Hoda Muthana
Hoda Muthana (born c. 1994 in the United States) is an expatriate former member of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a militant group which was engaged in violent religiously-motivated conflict in Iraq and Syria.
Muthana was the youngest of five children raised in Hoover by parents who immigrated from Yemen. She graduated from Hoover High School in 2013 and briefly attended business classes at UAB until leaving the country in November 2014. She was raised under close discipline and had few close friends at school, or even in the Muslim community centered around the Hoover Islamic Center.
In 2012 Muthana became interested in stricter versions of Islam through sermons on YouTube. She assumed more modest dress and filled notebooks with transcriptions of the Quran, pleasing her parents. At the same time, she adopted the persona of a conservative and even militant Islamist on social media sites like Twitter. Through the internet, she interacted with adherents of the "Islamic State" movement, which extols the formation of a new caliphate to render all other national governments invalid. She further isolated herself from her community and aligned herself with ISIS ideology.
Muthana received help from ISIS contacts in formulating plans to move to Syria and join the movement. She renewed her expired passport, then immediately withdrew from UAB after enrolling for Spring classes in order to receive a refund check. In November 2014, while her father was in Washington D.C., she claimed to be going on a field trip to Atlanta in order to maintain her grades. She contacted her sister that evening to say she had boarded the "wrong bus" and would have to spend the night. Her next call came from Turkey, when she informed her sister of her true intentions.
Muthana's father immediately notified the FBI of his daughter's actions. He was able to speak to her by telephone from Syria the next day, and Hoda told him that she would be working with widows and orphans as a missionary, not as a fighter. A month later, she contacted her father again to ask for money to flee to Turkey as a refugee because she was being pressured to marry against her will. He realized that the request was dishonest, however, and sent no money. She was, she later acknowledged, pleased to marry in the Islamic State without her father's blessing. On December 20 in Raqqa, she married Suhan Rahman, a recruit from Melbourne, Austrialia who took the name Abu Jihad al-Australi. Rahman was reportedly killed by Jordanian air strikes against ISIS in Syria on March 17, 2015. Shortly after her husband's death, Muthana appealed for violence against Americans on Twitter.
She remarried, to a Tunisian fighter, and gave birth to a son in late 2017. Her second husband was killed in action in Mosul. She was married again to a Syrian-born member of the group, but as the Islamic State's territorial losses mounted, she began making plans to escape. In late 2018 she fled with her infant son from the village of Susa with a group of other exiles from ISIS. They spent two nights in the desert before being captured by Kurdish forces and brought to the al-Hawl refugee camp in northern Syria. She is the only American among the 1,500 or so foreign women and children held there.
In an interview for The Guardian in February 2019, Muthana expressed regret for her previous support for ISIS, saying, "I was really young and ignorant and I was 19 when I decided to leave."
References
- Hall, Ellie (April 17, 2015) "Gone Girl: An Interview With An American In ISIS" BuzzFeed News
- Anderson, Jon (April 20, 2015) "Hoover woman joins ISIS: Meet Hoda Muthana who fled U.S. to Syria." The Birmingham News
- Gore, Leada (April 19, 2016) "What happened to Hoda Muthana, Alabama girl who joined ISIS?." The Birmingham News
- Chulov, Martin & Bethan McKernan (February 17, 2019) "Hoda Muthana 'deeply regrets' joining Isis and wants to return home." The Guardian