Marine Veteran Says ISIS Bride Shouldn’t Be Allowed Back Into US

Marine Veteran Says ISIS Bride Shouldn’t Be Allowed Back Into US
Hoda Muthana, an Alabama woman who left home to join ISIS after becoming radicalized online. Hoda Muthana/Attorney Hassan Shibly via AP
Zachary Stieber
Updated:

A Marine Corps veteran said that ISIS bride Hoda Muthana, who top American officials say is a terrorist, should not be allowed back into the United States years after she left to join the terror group in Syria.

Hoda Muthana, 24, left to join the radical Islamist group in 2014 when she was 18 and a college student in Alabama.

She later married three ISIS fighters and had a son with at least one of them. At least two of the fighters died in battle; the status of the third isn’t clear.

Serving as a top propagandist for the group, Muthana was an active social media user who at one point posted on Twitter exhorting Muslims in the United States to carry out terror attacks.

“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 parade,” she said in one post.

Muthana’s family and legal team have argued that she should be let back into the United States because she’s sorry for what she did and will “pay her debts” to society.
Joey Jones, a retired Marine bomb technician who lost both his legs while serving in Afghanistan, told Fox News that he doesn’t think Muthana is remorseful and that she should not be allowed back into the United States.

“We send our men and women every day—thousands by the year—to go somewhere and possibly die, so that we can stay safe and secure here,” Jones said. “And we have an opportunity to keep one of those enemy people from coming onto our shores, and we should do everything we can to stop that from happening.”

An ISIS flag is taken down from an electricity pole on March 3, 2016. (Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images)
An ISIS flag is taken down from an electricity pole on March 3, 2016. Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images
Jones also praised President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for not “looking for the legal and foolproof approach to keep her away from this amazing country.”

“We can’t take that risk, and we shouldn’t take that risk,” he said.

Trump announced on Feb. 20 that he instructed Pompeo not to allow Muthana back into the United States.

Pompeo strongly condemned Muthana on March 4, telling reporters: “She’s a terrorist.”

“This is a woman who went online and tried to kill young men and women of the United States of America. She advocated for jihad, for people to drive vans across streets here in the United States and kill Americans,” he said.

“She’s not a U.S. citizen. She has no claim of U.S. citizenship. In fact, she’s a terrorist, and we shouldn’t bring back foreign terrorists to the United States of America. It’s not the right thing to do.”

“President Trump is determined that she will not come back. And we don’t need that kind of risk, and we don’t need people like her who threatened the lives of Americans and Iowans coming back to the United States who aren’t citizens,” he added.

It’s not clear what exactly Muthana did while in Syria and the case highlights how, historically, women who were part of violent groups or regimes, such as the Nazis, used their gender to try to shirk punishment, noted Jessica Trisko Darden, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Hoda Muthana, now 24, in a 2012 yearbook picture. (Hoover High School)
Hoda Muthana, now 24, in a 2012 yearbook picture. Hoover High School

Drawing from several books, including “Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields,” Trisko noted that like most Nazi women, the women in ISIS did not engage in armed combat but many helped perpetrate horrific crimes.

“Women’s roles in armed groups vary. But, in large part due to their ability to blur the line between civilian and combatant, women’s often unseen contributions to conflict can be key to an armed group’s success,” she wrote in an article published on The Conversation.

“The mobilization of more than 4,700 women like Shamima Begum and Hoda Muthana by ISIS was unprecedented because they were foreign. But women’s participation in violent projects to remake their societies is more common than we realize.”

She added, “Tens of thousands of Nazi women escaped justice. This historical precedent should be considered as governments decide how they will hold the women of ISIS to account for their crimes.”

Zachary Stieber
Zachary Stieber
Senior Reporter
Zachary Stieber is a senior reporter for The Epoch Times based in Maryland. He covers U.S. and world news. Contact Zachary at [email protected]
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