Hoda Muthana, 20, left the United States to join the Islamic State in Syria. Now, she wants to return home.
Six years ago, the Alabama college student lied to her parents about the trip. When she arrived, things went badly. She was confined to a home for unwed women, with marriage to a jihadist the only way out. She married a succession of the group’s fighters — the first two who were killed — and had a son with one of them.
But apparently, she celebrated her move by burning her American passport and shared thousands of incendiary tweets under her Twitter name @UmmJihad. This includes a tweet that said, “America desrves (sic) everything it has coming to it, by Allah we will terrorise (sic) YOU! Until you submit to the Shariah.”
She also went as far as encouraging others to attack holiday parades.”Spill all of their blood,” she wrote, “or rent a big truck n drive over them. Kill them.”
Two years have passed since Muthana said she took her son and ran away from the Islamic State, which was collapsing under military assault.
She is now a refugee banned from the country where she grew up.
“When you are brainwashed, you don’t realize it until you snap out of it. I took everything too fast and too deep,” she tells Spanish filmmaker Alba Sotorra Clua in the new documentary The Return: Life After ISIS. The documentary will be available to watch through Thursday at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York.
The now 26-year-old described her experience in the Islamic State by saying it was “this horrible way of life that I really regret for the rest of my life and that I wish I could just erase.”
Clua has spent over a year visiting Roj Camp in Syria, where Muthana has been since she surrendered to the Kurds two years ago. She has been sleeping in a tent on a dirt flood struggling to meet her and her 4-year-old son’s needs.
About 1,500 women and children from over 50 countries are in the same predicament at the same camp where Kurdish authorities are holding Muthana. Other camps are housing thousands of other women and children since the fall of the Islamic State.
Various governments have decided what to do with their citizens, both men, and women alike, who joined the group’s ranks. Close to 300 Americans tried or were successful in joining militants in Syria, NPR reported in 2019, PEOPLE reported.
Cases like these have drawn international attention— especially those like Muthana, who now say they were manipulated and ask for forgiveness from their record of betrayal.
“I was not part of any type of jihad, never shot a gun, never used any weapons or anything,” Muthana said in 2019.
“I’m not sympathetic. These women had agency. They’re not stupid,” terrorism expert Max Abrahms of Northeastern University told PEOPLE that same year. “They knew exactly what the Islamic State was all about. It was notorious for flaunting violence over social media.”
In 2019, Muthana spoke with NBC News, saying she knew that if she were allowed to return to her home country, “Of course I will be given jail time.” But, she said, “I prefer America than anywhere else.”
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