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.
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.
“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.”
“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.
“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.
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.
“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.”
