A girl who ran away from her home in Alabama at the age of 20, joined an Islamic State group and had a baby with one in every of its militants, says she still hopes to return to the US, serve a jail term if essential and speak out against extremists.
In a rare interview from the Roj detention camp in Syria, where she is being held by US-allied Kurdish forces, Hoda Muthana said she was brainwashed by online traffickers into joining the group in 2014 and regrets every little thing except her young son, who’s now in preschool age. school age.
“If I even have to go to jail and do my time, I’ll. … I won’t fight it,” said the 28-year-old News traffic. “I hope my government will have a look at me as young and naive.”
This phrase has been repeated in various media interviews since the extremist group escaped from one in every of the last enclaves in Syria in early 2019.
But 4 years earlier, at the height of the extremists’ power, she had enthusiastically supported them on social media and in an interview with BuzzFeed News. The Islamic State then ruled a self-proclaimed Islamic Caliphate that stretched over roughly a 3rd of Syria and Iraq. In posts sent from her Twitter account in 2015, she called on Americans to join the group and perform attacks in the US, suggesting automobile shootings or vehicle ramming at national holiday gatherings.
In an interview with TNM, Muthana now says her phone was taken and that the tweets were sent by IS supporters.
![Hoda Muthana in an interview with The News Movement](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/01/hoda-2.jpg?w=1024)
Muthana was born in Latest Jersey to Yemeni immigrants and once held a US passport. She was raised in a conservative Muslim household in Hoover, Alabama, just outside Birmingham. In 2014, she told her family she was happening a college trip, but as an alternative flew to Turkey and made her way to Syria, funding the trip with study checks she secretly cashed.
The Obama administration revoked her citizenship in 2016, claiming that her father was an accredited Yemeni diplomat at the time of her birth – a rare deprivation of citizenship. Her lawyers disputed the move, arguing that her father’s diplomatic accreditation expired before she was born.
The Trump administration has maintained that she shouldn’t be a citizen and forbade her to returnat the same time as it pressured European allies to repatriate their detained nationals to ease pressure on detention camps.
US courts sided with the government on Muthana’s citizenship issue, and last January the Supreme Court he declined to consider her re-entry lawsuit.
![](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/01/Islamic_State-US-Stuck_in_Syria_02303jpg-ddc52.jpg?w=756)
This has left her and her son stranded in a camp in northern Syria housing 1000’s of the widows of Islamic State fighters and their children.
About 65,600 suspected Islamic State members and their families, each Syrian and foreign, are held in camps and prisons in northeastern Syria run by U.S.-allied Kurdish groups, according to a Human Rights Watch report released last month.
Women accused of belonging to the Islamic State and their minor children are mostly detained in the al-Hol and Roj camps, in what the human rights organization has described as “life-threatening conditions”. There are over 37,400 foreigners amongst the prisoners of the camp, including Europeans and Americans.
Human Rights Watch and other observers cited dire living conditions in the camps, including inadequate food, water and medical care, in addition to physical and sexual abuse of prisoners by guards and fellow inmates.
Kurdish-led authorities and activists blamed IS sleeper cells for a rise in violence at the facilities, including the beheading of two Egyptian girls, aged 11 and 13, in the al-Hol camp in November. Turkish airstrikes targeting Kurdish groups launched this month also hit near al-Hol. Camp officials claimed that the Turkish attacks targeted the security forces guarding the camp.
“None of the aliens were brought before a judicial authority … to determine the necessity and lawfulness of their detention, rendering their servitude arbitrary and illegal,” Human Rights Watch wrote. “Detention based solely on family ties is collective punishment, a war crime.”
Calls for the repatriation of detainees were largely ignored in the immediate aftermath of IS’ bloody rule, which was marked by massacres, beheadings and other atrocities, lots of which were shown to the world in graphic videos circulating on social media.
Nevertheless, over time, the pace of repatriation began to pick up. Human Rights Watch said about 3,100 foreign nationals — mostly women and youngsters — were sent home over the past yr. Most of them are Iraqis, who make up the majority of those detained, but residents have also been repatriated to Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and the UK.
The US repatriated a complete of 39 Americans. It shouldn’t be clear what number of other Americans remain in the camps.
Currently, Muthana is presented as a victim of the Islamic State.
Speaking to TNM, she describes how, after arriving in Syria in 2014, she was detained in a boarding house reserved for single women and youngsters. “I’ve never seen such filth in my life, like there are 100 women and twice as many children running around, an excessive amount of noise, dirty beds,” she said.
The one way to escape was to marry a warrior. She eventually married and remarried 3 times. Her first two husbands, including her son’s father, died in battle. She reportedly divorced her third husband.
The extremist group, also often called ISIS, now not controls any territory in Syria or Iraq, but still carries out sporadic attacks and has supporters in the camps themselves. Muthana says she still has to watch out what she says for fear of retaliation.
“Even here at the moment, I am unable to fully say every little thing I would like to say. But once I’m gone, I’ll do it. I can be against it, she declared. “I would love to help the victims of ISIS in the West understand that somebody like me shouldn’t be a part of it, that I’m also a victim of ISIS.”
Hassan Shibly, a lawyer who assisted Muthana’s family, said it was “absolutely clear she was brainwashed and used.”
He said her family wished she could return, repay her debt to society, after which help others “fall into the dark path she was led down”.
“She was completely misled and nobody denies that. But again, she was a youngster who fell victim to a really sophisticated recruitment operation that focuses on exploiting the young, the vulnerable, the disenfranchised,” he said.