Hoda Muthana, who left Hoover in 2014 to join ISIS in Syria, now claims she made “a big mistake.”
The 24-year-old is begging American officials to let her return home now that ISIS is on the verge of total annihilation, according to reports.
The Guardian reported Sunday that Muthana was 19 years old when she left Alabama and headed to Raqqa, Syria. There, she first married an Australian jihadist named Suhan Rahman, who was reportedly killed later in the town of Kobanî.
After Rahman’s death, Muthana – called “one of Isis’s [sic] most prominent online agitators” – took to social media in a vengeful call for the blood of American citizens to be spilled by radical jihadists living in the country.
She tweeted, “Americans wake up! Men and women altogether. You have much to do while you live under our greatest enemy, enough of your sleeping! Go on drivebys, and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them. Veterans, Patriots, Memorial, etc day … Kill them.”
The Guardian outlined that this type of online behavior continued for some time.
“For many months in 2015, her Twitter feed was full of bloodcurdling incitement, and she says she remained a zealot until the following year. She now says her account was taken over by others [after she allegedly stopped being a zealot],” the publication explained.
After the death of Rahman, she married a Tunisian fighter, with whom she had her son, Adam. This second husband was soon killed in Mosul, and Muthana briefly married a Syrian fighter last year to complete her own trifecta of jihadist husbands.
It is supposedly in part out of concern for her son that she wants to return to her family in the Yellowhammer State. She also claims to have become de-radicalized over time after seeing the realities in the Middle East.
“I look back now and I think I was very arrogant,” Muthana told The Guardian. “Now I’m worried about my son’s future. In the end I didn’t have many friends left, because the more I talked about the oppression of Isis the more I lost friends. I was brainwashed once and my friends are still brainwashed.”
She is now living with her son in the tent-city and refugee camp called al-Hol – also known as al-Hawl – after being captured by Kurdish forces.
Muthana told The Guardian that she had not yet talked with American officials since her capture but that she “deeply regrets” ever leaving her homeland in the first place.
“I would tell them please forgive me for being so ignorant, and I was really young and ignorant and I was 19 when I decided to leave,” she claimed. “I believe that America gives second chances. I want to return and I’ll never come back to the Middle East. America can take my passport and I wouldn’t mind.”
Sean Ross is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @sean_yhn
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