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Roj Camp (Syria), Jan. 8 (AP) — A 20-year-old woman in Alabama who ran away from home to join the Islamic State group and fathered a child with one of its fighters said she still hopes to Come back to the US, serve your sentence if necessary, and advocate against extremists.
Hoda Muthana, in a rare interview at the Roj internment camp in Syria, where she is being held by U.S.-allied Kurdish forces, said she was brainwashed into joining the group by internet traffickers in 2014 and that, along with her young son, she Feeling school-aged about everything now.
“If I need to sit in jail and spend my time, I’ll do it … I’m not against it,” the 28-year-old told US outlet The News Movement. “I hope my government sees me as someone who was young and naive at the time.”
She has repeated the phrase in various media interviews since fleeing one of the extremist group’s last enclaves in Syria in early 2019.
But four years ago, at the height of their power, she expressed enthusiastic support for the extremists on social media and in interviews with BuzzFeed News. IS then rules a self-declared Islamic caliphate that spans about a third of Syria and Iraq. In a 2015 post from her Twitter account, she called on Americans to join the group and carry out attacks in the United States, suggesting drive-by shootings or vehicle rammings targeting rallies on the national holiday.
In an interview with TNM, Muthana now says her phone was taken and the tweets were sent by IS supporters.
Muthana was born in New Jersey to a family of Yemeni immigrants who held a U.S. passport. She grew up in a conservative Muslim family in Hoover, Alabama, just outside Birmingham. In 2014, she told her family she was going on a school trip, but she flew to Turkey and crossed into Syria instead, funding the trip with tuition checks she secretly cashed.
The Obama administration revoked her citizenship in 2016, saying her father was a certified Yemeni diplomat at her birth — a rare revocation of birthright citizenship. Her lawyers disputed the move, arguing that her father’s diplomatic recognition ended before she was born.
The Trump administration has insisted she is not a citizen and has barred her return, even as it has urged European allies to repatriate their own nationals detained to ease pressure on internment camps.
U.S. courts have sided with the government over Muthana’s citizenship, and last January the Supreme Court declined to consider her lawsuit seeking re-entry.
It has left her and her son agonizing in a detention camp in northern Syria where thousands of widows and their children of Islamic State fighters are being held.
Some 65,600 suspected Islamic State members and their family members — including Syrians and foreign nationals — are being held in camps and prisons run by U.S.-aligned Kurdish groups in northeastern Syria, according to a Human Rights Watch report released last month .
Most of the women accused of IS links and their underage children were housed in al-Hol and Roj camps in what rights groups said were “life-threatening conditions”. Camp prisoners included more than 37,400 foreigners, including Europeans and North Americans.
Human Rights Watch and other monitors cited poor living conditions in the camps, including inadequate food, water and medical services, and physical and sexual abuse of prisoners by guards and other detainees.
Kurdish-led authorities and activists have accused IS sleeper cells of rampant violence at the facility, including the beheading of two Egyptian girls, aged 11 and 13, at the al-Hol camp in November. Turkish air strikes against Kurdish groups that month also came close to al-Hol. Camp officials said the Turkish attack targeted security forces guarding the camp.
“None of the aliens were brought before judicial authorities … to determine the necessity and legality of their detention, making their captivity arbitrary and illegal,” Human Rights Watch wrote. “Detention based solely on family ties amounts to collective Punishment is a war crime.”
Calls to repatriate detainees have been largely ignored in the immediate aftermath of IS’s bloody reign, marked by massacres, beheadings and other atrocities, many of which were broadcast to the world in graphic films circulated on social media. out.
But over time, the pace of repatriation picked up. Some 3,100 foreigners — mainly women and children — were deported in the past year, Human Rights Watch said. Most were Iraqis, who made up the majority of those detained, but citizens were also deported to Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and the United Kingdom.
The United States deported a total of 39 American citizens. It was unclear how many Americans remained in the camp.
These days, Muthana paints himself as a victim of ISIS.
In an interview with TNM, she described how after arriving in Syria in 2014, she was detained in a hostel reserved for unmarried women and children. “I’ve never seen that kind of squalor in my life, like 100 women and twice as many children running around, making too much noise and the beds are dirty,” she said.
The only way to escape is to marry a warrior. She eventually married and remarried three times. Her first two husbands, including the father of her son, were killed in battle. She is reportedly divorcing her third husband.
The extremist group, also known as Islamic State, no longer controls any territory in Syria or Iraq, but continues to carry out sporadic attacks and has supporters in the camps. Muthana said she must still be cautious about what she says out of fear of reprisal.
“Even here, right now, I can’t quite say everything I want to say. But once I leave, I will. I’m going to fight against that,” she said. “I hope I can help victims of ISIS in the West understand that people like me don’t belong, I’m a victim of ISIS too.” (AP)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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