ISIS bride begging to return to US says therapy is good punishment

Hoda Muthana, the Alabama woman who spent four years as an ISIS bride, said she hopes Americans will have sympathy for her – and suggested in her first TV interview that therapy would be a reasonable form of punishment for joining the terror group.

“I hope they excuse me because of how young and ignorant I was. Now I’m changed. Now I’m a mother and I have none of the ideology and hopefully everyone will see it when I come back,” she told ABC News. “I hope America doesn’t think I’m a threat to them and I hope they can accept me.”

Muthana suggested undergoing therapy once she’s back in the US.

“Maybe therapy lessons. Maybe a process that will ensure us we will never do this again. I am definitely planning, definitely wanting people to not make the same decision that I’ve made,” she said.

Muthana, 24, who fled ISIS three weeks ago, told ABC News she felt obligated to travel to Syria to join the jihadists once they announced ISIS’ so-called caliphate.

Speaking from a refugee camp in northern Syria, with her 18-month-old son seated on her lap, she said she was born in New Jersey and moved to New York and then to Washington, DC, before settling in Alabama when she was in the seventh grade.

Her family was very strict and she longed to have a normal life with friends, she said, so she turned to social media – specifically Twitter – before becoming radicalized.

After joining ISIS, she spread messages of hate and called for attacks on Americans.

“Americans wake up. … Go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood. … Veterans, patriots,” she wrote in one tweet about a Memorial Day weekend.

Muthana, who first traveled to Turkey, recalled getting shot when she crossed into Syrian territory in November 2014.

She was placed in a safe house in Raqqa — the so-called capital of the caliphate — along with 200 other people.

One option for her to leave the crammed house was to get married, she said, so she got hitched to an Australian ISIS fighter who was killed three months later.

She later married a Tunisian, who fathered her only child, a son. The man was killed about a year later, she said.

“Everyone blames the struggles of the things that go on in a war zone that it’s a test from God basically,” Muthana told ABC News.

She said she was ashamed of the hateful tweets she posted when she was part of ISIS.

“I was still at the peak of being brainwashed, I guess, and I had people all around me that were just widowed so we were very angry … because we were all just young girls married for the first time — most of us it was our first relationships — and then he just suddenly died,” she said.

“I can’t even believe I thought of that.”

She said that she and her son were forced to eat the wheat that was fed to cattle – and decided it was time to surrender to Kurdish authorities after she ended up frying grass to feed her son.

“Everyone was starving,” she said.

She expressed regret about her social media posts inciting violence against Americans.

“I wish I could take it completely off the Net, completely out of people’s memory. … I regret it. … I hope America doesn’t think I’m a threat to them and I hope they can accept me and I’m just a normal human being who’s been manipulated once and hopefully never again,” she said.

Muthana said US diplomatic officials had not contacted her yet and worries that if and when she returns to the US, she will be separated from her son and jailed.

Muthana’s family lawyer, Hassan Shibly, told ABC News that she was “brainwashed” by ISIS and now feels “tremendous remorse.”

“This is a young, vulnerable woman who was brainwashed and manipulated by monsters who took advantage of her,” Shibly said.

“Hoda is absolutely disgusted by the person she became while under the spell,” Shibly added.