The US Supreme Court has refused to hear the case of an American-born woman who left the country to become an ISIS bride and now wants to return home.
The high court’s justices declined to consider the appeal of Hoda Muthana, who travelled to Syria in 2014 after becoming radicalised online, married three jihadis and had a son there.
While she was overseas, the Obama administration ruled that she was not a US citizen as she had been born in New Jersey to a diplomat from Yemen, and cancelled her passport.
Her family in Alabama has sued to allow her to return to the US, but a federal judge ruled in 2019 that the US government had been right in ruling her a non-citizen, despite her birth in the country, as children of diplomats are not entitled to birthright citizenship.
Her family again appealed, claiming that her father’s diplomatic status had ended before her birth, making her a citizen.
In 2015, she took to Twitter to celebrate burning her US passport online and called for Memorial Day 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 parades..go on drive by’s + spill all of their blood or rent a big truck n drive all over them. Kill them,” she tweeted.
She surrendered to US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces as Islamic State were losing control of their self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
But she has since said that she regrets joining the group and now wants to return home with her toddler son.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2019, the ex-jihadi claims she “deeply regrets” leaving the US, and that she believed she was doing what was right according to Islam.
“I thought I was doing things correctly for the sake of God,” she told The Guardian in 2019.
“I was really young and ignorant and I was 19 when I decided to leave.”