrorist if they want that. "It was important for my father to get me more religious," he says. "I didn't know much about my religion. It was like I had left it in Somalia. But my father said, you are a Muslim, you have a Muslim name. You have to know your history, your background and your religion." So the family went to Mecca and Ahmed remembered returning to Denmark with a sense of relief. "When we came back I was happy and I was a new person with a religious identity. I saw the world differently. I saw that it was important for a person to have a connection with his god, I saw that there was an afterlife." But Ahmed's new faith got him into trouble at school. He abandoned jeans and T-shirts and took to wearing traditional Islamic dress. He became defensive and argumentative when the subject of religion came up. He acknowledges today that he could have handled things better, but at the time, he said, he responded aggressively because he felt he had a duty to defend his religion when he was being baited by his Danish classmates. "They would say things like, 'You stone your women, you lash people who speak freely,' and I felt I had to defend my religion, but I didn't know how to debate properly and it went out not correctly." Ahmed was shortly to discover exactly how "not correctly" it had come out. He was out one evening when his father rang. "Where are you?" he demanded. "What have you done?" His father said the police had just knocked on the door and were looking for him."When I got home, he was shocked and angry. He told me that I had to go straight to the police station the following morning, and ask them what they wanted." So Ahmed went to see the police and was amazed to discover that he'd been turned in by the principal of the school.

Culled from BBC.