“The Prophet said, ‘War is deceit.’” (Bukhari 4.52.269)
Of course, maybe Hoda Muthana isn’t trying to deceive us. But maybe she is, although the possibility will likely be dismissed as “Islamophobic,” and the lives of Americans put at risk by her return.
“‘I just want to go home’: Alabama jihadi bride stripped of her citizenship after calling for extremists to ‘spill blood of Americans’ pleads to be let back into U.S.,” by Eleanor Dye and Melissa Koenig, Daily Mail, February 8, 2023:
An Alabama jihadi bride who was stripped of her citizenship after joining ISIS in Syria now claims the terrorist group plans to attack the Syrian camp where she is detained – but says she ‘just wants to go home’.
Hoda Muthana, 28, says she fears that ISIS will attack Camp Roj – the detention camp in north east Syria where she has been detained.
Muthana joined the terrorist group when she was 20 but now says she was groomed online by members who wanted to attract young and vulnerable women.
She was stripped of her citizenship by Obama and, in January, Supreme Court Justices refused to hear her appeal to be allowed back.
But at the height of the extremists’ power, she had voiced enthusiastic support for them on social media, calling for them to ‘spill the blood of Americans’.
The now mother, who married three fighters, responded: ‘ISIS keeps threatening even this camp and saying that one day we will free you.
‘And one day we will come help and attack the administration and stuff and nobody wants to be saved by them, you know. Everyone wants to go home.
‘It is still scary to think that ISIS could do something even inside the camp you know.’
Muthana has repeatedly claimed she is a victim of the terrorist organization, which has been involved in a decade-long war with Syria thought to have killed at least 300,000 civilians.
But at the height of the extremists’ power, she had voiced enthusiastic support for them on social media and in an interview with BuzzFeed News.
She told reporter Ellie Hall at the time that it is the duty of all true Muslims to join her and wage war on the West.
Muthana also used Twitter under the name ‘Umm Jihad’ and the handle @ZumarulJannah.
On March 19, 2015, that account shared statements encouraging followers in the US to attack parades on national holidays and ‘spill all of their blood or rent a big truck n (sic) drive all over them. Kill them’.
Another tweet posted on the same day read ‘You can look up Obamas schedule on the white house (sic) website. Take down that treacherous tyrant!’.
Muthana was also tagged in photos posted on Twitter with women clad in burkas holding rifles and ISIS flags. She later confirmed to Buzzfeed that she was one of the women in the photo.
By January 2016 the Obama administration revoked her passport and just last year, the US Supreme Court declined an appeal against that decision.
But she has denied that she sent those tweets.
‘I never had a platform to say this, but I have always been trying to tell people that those tweets were not mine,’ the former ISIS bride said recently.
‘It either gets cut out of the media or it gets kind of butchered somehow and I never get a platform.
‘It’s not fair, the person that did bring me here had a wife who I become (sic) friends with.
‘There was a group of us in a home and she would take our phones.
‘She would take our phones and tell us because we’ve always thought about going back to our countries that we need to make ourselves look bad in the media so we don’t have this persuasion to go back.
‘That’s basically what her agenda was, that’s what their (ISIS) agenda is, that they have to portray you in the worst way so that you don’t have these thoughts of ever wanting to return.
‘She just took my phone and I thought she was just looking through my diary or something and then when she left and I looked through and I saw a bunch of evil horrible tweets that I would never have done because I wanted to stay off media, I never wanted to get myself out there you know.
‘It was not only me that she did it to, it was several people and they were made to look really bad also.’…
Hassan Shibly, an attorney who has assisted Muthana´s family, said it is ‘absolutely clear that she was brainwashed and taken advantage of.’
He said her family wishes she could come back, pay her debt to society and then help others from ‘falling into the dark path that she was led down.’
‘She was absolutely misguided, and no one is denying that. But again, she was a teenager who was the victim of a very sophisticated recruitment operation that focuses on taking advantage of the young, the vulnerable, the disenfranchised,’ he said.
