Update:
Hoda Muthana, the young Alabama woman who fled to Syria to support ISIS and now wants to return home, has no legal basis to claim U.S. citizenship, according to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
You can read more on the secretary’s statements here.
President Trump has also weighed in on the matter.
Earlier:
Hoda Muthana, a Hoover woman who traveled to Syria and joined terrorist group ISIS, is back in the news.
Muthana told The Guardian she regrets joining the group and now wants to come home.
“I don’t know, I thought I was doing things correctly for the sake of God,” she said. “And when I came here and saw everything with my own eyes I realized I’ve made a big mistake.”
Muthana and her 18-month old son are reportedly in a refugee camp in northern Syria.
Muthana was 20 when she abandoned her family and fled to Syria in November 2014, a year after she graduated from Hoover High School. She later studied business at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Muthana, who comes from a Muslim family that does not espouse extreme views, developed a jihadist interpretation of Islam from online readings. She tricked her family into letting her go to Atlanta for a school field trip, instead hopping on a plane to Turkey and then to Syria to meet with ISIS. Less than a month after arriving in Syria, she married Suhan Abdul Rahman, an Australian jihadist, who died only a few months later allegedly during a Jordanian air strikes during a battle.
She went on to marry at least two others times, according to reports, including her second marriage to a Tunisian fighter with whom she had her son, Adam. Her second husband was killed in Mosul and she went on to marry a Syrian man, the Guardian reports.
While in Syria, Muthana reportedly tweeted anti-American statements aimed at recruiting new ISIS supporters. Some of those messages encouraged people to “spill” American blood. She now said she lived under very harsh conditions.
“It was like a movie. You read one book and think you know everything. I’m really traumatized by my experience. We starved and we literally ate grass," she said.
Muthana’s case is unique. Of the 94 cases of Americans that traveled to the area with the intent of supporting terrorists, only 27 actually arrived in the country. Of those 27, 12 have been killed. The Guardian reports Muthana is the only American among an estimated 15,000 foreign women and children inside the refugee camp of 39,000 people where she is now staying.
If Muthana does return to the U.S., she could likely face criminal charges. According to New America, six Americans have returned from fighting or training with militant groups in Syria. All were taken into custody.