20-Year-Old Alabama College Student Fled Home to Join ISIS, Had a Baby — and Now Wants to Come Back

Four years ago, Hoda Muthana was a 20-year-old with a sweet face and a gleaming smile studying business at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

While with ISIS she was awilling recruiter and amplifier of their message via Twitter, according to a group that tracks extremism online. But Muthana — born in New Jersey and raised in the Birmingham area — says she is remorseful, is ready to be punished, and she has an 18-month-old son with her. She wants to come home.

She married an ISIS fighter under duress, shetold theNew York Timesin an interview last week, and she describes herself as disillusioned with her life there.

The U.S. government doesn’t care. They say that because of the technicalities of diplomatic law (Muthana’s father is a former diplomat from Yemen) she and her child are not American citizens and thus not their responsibility.

“I don’t get the heartstrings deal,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeotold Fox Business. “This is a woman who inflicted enormous risk on American soldiers, American citizens. She’s a terrorist. She’s not coming back to our country to pose a threat.”

Muthana told theTimesshe was nonviolent: “I was not part of any type of jihad, never shot a gun, never used any weapons or anything.”

Her family is suing the government, asking a federal court to assist in the homecoming of Muthana and her child. Her family’s lawyer argues that her father was fired from his job at the United Nations weeks before she was born in New Jersey, making her a bona fide citizen.

The suit names President Donald Trump, Secretary Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr as defendants.

Representatives from the White House and Justice Department did not return PEOPLE’s request for comment. A State Department spokesperson said, ‎”‎We are aware of the recent court filing. ‎We cannot comment further due to pending litigation.”

ISIS, now a shadow of the savage pseudo-state it was five years ago, has withered under sustained military assault. Other countries are left to figure out how to handle the group’s foreign members and the family of its dead fighters

While a number of American-born ISIS fighters have been brought home, the U.S. says Muthana will not count among them.

The narrow fight over her citizenship spotlights a troubling legacy of ISIS, including how deftly the terrorist group was able to recruit people across the world using social media (including Americans).

In Her Own Words

Four years ago, while she was a sophomore at the University of Alabama, Muthana began talking on social media with other Muslims, according to Charles Swift, her family’s attorney in their suit.

Swift says she did not know there were ISIS recruiters in the space and they convinced her to join. (She would have been far from the first:as theTimesdetailed in a 2015 piece, ISIS made an aggressive push to recruit Americans and other Westerners, pursuing them relentlessly, plying their perceived immaturity and loneliness and even sending them money.)

Swift says Muthana soon dropped out of college, before completing her sophomore year, then lied to her parents and used her tuition money to buy a ticket to Turkey.

From there, she was smuggled into Syria in November 2014.

“I thought I was doing the right thing,” she told theTimes. “I thought I was doing things correctly for the sake of God.”

“Everything is horrifying. You see executions in the street, you see dead bodies everywhere. There are bombs. You hear someone scream and you can’t go and help them for fear of your own life,” Muthana, now 24, told theTimes.

She feared she’d be punished, raped or killed if she got caught running away.

As the group was forced to retreat in recent months, Muthana said she moved from city to city. She ended up in a tent in the desert eating boiled grass. There were no diapers for her son and there was no medicine.

Her second husband was also killed, and she said she and her third husband divorced, according to theTimes.

She told theTimesshe finally ran away, trekking on foot through the desert clutching her toddler until she found American soldiers who were processing ISIS members that had surrendered. They sent her to a Kurdish camp in northeast Syria where she is now, pleading for the U.S. to let her back in with her child.

“I know I ruined my future and my son’s future and I deeply, deeply regret it,” she told theGuardian.

The Citizenship Fight

Her father worked as a Yemeni diplomat at the United Nations until right before her birth, the documents show.

As a child of a diplomat, she would not have been granted birthright citizenship. But her father left his diplomatic post shortly before she was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, and her family was so sure Muthana was a citizen that they did not have her naturalized with the rest of the family, according to their attorney.

However, the government says Muthana’s father’s diplomatic rights were not terminated until months after she was born.

She was entitled to a hearing over her contested citizenship at the time her passport was revoked in January 2016, but she was far away and long gone.

A few months after a government letter arrived at her parents’ house invalidating her passport, she posted a photo of herself holding her passport and promising a bonfire, according to theTimes.

In other social media posts, she incited Americans to join the caliphate and to inflict terror at home, theTimesreported. TheGuardiandescribed her Twitter account in 2015 as “full of bloodcurdling incitement.”

She was brainwashed, said Shibly, the civil rights attorney.

“It’s no different than the manipulation tactics of sex traffickers and violent gang and hate groups use to recruit online,” he said in his radio interview last week.

The group offered a sense of belonging to potential recruits and then isolated them from their community and from their parents, who might have intervened, Shibly said.

Muthana was raised in an ultraconservative family, according to theTimes. Eventually she came to view her parents as infidels, Shibly said.

“I look back now and I think I was very arrogant,” she told theGuardian.

“I thought she was a goner, mentally, forever,” Shibly said. He added, “I thought the next time we’d hear from her would be reading in the news that she was killed somewhere.”

Hoda Muthana in an undated photo.Hassan Shibly/AP

Some 300 Americans tried or were successful in joining militant groups in Syria and a handful are believed to still be there,according to NPR. (TheTimesput the figure much lower: reporting that about 60 Americans went to Syria for ISIS.)

A small number of Americans, perhaps around dozen, reportedly remain in the Middle East after ISIS’ collapse.

A week ago, President Trump asked European governments to take back 800 ISIS fighters and put them on trial — but he has no interest in doing so for Muthana.

“I have instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and he fully agrees, not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the Country!” Trumptweeted last week.

What’s Next?

Swift, her family’s attorney and a constitutional lawyer, says Muthana is willing to stand trial in the U.S. and knows she may go to prison.

Speaking with PEOPLE, terrorism expert Max Abrahms, of Northeastern University, took a skeptical view of what Muthana said was her nonviolent role in ISIS.

“These core features of ISIS are what attracted her,” Abrahms says. “I’m not sympathetic. These women had agency. They’re not stupid. They knew exactly what the Islamic State was all about. It was notorious for flaunting violence over social media.”

“We’ll probably never know her full range of activities,” he says — but it doesn’t matter: “I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the man who does the shooting and the raping and the woman who helps the man do the killing and the raping.”

“The very act of going there and being an ISIS bride aided their ability to attract not just other women, but more men,” he says, noting that the idea was to create a complete, multi-generational Islamic state, so women were essential and foreign women, who were not coerced into joining, tended to be more committed.

A hearing in the suit is set for Monday morning in Washington, D.C.

Speaking with theGuardian, Shibly said he believedthere could yet be some good to comefrom Muthana’s story.

“Having somebody like Hoda work through the legal system and with the United States government to publicly speak out against the kind of hatred and manipulation that groups like this engage in would be a very useful tool to help protect other vulnerable individuals from being taken advantage of,” he said.

Speaking withNBC News on Friday, Muthana said she knew that if she were allowed to return to America, “Of course I will be given jail time.”

But, she said, “I prefer America than anywhere else.”

source: people.com