Six years ago, Hoda Muthana was a 20-year-old college student in Alabama who lied to her family about a trip and instead joined the Islamic State in Syria. When she arrived she was confined to a home for unwed women, with marriage to a jihadist the only way out. She married a succession of the group’s fighters \u2014 the first two of whom were killed \u2014 and had a son with one of them.<\/p>\n
On social media, she celebrated the burning of her U.S. passport and shared thousands of incendiary tweets under the name @UmmJihad, including writing that “America desrves (sic) everything it has coming to it, by Allah we will terrorise (sic) YOU! Until you submit to the Shariah” and urging others to attack holiday parades.<\/p>\n
“Spill all of their blood,” she wrote, “or rent a big truck n drive over them. Kill them.”<\/p>\n
Today, two years after Muthana said she took her young son and ran away from the Islamic State as it was collapsing under military assault, she is a refugee barred from the country where she grew up with a very different view of the group she had once so longed to join.<\/p>\n
“When you are brainwashed, you don’t realize it until you snap out of it. I took everything too fast and too deep,” she tells Spanish filmmaker Alba Sotorra Clua in the new documentary The Return: Life After ISIS, available to watch through Thursday at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York.<\/p>\n
What she experienced in the Islamic State, Muthana, now 26, says in the film, was “this horrible way of life that I really regret for the rest of my life and that I wish I could just erase.”<\/p>\n
Clua spent a year and a half visiting Roj Camp in Syria where Muthana, stateless, has been in limbo since surrendering to the Kurds in early 2019 \u2014 sleeping in a tent with a dirt floor, no phone, no money and barely what she needs to care for her 4-year-old son.<\/p>\n
Muthana, who is being held by Kurdish authorities, is far from alone: She lives in the camp along with roughly 1,500 women and children from more than 50 countries. There are other camps housing thousands of other women and children. After the Islamic State fell, various governments have had to weigh what to do with their citizens, men and women alike, who joined the group’s ranks. Some 300 Americans tried or were successful in joining militants in Syria, NPR reported in 2019.<\/p>\n
Their cases have drawn international attention and much discussion \u2014 especially those, like Muthana, who now plead manipulation and seek forgiveness from their record of betrayal.<\/p>\n
“I was not part of any type of jihad, never shot a gun, never used any weapons or anything,” Muthana said in 2019.<\/p>\n
“I’m not sympathetic. These women had agency. They’re not stupid,” terrorism expert Max Abrahms, of Northeastern University, told PEOPLE that same year. “They knew exactly what the Islamic State was all about. It was notorious for flaunting violence over social media.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
To be fair, ISIS’s famous beheading videos (beginning in 2014, a year\u00a0before<\/strong><\/em> she left to join the jihad) were really unclear on what ISIS (then-ISIL) were all about. Perhaps she believed that these people had grown tired of their bodies and wanted to have their heads separated from them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hoda Muthana left the US, where she was attending college, several years back to join ISIS … ISIS bride resurfaces like a turd you just can’t flush<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[209,307,603,223],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-114111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teh-stoopid","category-isis","category-stupid-criminals","category-syria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=114111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":114112,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114111\/revisions\/114112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=114111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=114111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=114111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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