The ISIS bride at the center of a dispute over whether she can come back to the U.S. is saying that she didn’t hate America. And she says she’ll never do it again.
Hoda Muthana told Fox News in an interview at a refugee camp in Syria that with therapy she’d become a model citizen.
“Before I came, I’ve never done any crime, and I’m sure I’m not going to be doing any crimes in the future,” she said in the interview posted Monday evening, “and I know I’ve come to Syria and look like I am a supporter of the worst terror group in history.”
Ms. Muthana voluntarily left the U.S. for the then-ascendant Islamic State in 2014, when the group was posting regular beheading videos, and became a vocal supporter.
“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 drive-bys and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them. Veterans, Patriot, Memorial etc Day parades..go on drive by’s + spill all of their blood or rent a big truck n drive all over them. Kill them,” she wrote earlier this year in now-deleted Twitter post.
She claims the Islamic State took over her Twitter account.
“I just want to go back home,” Ms. Muthana told Fox News. “I want my son to see my family, I want him to be safe in Syria. It’s not safe here, no matter what my government tells me.”
Ms. Muthana is demanding through her lawyers to return to the U.S., claiming to be an American citizen. The issue in dispute is whether, at the time of her birth, her father was still a Yemeni diplomat. If he was, under international law and diplomatic conventions, she is not a U.S. citizen, regardless of the uncontested fact of her U.S. birth.
Ms. Muthana, 19 at the time she left for ISIS’s self-styled caliphate, says she was seduced online and “brainwashed” into joining and denied that leaving America for a sworn enemy means that she hated the U.S.
“I didn’t hate America” she told Fox News. “I didn’t hate anything. I just thought it was obligatory — when I started practicing I was very scared of the concept of hellfire. The Koran told me to go.”
Fox reporter Benjamin Hall wrote that, besides Ms. Muthana, the other ISIS families in the refugee camp in Syria all regret joining the terrorist group, but he suggested a case of motivated reasoning.
“Today, every ISIS member I speak to says they regret their decision. But it seems clear they only changed their mind when it became clear their caliphate had been defeated,” he wrote.
• Victor Morton can be reached at vmorton@washingtontimes.com.
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