Montasser AlDe'emeh

Montasser AlDe'emeh (Arabic: منتصر يوسف علي الدعمي, romanized: Muntaṣir Yūsuf ʿAlī al-Diʿmī; Jordan, April 8, 1989) is a Belgian academic. At KU Leuven and Ghent University, he is conducting research into Islamic State-affiliated groups and foreign fighters in the Syrian Civil War and War in Iraq.

Biography
Montasser’s parents were both born in Mandatory Palestine. In 1948, his family fled from Sabbarin, a village in the subdistrict of Haifa that was depopulated during the Nakba.

The family ended up in the Nur Shams and Far'a refugee camps, in the northern part of the West Bank. During the Six-Day War in 1967, his family fled to Jordan. In 1991, two-year-old Montasser, arrived in Molenbeek-Saint-Jean.

Education
In 2011, Montasser graduated cum laude from the KU Leuven with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Language and Area Studies: Arabic and Islamic Studies. In 2012, Montasser obtained a master’s degree in Language and Area studies: Arabic and Islamic Studies (Magna cum laude) from the same university. During the academic year 2019/20, he continued his studies and research in the United Kingdom, where he obtained a postgraduate diploma with distinction from SOAS University of London.

Anti-Radicalisation
Immediately following the 2016 Brussels attacks, Montasser started to work with Scholengroep Brussel (2016-2022), schools organised by the Flemish Community in Brussels, as the head of deradicalisation, a job that he also performed for VCLB Pieter Breughel for three school years and for GO! CLB Brussel during one year.

Fieldwork-based research
During his doctoral study, he went to Syria to interview fighters from the Al-Nusra Front. In Syria, he got arrested, and interrogated by Al-Nusra. AlDe’emeh tries to help young people turn away from radical ideology. AlDe'emeh tried to stop Abdelmalek Boutalliss, a young ISIS fighter, from blowing himself up in Iraq. In 2017, he embedded further field research in Kirkuk, Iraq; here he followed the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan Peshmerga fighters led by the Kurdish general Wasta Rasul, during their battles with ISIS at the frontline. In 2019, he visited the Gweran Prison in Al-Hasakah, where he interviewed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant prisoners.

Views
AlDe’emeh believes that exposure to a more sophisticated study of Islam can help some of those recruited by armed groups rethink their fanatical views. He believes there are two profiles of jihadists: the naive idealists and the more violent extremists prepared to strike in their homeland. In January 2024, AlDe'emeh stated that Islamic State cells are still active in Syria and Iraq. However, he pointed out that the group has many local enemies. In Syria, these include Shia militias, the Lebanese Hezbollah, Tahrir al-Sham, Syrian rebel groups supported by Turkey, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), Sunni Arab tribes, Assad’s forces and militias affiliated with them, in addition to the international coalition, Arab countries such as United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, as well as Russia.

Works
His 2015 co-written highly-acclaimed book ''De Jihadkaravaan. Reis naar de wortels van de haat (The Jihad Caravan. A Journey to the Roots of Hatred''), was nominated for the Brusseprijs 2016 (award for the best journalistic book in Dutch). The book includes AlDe’emeh’s interviews with jihadists in Syria.