Alabama college student fled home to join ISIS 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.

Today she is a refugee and widow of the collapsing Islamic State, which she joined in 2014 after being radicalized online by the terror group’s members.

Born in New Jersey and raised in the Birmingham area, Muthana is now asking to return to the United States. She says she is remorseful, ready to be punished, and she has an 18-month-old son with her.

She married an ISIS fighter under duress, she told the New York Times in 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 Pompeo told 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 the Times she 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 via social media (including Americans).

“Hoda acknowledges her mistakes and is willing to pay the price, even behind bars if she has to,” Hassan Shibly, a civil rights attorney working with her family, said in a radio interview last week. “She is speaking publicly about how evil ISIS is even when she’s still within their grasp, surrounded by many of their supporters still, and risking her life to do so.”

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 the Times detailed 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 the Times. “I thought I was doing things correctly for the sake of God.”

But life in ISIS-controlled territory was not what she’d imagined. She said she was coerced into marrying an ISIS fighter, and three months later he was killed. She married again to another fighter, but two years into her stay, she was pregnant, homesick and worn down by her daily reality.

“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 the Times.

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 the Times.

“I’ve been literally planning to get out for months,” she told The Guardian last week. “I got caught twice by ISIS and I was so scared I broke my phone. From what I heard, if they were to read my messages I would have been killed.”

She told the Times she 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 the Guardian.

Source: AP