(ReclaimingAmerica.net) – A former American citizen who ran away from home to join the Islamist State terrorist group in Syria is asking to return to the United States.
28-year-old Hoda Muthana ran away from home in Alabama to become part of ISIS (“Islamic State in Iraq and Syria”), also known as simply the “Islamic State.”
In 2013-2015, ISIS, which is more extremist even than al-Qaeda, ruled a large area in Eastern Syria and Western Iraq before it was destroyed on former President Donald Trump’s watch.
After she ran away and joined the Islamic State, Muthana, the daughter of a Yemeni diplomat born in the United States, was stripped of her citizenship by the Obama administration.
The former ISIS supporter, held by US-allied Kurds in the Roj detention camp in Syria, gave a media interview, asking to be allowed to return to America, serve time in prison if needed, and then advocated against Islamist terrorism.
“If I need to sit in prison and do my time, I will do it… I won’t fight against it. I’m hoping my government looks at me as someone young at the time and naive,” Muthana told U.S.-based outlet The News Movement, as cited by AP and Newsmax.
The report notes that Muthana has been toeing the same line since early 2019 when she fled from one of the last ISIS strongholds in Syria.
However, in 2015, when the Islamic State was at the height of its power, she enthusiastically advocated for the terrorist group in an interview with Buzzfeed and social media posts.
On Twitter back then, Muthana urged Americans to join ISIS and start attacking their country through drive-by shootings or plowing national holiday gatherings with vehicles.
In her latest interview, however, the former American claims that Islamic State supporters snatched her smartphone and posted tweets from her account.
Muthana, born in New Jersey, grew up in a conservative Muslim family in Hoover, Alabama. In 2014, she lied to her family she was leaving on a school trip and took a plane to Turkey, from where she crossed into Syria. She paid for the journey with secretly cashed tuition checks.
In 2016, the Obama administration took away her citizenship, arguing that her father was an accredited diplomat for a foreign nation when she was born.
The Trump administration also said Muthana was not a US citizen and banned her from entering the country. US courts have supported that decision.
That left the former American in a detention camp in Syria with her underage son with an ISIS fighter. A Human Rights Watch report from December said Kurdish-run camps and prisons in Northeast Syria contained about 65,000 ISIS members and their families. Those include over 37,400 foreigners, including Muslims born in Europe and North America.
Thirty-nine American nationals have been allowed to return from the ISIS camps, and it is unknown how many remain.
In her interview, Muthana said she deeply regretted joining ISIS and claimed to have been a victim.
She married three times to Islamic State fighters, with her first two husbands getting killed in battle.
What is your opinion? Should Muthana ever be allowed back in the United States? Why or why not? Please share your view by emailing [email protected]. Thank you.
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.
https://t.co/nfd230UWwb— NEWSMAX (@NEWSMAX) January 8, 2023
