Gumpette Who Joined ISIS Wants to Return to US

A woman who ran away from home in Alabama at the age of 20, joined the Islamic State group and had a child with one of its fighters says she still hopes to return to the United States, serve prison time if necessary, and advocate against the extremists.

In a rare interview from the Roj detention camp in Syria where she is being held by US-allied Kurdish forces, Hoda Muthana said she was brainwashed by online traffickers into joining the group in 2014 and regrets everything except her young son, now of pre-school age.

“If I need to sit in prison, and do my time, I will do it. … I won’t fight against it,” the 28-year-old told The News Movement. “I’m hoping my government looks at me as someone young at the time and naive.”

But four years earlier, at the height of the extremists’ power, she had voiced enthusiastic support for them on social media and in an interview with BuzzFeed News. IS then ruled a self-declared Islamic caliphate stretching across roughly a third of both Syria and Iraq. In posts sent from her Twitter account in 2015 she called on Americans to join the group and carry out attacks in the US, suggesting drive-by shootings or vehicle rammings targeting gatherings for national holidays.

Muthana was born in New Jersey to Yemeni immigrants and once had a US passport. She was raised in a conservative Muslim household in Hoover, Alabama, just outside Birmingham. In 2014, she told her family she was going on a school trip but flew to Turkey and crossed into Syria instead, funding the travel with tuition checks that she had secretly cashed.

As of June 2024, Muthana and her 7 year old son were being held in the Al-Roj detention camp (along with over 65,000 suspected Islamic State members and their families) in north-east Syria by US-allied Kurdish forces. [20][21][22] At this time she was well-known in the camp for being outspoken. She did not wear a face veil and scrawled F-ISIS on the wall outside her tent. She told CNN that "all she wanted" was to return to the US, and that she would prefer to serve time in an American prison.[20]

In February 2026, Muthana and her son were still at al-Roj, and in an interview she expressed her desire to be "repatriated" to the US and face prosecution according to due process



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