A 23-year-old woman walks through the doors of a white prison building atop a hill in Lebanon, 3 miles east of the capital, Beirut. She tells the guards that she wants to meet with the prisoners.
This is Roumieh Central Prison, notorious in the country for housing those accused of terrorism and of belonging to extremist groups including the Islamic State group and al Qaeda. The woman is Maya Yamout, one of two sisters who set out on a mission to get to the bottom of why violent, extremist tendencies exist in those who exercise them.
She meets a man who looks like he’s in his 40s, his face half melted from a severe burn. He asks her what she is doing there.
“I’m researching people who’ve been accused of terrorism,” she answers, then asks him why he is being held.
“It’s a long story — more than terrorism.”
She laughs and tells him that that was an inconceivable thought.
He stares into her eyes defiantly. “I am a student of Osama bin Laden.”
She tells him she wants to talk some more, and Ahmad — a pseudonym to preserve his anonymity — asks her to return the next day to chat over a coffee. She does, and they sit across from each other at a table, where he serves her coffee. He looks intensely at her, as if daring her to take a sip.
She does, and spits it out immediately.
“Where’s the sugar?” she demands jokingly, and the man laughs.
Fifteen years later, Maya, now 37, recounts this story from her apartment in the United Kingdom, where she is pursuing a doctorate in criminology. Her interaction with Ahmad was her first case in a journey of over a decade spent rehabilitating extremists and pushing for reform in Lebanon’s judicial and prison systems.
Maya and her sister Nancy, 45, made this their mission after a friend of theirs joined an extremist group and was killed while fighting. Over years of research in Roumieh prison, the sisters have talked to about 150 extremists.
“My sister and I were very dedicated to knowing what’s going on. The more we knew their stories, the more we understood,” says Maya.
They found that most of the prisoners were afflicted with the absent-father syndrome, where the father was either not present in their lives or a poor role model, contributing to their decision to adopt a violent lifestyle. This was a major finding in their work, but the sisters also found many “minor issues” that contributed to violent extremism.
“They want to have power, money, financial support, marriage, whatever it is — because in real life, they couldn’t,” says Maya.
The sisters founded Rescue Me Lebanon, an organization that conducts various types of counterviolence programs in prison settings, including psychotherapy. They work mostly on rehabilitating those charged with terrorism and help impede their return to extremist groups, using techniques such as cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy and aggression replacement training.
Gaining a foothold and sparking conversations with the prisoners, particularly the more doctrinaire among them, was often difficult, but Nancy and Maya say that sometimes small touches would help. They always veiled themselves during their work, for example, explaining to prisoners that they did not usually wear the hijab, but that they were keen to respect their environment. Nancy says that law enforcement officials would sometimes ask the sisters how they were getting the extremists to speak to them when they had had no luck.
Maya’s first interaction with an extremist showed how the sisters encouraged these men to confide in them. She recalls that, as she sipped the coffee Ahmad had poured her, his first remark was, “I thought you didn’t trust us.” The sisters explain that building trust was a key component of their research. They used defense mechanism questionnaires and conducted psychosocial interviews, which allowed them to understand the prisoners as human beings, without asking about their politics. Eventually, they would talk about why they joined extremist groups.
“[Authorities] interrogate, we interview. The language is different in the same setting,” explains Nancy. “The first thing I’d ask an inmate was, ‘How was your day? How are you?’”
She described working with one man in his 20s, Yousef — whose name has also been changed to preserve his anonymity — who said “he loved killing and the smell of blood.” He was convicted for killing eight people but admitted to Nancy that the true number was higher. Later, he expressed incredulity at the notion that he had confided in her.
“He’s narcissistic and has a God complex. You can see that he’s empty inside and has nothing to offer except his aggression,” she explains.
The sisters’ research categorizes extremists into four categories — psychopaths, ethnogeographic political, ethnogeographic religious and retributional. The categories sometimes overlap or explain extremist behavior at different stages of the inmates’ careers. In the second and third categories, extremism is a product of the political and religious context that an individual is associated with. In the retributional category, extremism is a way for individuals to achieve justice that they believe they’ve been denied. In the case of psychopaths, they have a predisposed tendency to adopt violent ways.
Though the sisters’ work can seem emotionally draining, they were disciplined about keeping a check on their own mental well-being, compartmentalizing their work and personal lives. The sisters started going to individual therapy about a year before beginning their research project.
“Whatever you do, you are not 100% objective, so I want to be as objective as possible,” says Nancy. “The more therapy I do on myself, the more objective I become.”
The sisters emphasize that every case is unique and that they adopt a variety of approaches in their attempts to rehabilitate. Nancy recounts how she and Maya had to run their idea for expressive therapy in the prison by a group of religious leaders to convince them that what they were proposing was in accordance with Sharia. After being approved, they brought in supplies to create collage art, aiming to help prisoners “express their anger and repressed emotions.”
“We’d sometimes bring them half a picture to see how they’d complete it.” The prisoners “enjoyed and loved” these sessions, she says.
These sessions sometimes aligned with prisoners’ preexisting interests. Nancy describes a former extremist, an ardent artist, whom Maya talked to in an individual session. When he expressed disillusionment with life, she connected with his wife and asked her for pictures of his children to channel his emotions. After a while, he was released and found work drawing murals for villas. Following Lebanon’s economic crisis, there was a fall in demand for his services, which led him to take up another kind of art: baking.
“He opened a bakery and loves cooking,” says Nancy. “He’s really good at it.”
The case of Taha is another “success story.” He was a boxer, and after his release, people initially didn’t want to engage with him. He went to a gym and expressed interest in boxing, telling the owner that he had no money to pay. The owner offered to let him train in the gym as long as he offered cleaning services to the boxing gym.
“He trained and trained and trained and cleaned the gym. After six months, he went to a tournament and won first place,” says Nancy, a glimmer of pride in her voice.
Expert opinions on the efficacy of prisoner rehabilitation vary. Maya says that, based on her case studies, psychopaths — who comprise about 15% of those they’ve interviewed — are harder to rehabilitate, as they refuse to believe that there is anything wrong with them.
“Their brains are so formed,” she says. “Their identity of power and violence will always be present in their actions.”
Roumieh has consistently been part of international discourse on prison and human rights conditions, including issues of overcrowding. According to a 2023 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, 80% of Lebanon’s prison population was in pretrial detention.
“There’s a huge issue that has to do with overcrowding of prisons,” says Ramzi Kaiss, a Lebanon researcher at HRW. “The number of people in jail or in prisons across Lebanon severely exceeds the capacity of those prisons, which, as a result, is creating very harsh conditions for those people in prisons.”
Ghida Frangieh, a lawyer and researcher at the nonprofit research organization Legal Agenda, explains that, when it comes to people who’ve been charged with terrorism, Lebanese law allows for pretrial detention indefinitely.
“It’s problematic because judicial procedures are often slow, and people may end up in pretrial detention for long periods of time without being released on bail,” she says.
A combination of imprisoning individuals without trial and the atmosphere in Roumieh often exacerbates the very phenomenon that the sisters are trying to mitigate with their work. Even when people are falsely accused of terrorism, there is a real risk that they emerge from prison radicalized.
“When you go to Roumieh, you aren’t backed by anyone. The environment is like small mafias — ISIS, Nusra [Front], al Qaeda,” explains Nancy.
“You need to be in one of the groups so that you’re protected and given food and everything else.”
Frangieh also says that, with people being held in those conditions, left to fend for themselves, it “leaves them feeling betrayed and often creates a sense of anger towards the state.”
“Our prisons are spaces of exclusion, of punishment, and not spaces of rehabilitation for the benefit of prisoners and society,” she says.
In Lebanon, prisons come under the jurisdiction of the Internal Security Forces. Frangieh believes that responsibility for prisons should be transferred to the Ministry of Justice, in accordance with Lebanese law.
“There is little analysis and research about what are the best methods to manage prisons today, how best to ensure the balance between protecting society from dangerous individuals while respecting their dignity, development and appropriate living conditions,” she explains.
“Prison management is a science. We don’t have that expertise today in our administration.”
Maya emphasizes the importance of social policy and reforms in legal processes. She believes that prisoners should be evaluated thoroughly by mental health professionals to determine whether they can be successfully rehabilitated and reintegrated into society, and that these evaluations should be a core component of their trials in court. The sisters believe that when individuals are not fit for rehabilitation, they should remain in prison.
“We need to identify who deserves a second chance,” Maya says. “We even need mental health professionals in courts to testify.”
“Their cases shouldn’t be treated like [regular] cases, as every case is unique.”
The sisters formulated a law that mandated a year of evaluation and rehabilitation for prisoners before their release, involving a psychiatrist, social worker and a warden studying the person’s file and working with them regularly. The law was stuck in parliament for over two years, in part due to the political vacuum when the country didn’t have a president. However, with the 2025 election of Joseph Aoun as Lebanon’s president, Nancy and Maya are optimistic about the potential for reform.
“We need to make this law work because it reaches all Lebanese,” Nancy says. “Everybody will benefit from it.”
The sisters envision released prisoners having a support system of nongovernmental organizations that can provide them with legal, mental health and other kinds of support. At this time, Rescue Me Lebanon provides aftercare programs to former prisoners but not to the extent that it hopes to, due to a limited budget and difficulties reaching potential beneficiaries. Many of the released prisoners are based in Lebanon’s northern city of Tripoli, where the organization does not currently provide services. At the same time, many former prisoners are deterred by the idea of traveling to Beirut due to the presence of military checkpoints, where they may be taken aside and questioned again.
“I cannot do it alone as an NGO, I need a bigger network,” says Nancy. “I want this law to go all over.”
She narrates the story of a man Maya worked with. After seven years of being held in Roumieh, he was ruled innocent but was unable to reconcile with his family and fiancee. The feeling of abandonment radicalized him; he joined the extremist group Fatah al-Islam and died as a suicide bomber.
“Maya tried to encourage him to talk to her, and he said, ‘If I talk to you, I will change my mind, and I don’t want to,’” Nancy says. “If our law was in place, he couldn’t have gone out of prison without talking to me, Maya or any other social worker.”
The phenomenon of prison radicalization is due, in large part, to the rampancy of pretrial detentions. A March 2025 study by Legal Agenda, co-authored by Frangieh, states that, as of mid-2024, “the percentage of pre-trial detainees in prisons and in the courts’ detention facilities managed by the Internal Security Forces (ISF) reached 65% of the total number of detainees.”
“There have been several cases where individuals are held in pretrial detention for months, more than a year, even,” says Kaiss. “By the time their ruling comes, either the judgment is that they’re innocent, or they’re provided a sentence that is, in fact, shorter than the period that they sat in prison for,” he adds. “That’s how long the pretrial detention is.”
Even though Maya and Nancy have faced obstacles in their work on personal and professional levels, they say there’s nothing else they’d rather do. Maya says she believes it is her “message in life.”
Nancy expresses similar sentiments.
Her job is “never boring,” she says. “I have loved stories since I was young.”
She references Shahrazad, the character from “1,001 Nights” who narrates stories to Shahriyar, her husband, every night for nearly three years in a bid to save herself from a vengeful oath he has taken to execute a new bride every morning.
“To me, I am Shahriyar and I’m listening to Shahrazad. I have different Shahrazads every day.”
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