ROJ CAMP, Syria (AP) — A woman who ran away from home in Alabama at age 20, joined the Islamic State group and had a child with one of her fighters says she still hopes to return to the United States. States, to serve jail time if necessary, and advocate against the extremists.
In a rare interview from 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 but her young son, now of pre-school age.
“If I have to go to jail and serve my time, I will do it… I will not fight it,” the 28-year-old told US newspaper The News Movement. “I hope my government sees me as someone young and naive at the time.”
It’s a line she’s repeated in several 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 expressed her enthusiastic support on social media and in an interview with BuzzFeed News. At the time, IS ruled a self-declared Islamic caliphate that spanned about a third of both Syria and Iraq. In messages sent from her Twitter account in 2015, she called on Americans to join the group and carry out attacks across the US, suggesting drive-by shootings or vehicle rams targeting rallies for National holidays.
In her interview with TNM, Muthana now says that her phone was taken from her and that 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 Birmingham. In 2014, she told her family she was going on a school trip, but flew to Turkey and crossed over to Syria instead, funding the trip with tuition checks she secretly cashed.
The Obama administration revoked her citizenship in 2016, saying her father was an accredited Yemeni diplomat at the time she was born — a rare birthright revocation. Her lawyers have disputed that move, arguing that the father’s diplomatic accreditation ended before she was born.
The Trump administration insisted she was not a citizen and banned her from returning, even as she pressured European allies to repatriate their own detained nationals to ease pressure on the detention camps.
US courts have sided with the government on the issue of Muthana’s citizenship, and last January the Supreme Court declined to consider her reinstatement suit.
That left her and her son languishing in a detention camp in northern Syria where thousands of widows of IS fighters and their children live.
Some 65,600 suspected members of the Islamic State and their families – both Syrians and foreign citizens – are being held in camps and prisons in northeastern Syria run by US-affiliated Kurdish groups, according to a report published last month by Human RightsWatch.
Women accused of links to IS and their minor children are largely housed in al-Hol and Roj camps in what the rights group described as “life-threatening conditions”. The camp inmates include more than 37,400 foreigners, including Europeans and North Americans.
Human Rights Watch and other observers have reported appalling living conditions in the camps, including inadequate food, water and medical care, as well as physical and sexual abuse of prisoners by guards and fellow detainees.
Kurdish-led authorities and activists have blamed IS sleeper cells for increasing violence within the facilities, including the beheading of two Egyptian girls, aged 11 and 13, in the al-Hol camp in November. Turkish airstrikes targeting the Kurdish groups launched that month also hit near al-Hol. Camp officials claimed that the Turkish attacks targeted security forces guarding the camp.
“None of the foreigners have been brought before a judicial authority … to determine the necessity and legality of their detention, making their detention arbitrary and illegal,” Human Rights Watch wrote. “Detention based solely on family ties amounts to collective punishment, a war crime.”
Calls to repatriate the captives were largely ignored in the immediate aftermath of IS’s bloody reign, which was marked by massacres, beheadings and other atrocities, many of which were broadcast around the world in graphic films circulated on social media.
But as time passed, the pace of repatriations began to pick up. Human Rights Watch said some 3,100 foreigners – mostly women and children – have been sent home in the past year. Most were Iraqis, who make up the majority of detainees, but civilians were also repatriated to Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and the United Kingdom.
The US has repatriated a total of 39 US citizens. It is unclear how many other Americans are still in the camps.
Today, Muthana portrays herself as a victim of the Islamic State.
Speaking to TNM, she describes how, after arriving in Syria in 2014, she was held in a boarding house reserved for unmarried women and children. “I’ve never seen such filth in my life, like 100 women and twice as many kids running around, too much noise, filthy beds,” she said.
The only way to escape was to marry a hunter. She eventually married and remarried three times. Her first two husbands, including her son’s father, were killed in battle. She is reportedly divorced from her third husband.
The extremist group, also known as ISIS, no longer controls any area in Syria or Iraq, but continues to carry out sporadic attacks and has supporters in the camps themselves. Muthana says she still has to be careful what she says for fear of reprisals.
“Even here, right now, I can’t say everything I want to say. But once I’m gone, I will. I will argue against this,” she said. “I wish I could help the victims of ISIS in the West understand that someone like me is not part of it, that I am also a victim of ISIS.”
