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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran | |||
| Alabama woman who joined ISIS hopes to return from Syria camp | |||
| 2023-01-09 | |||
A woman who ran away from home in Alabama at the age of 20, joined ISIS and had a child with one of its fighters says she still hopes to return to the US, 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 US-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 US-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 extremists’ power, she had voiced enthusiastic support for them on social media and in an interview with BuzzFeed News. ISIS then ruled a self-declared Islamic 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 US, 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 ISIS supporters. Muthana was born in New Jersey to Yemeni immigrants and once had 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 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 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.
US 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 ISIS fighters and their children.
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| Posted by:badanov |
| #4 She took up arms against her country and we all know she'll skate free. Meanwhile, we have the Garland Gulag. We are an occupied nation. |
| Posted by: Rex Mundi 2023-01-09 10:51 |
| #3 Might have been worse at home. Runaways |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2023-01-09 08:57 |
| #2 But, of course, she can't be imprisoned...because "My son needs me". F*&k her. Let them rot. |
| Posted by: Frank G 2023-01-09 07:13 |
| #1 Feely and willing joined a Terrorist group that has directly attacked the USA CONUS no less than 7 times, and other free nations many times that amount. All of which resulted in the deaths of many innocent persons and kids. She must be brought to trial for aiding and abetting Terrorism and slapped with the MAX jail time as an example. |
| Posted by: NN2N1 2023-01-09 05:36 |