Alabama woman who joined IS still hopes to return to US
ROJ CAMP, Syria — A woman who ran away from home in Alabama at the age of 20, joined the Islamic State group and had a child with one of its fighters says she still hopes to return to the United States, serve prison time if necessary, and advocate against the extremists.
In a rare interview from the Roj detention camp in Syria, Hoda Muthana, 28, said she was brainwashed by online traffickers into joining the group in 2014 and regrets everything except her son, now of preschool age.
“If I need to sit in prison, and do my time, I will do it ... I won’t fight against it,”she told U.S.-based outlet The News Movement. “I’m hoping my government looks at me as someone young at the time and naive.”
It’s a line she’s repeated in various media interviews since fleeing from one of the extremist group’s last enclaves in Syria in 2019.
But four years earlier, at the height of the extremists’ power, she had voiced enthusiastic support for them on social media and in an interview with BuzzFeed News. IS then ruled a self-declared Islamic caliphate stretching across roughly a third of both Syria and Iraq.
In posts sent from her Twitter account in 2015 she called on Americans to join the group and carry out attacks in the U.S.
In her interview with TNM, Muthana now says the tweets were sent by IS supporters.
Muthana was born in New Jersey to Yemeni immigrants and once had a U.S. passport. She was raised in a Muslim household in Hoover, Alabama, just outside Birmingham. In 2014, she told her family she was going on a school trip but flew to Turkey and crossed into Syria instead.
The Obama administration canceled her citizenship in 2016, saying her father was an accredited Yemeni diplomat at the time she was born — a rare revocation of birthright citizenship. Her lawyers have disputed that move, arguing that the father’s diplomatic accreditation ended before she was born.
The Trump administration maintained that she was not a citizen and barred her from returning, even as it pressed European allies to repatriate their own detained nationals to reduce pressure on the detention camps.
U.S. courts have sided with the government on the question of Muthana’s citizenship, and last January the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider her lawsuit seeking re-entry.
That has left her and her son languishing in a detention camp in northern Syria housing thousands of widows of Islamic State fighters and their children.
Some 65,600 suspected IS members and their families — both Syrians and foreign citizens — 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 affiliation with IS and their minor children are largely housed in the al-Hol and Roj camps, under what the rights group described as “life-threatening conditions.”
The camp include more than 37,400 foreigners, among them Europeans and North Americans. But with the passage of time, the pace of repatriations has started to pick up.
Human Rights Watch said some 3,100 foreigners — mostly women and children — have been sent home over the past year. The U.S. has repatriated 39 American nationals. It’s unclear how many other Americans remain in the camps.
These days, Muthana portrays herself as a victim of the Islamic State.
Speaking with TNM, she describes how, after arriving in Syria in 2014, she was detained in a guest house reserved for unmarried women and children. “I’ve never seen that kind of filthiness in my life, like there was 100 women and twice as much kids, running around, too much noise, filthy beds,” she said.
The only way to escape was to marry a fighter.
She eventually married and then remarried two more times. Her first two husbands, including the father of her son, were killed in battle. She reportedly divorced her third husband.
The extremist group, also known as ISIS, no longer controls any territory in Syria or Iraq but continues to carry out sporadic attacks and has supporters in the camps themselves. Muthana said she still has to be careful about what she says because of fear of reprisal.
“Even here, right now, I can’t fully say everything I want to say. But once I do leave, I will. I will be an advocate against this,” she said. “I wish I can help the victims of ISIS in the West understand that someone like me is not part of it, that I as well am a victim of ISIS.”