ROJ CAMP (AP) – A woman who ran away from home in Alabama at the age of 20, joined the Daesh terrorist group and had a child with one of its militants 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 where she is being held by U.S.-allied Kurdish forces, Hoda Muthana said she was brainwashed by online traffickers into joining the group in 2014 and regrets everything except her young son.
“If I need to sit in prison, and do my time, I will do it... I won’t fight against it,” the 28-year-old 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 early 2019.
But four years earlier, at the height of the terrorists’ power, she had voiced enthusiastic support for them on social media and in an interview with BuzzFeed News. Daesh then ruled a self-declared so-called caliphate stretching across roughly a third of both Syria and Iraq. In tweets from 2015 she called on Americans to join the group and carry out attacks in the U.S., suggesting drive-by shootings or vehicle rammings targeting gatherings for national holidays.
In her interview with TNM, Muthana now says her phone was taken from her and that the tweets were sent by Daesh supporters.
Muthana was born in New Jersey to Yemeni immigrants and once had a U.S. passport. She was raised in a conservative 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, funding the travel with tuition checks that she had secretly cashed.
The Obama administration cancelled 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 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 Daesh terrorists and their children.
Some 65,600 suspected Daesh members and their families 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.