ROJ CAMP, Syria (AP) — 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 join the United States States to return and serve time in prison if necessary, and speak out against the extremists.
In a rare interview from Syria’s Roj detention center, where she is being held by US-allied Kurdish forces, Hoda Muthana said she was brainwashed by online traders into joining the group in 2014 and regrets everything but her young son who is now before school age.
“If I’m in jail and I have to do my time, I will do it… I will not fight it,” the 28-year-old told The News Movement. “I hope my government sees me as someone who was young and naive at the time.”
It’s a line she’s been repeating in various media interviews since fleeing 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 pledged enthusiastic support to them on social media and in an interview with BuzzFeed News. IS then ruled a self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate that spanned about a third of Syria and Iraq. In posts she sent from her Twitter account in 2015, she called on Americans to join the group and carry out attacks in the US, and suggested shootings from cars or vehicles targeting rallies on national holidays.
In her interview with TNM, Muthana says her phone was taken from her and the tweets were sent by IS supporters.
Muthana was born in New Jersey to Yemeni immigrants and once held a US passport. She grew up in a conservative Muslim household in Hoover, Alabama, just outside of Birmingham. In 2014, she told her family that she was going on a school trip, but instead flew to Turkey and entered Syria to fund the trip with tuition fees she had secretly cashed.
The Obama administration stripped her of her citizenship in 2016, saying her father was an accredited Yemeni diplomat at the time of her birth – a rare revocation of citizenship by birthright. Her lawyers have disputed the move, arguing that the father’s diplomatic accreditation ended before she was born.
The Trump administration claimed she was not a citizen and barred her from returning, despite urging European allies to repatriate their own detained nationals to ease pressure on the detention centers.
US courts have sided with the government on the issue of Muthana’s citizenship, and last January the Supreme Court declined to consider her claim for re-entry.
That has left her and her son languishing in a detention center in northern Syria that houses thousands of Islamic State fighters’ widows and their children.
About 65,600 suspected Islamic State members and their families — both Syrians and foreign nationals — are being held in camps and prisons in northeastern Syria run by US-aligned Kurdish groups, according to a Human Rights Watch report released last month.
Women accused of belonging to ISIS and their minor children are mostly being held in al-Hol and Roj camps, in conditions the rights group described as “life-threatening”. There are more than 37,400 foreigners among the camp inmates, including Europeans and North Americans.
Human Rights Watch and other observers have cited the appalling living conditions in the camps, including inadequate food, water and medical care, and physical and sexual abuse of inmates by guards and fellow inmates.
Kurdish-led authorities and activists have blamed IS dormitories for increasing violence at the facilities, including the beheading of two Egyptian girls, aged 11 and 13, at al-Hol camp in November. Turkish airstrikes on Kurdish groups launched that month also struck near al-Hol. Camp officials claimed that the Turkish attacks targeted security forces guarding the camp.
“None of the aliens have been produced before a judicial authority … to determine the necessity and legality of their detention, making their detention arbitrary and unlawful,” Human Rights Watch wrote. “Incarceration based solely on family ties amounts to collective punishment, a war crime.”
Calls for the return of those imprisoned were largely ignored in the immediate aftermath of ISIS’s bloody reign, which was marked by massacres, beheadings and other atrocities, many of which were shared in graphic films on social media worldwide.
But over time, the pace of repatriations has increased. About 3,100 foreigners — mostly women and children — were sent home last year, according to Human Rights Watch. Most were Iraqis, who make up the majority of those detained, but citizens have also been repatriated to Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and the United Kingdom.
The US has repatriated a total of 39 American nationals. It’s unclear how many other Americans remain in the camps.
Muthana is presenting herself as a victim of the Islamic State these days.
Speaking to TNM, she describes how, after arriving in Syria in 2014, she was held in a guest house reserved for unmarried women and children. “I’ve never seen such dirt in my life, like 100 women and twice as many children running around, too much noise, dirty beds,” she said.
The only way out was to marry a fighter. She eventually married and remarried three times. Her first two husbands, including her son’s father, were killed in battle. She reportedly divorced her third husband.
Also known as ISIS, the extremist group no longer controls territory in Syria or Iraq, but continues to carry out sporadic attacks and has supporters of its own in camps. Muthana says she still has to be careful about what she says for fear of reprisals.
“Even here, at the moment, I can’t say everything I want to say. But as soon as I go, I will. I will fight against it,” she said. “I wish I could help the victims of ISIS in the West understand that someone like me is not part of the fact that I am also a victim of ISIS.”