Syria: A woman, who had left her Alabama home at the age of 20 to join terror outfit ISIS and even gave birth to child with a terrorist, said in an interview given to news platform TNM that she wished to return home.
She is also willing to serve jail-term and speak out against the jihadi Islamists.
Hoda Muthana said she was duped into joining the organisation in 2014 by web traffickers in a rare interview from the Roj prison camp in Syria, where she is being held by US-allied Kurdish forces.
She said she regretted everything except her son, who is now in preschool.
What did she say?
The 28-year-old narrated her ordeal, recently in an interview with The News Movement, a US-based media house.
“I won’t resist. I’ll serve my sentence out if I have to sit in jail for it. I’m hoping my government sees me as a young, impressionable person at the time,” she said in the interview.
Reportedly, she has talked about her ‘change of heart’ in numerous interviews ever since she fled one of the terrorist group’s last strongholds in Syria in the early months of 2019.
However, four years prior to this she had enthusiastically supported the radicals at the height of their influence, via social media posts and interviews with renowned international news channels.
The Islamic caliphate that ISIS then claimed to control covered around a third of both Syria and Iraq.
She encouraged Americans to join the group and carry out attacks in the US in messages made from her Twitter account in 2015. She suggested drive-by shootings or car rammings that targeted crowds celebrating national holidays.
Muthana now claims that her phone was stolen and that the tweets came from ISIS supporters in a recent interview.
Who is Hoda Muthana?
As per reports, Muthana, who was born to Yemeni immigrants in New Jersey, once held a US passport. She was raised in Hoover, Alabama, a small town outside of Birmingham, in a traditional Muslim family.
She travelled to Turkey and crossed into Syria in 2014 while pretending to be going on a school trip to her family.
The journey was paid for by tuition checks that she had covertly cashed.
Later, her citizenship was revoked by the Obama administration in 2016, claiming that her father had been a recognised Yemeni diplomat at the time of her birth. This was a rare instance of revoking somebody’s birthright citizenship.
That action has been contested by her attorneys, who contend that the father’s diplomatic credentials expired before she was born.
Even as it pushed European partners to repatriate their own jailed nationals to ease pressure on the detention camps, the Trump administration insisted she wasn’t a citizen and blocked her from returning.
On the issue of Muthana’s citizenship, US courts have sided with the government, and in January of last year, the Supreme Court declined to hear her re-entry lawsuit.
That has left her and her son languishing in a detention camp in northern Syria housing thousands of widows of ISIS fighters and their children.
What happened in the ISIS camps?
Muthana currently presents herself as a victim of ISIS.
She said in her recent interview that after landing in Syria in 2014, she was imprisoned in a guest house designated for single women and kids.
She stated, “There were like 100 ladies and twice as many kids running around, making too much noise, and the beds were filthy. I’ve never seen that sort of filthiness in my life.
The only way out was to wed a combatant. She finally got married and had three remarriages. Her son’s father was one of her first two husbands, and both were killed in combat.
According to reports, she ended her third marriage.
The extremist group, which is also known as ISIS, no longer controls any territory in Syria or Iraq but continuesto carry out sporadic attacks and has supporters in the camps themselves.
Muthana says she still has to be careful about what she says because of fear of reprisal.
“I can’t express everything I want to say right now, even here. But I will once I do depart. I’ll speak out against it,” she declared.
“I hope I can show the ISIS victims in the West that someone like me is not a member of it and that I am also a victim of ISIS,” he said.
It is “very apparent that she was brainwashed and taken advantage of,” according to Hassan Shibly, a lawyer who has supported Muthana’s family.
Her family would like for her to return, settle her debt to society, and then aid in preventing others from “sliding into the terrible path that she was led down,” according to Shibly.
“There is no disputing the fact that she was completely misinformed. But once more, she was a girl who fell victim to a highly cunning recruitment scheme that targets the impressionable, defenceless, and disenfranchised, he said.
Where is she currently?
According to a Human Rights Watch report published last month, around 65,600 suspected Islamic States’ members and their families, both Syrians and foreign nationals, are being kept in camps and prisons in northeastern Syria that are controlled by US-allied Kurdish forces.
The Al-Hol and Roj camps host the majority of the women and children suspected of having ties to ISIS in what the rights organisation called “life threatening conditions.”
More than 37,400 foreigners, including Europeans and Americans, are detained in the camp.
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