How a sheltered American woman became a radical ISIS jihadi
The American woman who fled the US to join ISIS — and is now begging to be allowed to come home — once urged US jihadis to plow a truck though Memorial Day parades and “spill all of their blood.”
“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,” Hoda Muthana tweeted in 2015, according to a BuzzFeed report.
Muthana — who is now in a refugee camp in Syria and pleading to return to her family in Alabama — also used her now-suspended Twitter account to lament the lack of Americans fighting for ISIS, and instructed supporters back in the States to “Terrorize the kuffar at home,” using a derogatory term for non-Muslims.
Muthana told the outlet in 2015 that she became a radical jihadi from the comfort of her home in Hoover, Ala., while leading a secret double life on social media.
The shy, sheltered daughter of Yemeni immigrants, her path to the terror group began when she received her first smartphone — a traditional gift in her strict but loving family — after graduating from high school in May 2013.
She began watching lectures about Islam on YouTube and grew increasingly devout.
“[My parents] liked the change until they saw me getting ‘jihadi,’” she told the outlet.
Online, she said, she found an Islamic community that she liked far more than the one she had grown up with in Hoover.
Her parents had banned her from using social media, but Muthana managed to set up a secret Twitter account, where she adopted a new, radical persona and began attracting thousands of followers and meeting ISIS members.
“I really think that her Twitter was her alter ego,” a former classmate who knew of the account told BuzzFeed.
“What she lacked in her personality she would make up for on Twitter.”
The classmate says Muthana tried to portray herself on Twitter as more conservative than she had been in real life, and her alter ego became increasingly radical and “religious extremist” — attacking other Muslim women for not wearing the hijab “properly,” for example.
“She posted a lot of really weird things,” the classmate told BuzzFeed. “Things that aren’t average Muslim women views.”
By the end of 2013, Muthana said, she had already begun planning to move to Syria.
People she met online helped her plan her escape a year later. She told her family she was going on a student trip to Atlanta, but instead used college tuition money to buy a plane ticket and jetted off to the Middle East.
After joining ISIS, she continued to post online and was married off to a series of fighters, eventually giving birth to a son.
In an interview published Monday, she told the Guardian she fled six weeks ago and was captured by Kurdish forces, who brought her to a refugee camp.
Muthana said she was “brainwashed” by ISIS — but claims her Twitter account was taken over by others in Syria.
She blamed her sheltered upbringing for being so susceptible to the online radicalization.
“You want to go out with your friends and I didn’t get any of that. I turned to my religion and went in too hard. I was self-taught and thought whatever I read, it was right,” she said.