ISIS Brides Do Their Little Turn On the Catwalk

Yes! I thought so. The ISIS Brides are definitely going for public acceptance via new clothes and - oddly, I think - ball caps. 

Here's a story about a newly westernized French ISIS Bride:

Emilie Konig, 36, was pictured in her new westernised garb at the al-Roj camp in northern Syria in recent days - the same camp where Begum is being held - as she tries to convince people she is no longer radicalized so she can return to France.

Gone was the heavy black niqab, gloves and abaya robe that she previously wore - even while living in France - and in its place she wore a hooded sweatshirt, sunglasses, faux leather leggings, white hi-top trainers and a shoulder bag.

Her head was covered with a Yankees baseball cap, with her hair hanging down her shoulder in a plait.

The look mirrors that of Begum, who first appeared in interviews from Syria dressed in a black hijab and abaya robe - but recently swapped them for a baseball cap, sunglasses, hoodie, white blouse, black jeans and white Converse-style trainers.

Begum, like Konig, adopted the look while trying to convince people she no longer poses a danger so she can return to Britain, which has stripped her of her citizenship because of her membership in ISIS.

Eilish O’Gara, a counter-terrorism analyst with the Henry Jackson Society, previously theorised that the outfit is 'a soft tactic' devised by Begum's lawyers designed to 'win back the hearts and minds of the British public'.

Just "a soft tactic." But, I'm telling you, it's a tactic that is likely to work.

ISIS Bride Makeovers - the Latest Tactic to Gain Sympathy?

This one might work, whereas the old tactic of minimizing their complicity with the caliphate fell flat.

Check out the remarkable before and after photos of Shamima Begum, the ISIS bride who lost her British citizenship (she also had and still has Bangladeshi citizenship) and is now stranded in a camp in Syria while she pleads for the Brits to take her back.

Gone is the shapeless hijab, and on is the nicely-fitting tee shirt and jeans. Now she looks like any young woman you might see in the West right down to the lipstick and bright red nail polish. The Nike ball cap is a nice accessory, too.

Shallow and silly as it may be, this approach will make her more relatable to the British public, or I miss my guess.

"Alabama Woman" Regrets Becoming an ISIS Bride

Hoda Multana, the woman born in New Jersey and raised in Alabama who at age 20 traveled to Syria where she did social media for ISIS, is featured in a film about the women, like her, who are now stranded in Syria after the collapse of the ISIS califate. The film is The Return: Life After ISIS, which is a title altogether too optimistic for Multhana's particular situation, given that she had her U.S. citizenship revoked due to her father's status as a Yemini diplomat at the time of her birth, making her return impossible.

From this week's New York Post story about her:

“ISIS bride” Hoda Muthana — who fled Alabama to join ISIS in 2014 and is now barred from returning to the US — said she will regret the decision “for the rest of my life,” according to a report on Wednesday.

Muthana, 26, tried to explain what led her to become part of the terror group in the new documentary “The Return: Life After ISIS” by Spanish filmmaker Alba Sotorra Clua, People reported.

“When you are brainwashed, you don’t realize it until you snap out of it,” Muthana said. “I took everything too fast, and too deep.”

What she experienced was “this horrible way of life that I really regret for the rest of my life and that I wish I could just erase,” she says in the film, according to People.

The most American thing about her is the way she blames her overly strict parents and her poor relationship with her mother for her decision to go to Syria.

“I grew up as an American, born and raised in America, and all I had waiting for me in the future was an arranged marriage — the exact way my parents wanted it to be,” Muthana continued. “So I had no time to dream about anything.”

Disappointment set in at once, she now says:

In Syria, Muthana insisted that she expected to find “a happy place with Muslims, helping in hospitals, helping in schools, helping a community out and just being good decent Muslims to each other.”

Instead, “It was a big mess. It was hell on earth. Really,” she said.

But then, why did she propagandize for ISIS for quite some time before the califate collapsed? As the story notes:

She continued to post online, celebrating burning her US passport and calling for attacks on Americans.

That is a puzzle.

However it Ends for the ISIS Bride, She Did it Her Way

A photo shared by Hoda Muthana on her now-closed @ZumarulJanna Twitter account

The Program on Extremism at the George Washington University issued a report last year on the phenomenon of American foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq. Read it here: The Travelers, American Jihadists in Syria and Iraq. It mentions Hoda Muthana and has some general remarks about the American women, comprising eleven percent of the travelers, who went there to join ISIS.

In November 2014, 20-year-old Hoda Muthana (kunya: Umm Jihad) left her hometown of Hoover, Alabama, for Syria. Prior to her departure, she was active in the community of English-speaking IS supporters on Twitter and other social media sites, and continued her online presence after arriving in Syria.

-- snip --

Despite the small sample size, American jihadist women travelers help shed light on Western women’s participation in jihadist networks. The three women above, alongside others in the sample, defy conventional stereotypes about how and why women (especially Western women) participate in jihadist movements. Although many presume that female jihadists are duped into participation, and motivated by the personal pursuit of love or validation, their contributions and motivations for engagement vary as much as their male counterparts. Though often relegated to support roles, women’s more “traditional” efforts as the wives and mothers of jihadists are not necessarily passive either. American women were committed to the jihadist cause and decided to travel on their own accord. They also appear to have played significant roles in their respective jihadist organizations. Muthana highlights the role of Western women in networks of online jihadist supporters, Nasrin served in a critically important and understaffed non-combat position (in a hospital), and Mansfield may have been more directly involved in operations.

Where does Hoda Muthana go from here? Will she manage to fight the State Department and get her day in court on the matter of birthright citizenship? The complaint filed on her behalf makes some fascinating points, and I would not count her out. All we know for sure is that she has no caliphate to go back to after five years of living the ISIS life. She made her own decisions, and soon she'll have to own up to what she's done.

And now the end is near, and so she'll face the final curtain. My friend, she'll say it clear, she'll state her case, of which she's certain. She's lived a life that's full, and traveled each and every highway. And more, much more than this, she did it her way.

Regrets, she's had a few. But then again, too few to mention. She did what she had to do, and saw it through without exemption. She planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway. And more, much more than this, she did it her way.

Yes, there were times, I'm sure you knew, when she bit off more than she could chew. But through it all, when there was doubt she ate it up and spit it out. She faced it all and she stood tall, and did it her way.

She's loved, she's laughed and cried, she had her fill, her share of losing. And now, as tears subside she finds it all, all so amusing. To think she did all that, and may I say, not in a shy way, oh no, no not her, she did it her way.

For what is a woman, what has she got? If not herself, then she has naught. To say the things she truly feels, and not the words of one who kneels. The record shows she took the blows, and did it her-er-er-er way.

Law Suit Filed on Behalf of ISIS Bride

Social media incitement in the Spanish Civil War

I seriously think we can get a lot of insight about the foreign fighters who joined ISIS, and what to do about them now that they want to be repatriated, by looking to the historical example of the foreign fighters who joined the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

They even had great female propagandists who riled up the troops, the most famous of whom was Dolores Ibárruri – La Pasionaria – who did all her work with just a microphone and a radio broadcast. What new levels of incitement she might have achieved with a Twitter account!

But, back to our present day social media inciter, Hoda Muthana. Her father filed a lawsuit on her behalf requesting injunctive relief to prevent the government from ruling on her lack of birthright citizenship without due process.

Hoda Muthana Lawsuit by on Scribd

It comes down to a battle of the letters. Mr. Muthana waves that 2004 USUN document with its all-important employment termination date of September 1, 1994 – just a month short of his daughter’s birth – and the USG replies with its 2016 letter that informed Muthana the U.S. Government was not notified of his loss of diplomatic employment until after his daughter’s birth.

The letters are brandished in paragraphs 21 and 25:

21. Utilizing his daughter’s birth certificate, Mr. Muthana applied for a passport for his minor daughter Hoda Muthana in 2004. After receiving this application, officials from the United States State Department initially questioned whether Ms. Muthana was eligible for a U.S. passport, based on their records showing her father’s diplomatic status remained in effect until February 6, 1995. In response, Ahmed Ali Muthana provided the government with Exhibit C, a letter from the United States Mission to the United Nations, signed by Russell F. Graham, Minister Counselor for Host Country Affairs, and addressed to Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, which confirms that the diplomatic status he had due to his employment at the U.N. was terminated prior to the time of Ms. Muthana’s birth. The United States accepted this documentation and issued Hoda Muthana the requested passport on January 24, 2005. Exhibit D. The United States also later renewed Ms. Muthana’s passport on February 21, 2014.

25. On January 15, 2016, the United States issued a letter addressed to Ms. Muthana at her parents’ residence, purporting to revoke her passport under 22 C.F.R. 51.7 and 51.66. Exhibit D. In the revocation letter, the government again acknowledged that her father’s diplomatic position ended on September 1, 1994, but now asserted for the first time that because the U.S. Permanent Mission to the United Nations, Host Country Affairs Section, had not been officially notified of his termination until February 6, 1995, she was not “within the jurisdiction of the United States” at the time of her birth, and therefore not a United States citizen pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

Notice the dates in para 25. It was in 2016, during the Obama administration, that the State Department revoked her passport because it had concluded she was not a citizen at the time of her birth. (Here’s a headline you'll never see: “Trump agrees with Obama, Alabama woman not a citizen under 14th Amendment”)

So then, the father was well aware of the USG’s position on the matter of his daughter’s lack of U.S. citizenship long before this became a news story. It turns out he was not entirely forthcoming when he released that 2004 USUN memo to the news media earlier this week; he could have also released the 2016 letter in which the State Department informed him that it did not end his diplomatic status until it was notified that his employment at the Yemeni UN Mission had been terminated, which notification occurred after the birth of his daughter Hoda.

And then there is the separate matter of whether or not Hoda Muthana expatriated herself, assuming she was in fact a birthright citizen, by her act of joining the ISIS caliphate. The complaint addresses that matter indirectly in a footnote on page ten:

Birthright citizenship may be revoked under 8 U.S.C. § 1481 for “formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state or a political subdivision thereof.” However, none of the circumstances set out in § 1401 is facially applicable to the facts of this case, as ISIS is not and has not been recognized as a state by the United States, or any country. And, Ms. Muthana’s actions do not meet the definition of treason as required by the statute. Apart from § 1481, counsel is not aware of any statutory process to revoke recognized birthright citizenship.

Facially applicable? I suppose that refers to something of or pertaining to surface appearances. Well, below the surface I don’t think that argument works at all.

Of course we didn’t diplomatically recognize the ISIS caliphate. So what? It didn’t need our recognition. It declared its own sovereignty, as do all states, and it operated as a full-fledged state until it was militarily destroyed.

We also didn’t recognize the USSR as a state until 1933. Nevertheless, if a birthright U.S. citizen had moved there and declared his allegiance to the USSR before 1933, we would surely have revoked his citizenship.

Count 8 of the complaint also goes to the issue of expatriating acts:

As United States Citizens, Ms. Muthana and her minor child have the right to return to the United States under international law, and the United States government has a vested interest in assisting U.S. citizens who flee armed conflict on foreign soil.

Ms. Muthana and her young son have succeeded in escaping ISIS-controlled territory; however, they are still located in an area of Syria which is riddled by conflict and violence. Since 2011, “fighting in Syria has killed an estimated 465,000 people, injured more than one million, and forced about 12 million people - or half the country's pre-war population - from their homes.”

Although Mr. Muthana’s daughter has at times been in the company of ISIS fighters and present in ISIS-controlled territory, there is no evidence to suggest that she has taken part in any armed combat or hostilities.

Armed combat, no. But she certainly did take part in hostilities in that she incited others to violence. Furthermore she must have been in the company of ISIS fighters more than just occasionally since she married three of them, the first one only a month after she arrived in Syria. And it is a huge understatement to say she was merely "present" in ISIS-controlled territory when she had to scheme and plot to get there from Alabama without her family's knowledge, and she stayed there five years, leaving only after it collapsed.

What about her acts and words during her time in ISIS territory? See the UK Guardian article of last Sunday:

[She was] Once one of Isis’s most prominent online agitators who took to social media to call for the blood of Americans to be spilled.

- Snip -

Her experience in the so-called caliphate tracks the arc of Isis’s shocking rise and precipitous collapse over five brutal years. Muthana fled her home and took a flight to Turkey in November 2014 after several months of planning, which she kept secret from her family.

She settled into the Syrian city of Raqqa, then one of Isis’s two main hubs – the other being Mosul in Iraq – where she married an Australian jihadist, Suhan Rahman, the first of her three husbands.

Rahman was killed in the town of Kobanî, and soon afterwards Muthana angrily tweeted: “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 drivebys, and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them. Veterans, Patriots, Memorial, etc day … Kill them.”

For many months in 2015, her Twitter feed was full of bloodcurdling incitement, and she says she remained a zealot until the following year. She now says her account was taken over by others.

And this:

That same day [as the “kill them” tweet], she tweeted out a photo of her ISIS husband’s bloodied body:

“I’m the most content I have ever been in my life. … And never think of those who have been killed in the cause of Allah as dead,” according to the UK’s Daily Mail.

And then there was the tweet in which she urged the taking down of President Barack Obama:

“You can look up Obamas schedule on the white house website. Take down that treacherous tyrant!”

That's some very high level of hostility, and all at the service of ISIS when it was at its gruesome peak.

Today, she says it was all a big mistake and we should welcome her back. Not coincidentally, today the caliphate has been destroyed and its fighters largely annihilated.

More Documents Released in the ISIS Bride Case - Citizen or Not?

Muthana's tweet one month after arrival in Syria

After arriving in the ISIS caliphate in November 2014, Hoda Muthana went by a few different names on social media, including @AhlulDhikr, @ZumarulJannah, and Umm Jihad. You can find that passport bonfire tweet and more details at the Counter Extremism Project, which tracked her online activities for some time.

Did Hoda first make a copy of the inside page before she burned her passport? Because you never know if you might want a replacement passport some day.

And was that passport valid in the first place? Yesterday, the State Department released a statement that Hoda is not a U.S. citizen, despite being born in the U.S., because her father was a diplomat with the Yemeni Mission to the UN when she was born in 1994.

But today, her father released a 2004 document from the USUN that states he ceased to be a member of that Yemeni Mission one month before Hoda was born, which, if true, means she has a claim on U.S. citizenship. That document was used to obtain Hoda's first passport in 2004, at age ten.

That 2004 memo from the USUN may not fully answer the question of whether or not Hoda's father was a foreign diplomat when she was born. First of all, it has to be verified. Then, what exactly was the father's status after leaving the Yemeni UN mission? Did he retain his diplomatic passport and visa? Was he employed by another diplomatic mission of the Government of Yemen, say, its New York City Consulate? Doesn't Article 39 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations recognize immunity for a “reasonable period” of time between the end of an assignment and the diplomat’s departure from the country? What if he doesn't depart?

Furthermore, citizenship at birth aside, didn't Hoda Muthana in effect expatriate herself when she joined the ISIS caliphate?

There is an expatriation law explainer online that is generally supportive of Hoda's claim to citizenship, but also sums it up this way:

In a nutshell, the Supreme Court has repeatedly insisted that the Constitution requires expatriation to be based upon some voluntary, affirmative renunciation of citizenship or pledge of fealty to another sovereign – and not simply a punishment imposed by the state.

Can’t we reasonably conclude from Hoda Muthana's own words and actions that she did just that? That she voluntarily renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a loyal subject of, and an activist for, the ISIS caliphate? Or can she take back those words and actions now that ISIS has been destroyed and she’s changed her mind?

Historical side note-wise, there might be a pretty good precedent for how to treat foreign volunteers after a failed war: how were the U.S. citizen volunteers in the Spanish Civil War repatriated after the collapse of the Spanish Republic? Some of them never got back. 

Plot Twist in 'ISIS Bride' Repatriation Case

"Alabama woman" according to CNN, but by way of Yemen

Well, well, well, it looks like the latest ISIS bride will not be coming back to sweet home Alabama, despite her claims to now regret the social media work she did for the caliphate. It appears that she is not a U.S. citizen, and is therefore someone else's problem.

'ISIS bride' Hoda Muthana is not a US citizen: Sec. Pompeo

In her first television interview, the 24-year-old Alabama woman who spent four years as an "ISIS bride" told ABC News she felt shame hearing the tweets she posted when she was part of ISIS and wants to return to the U.S. with her 18-month-old son, who was born under the terror group.

But in a statement, Pompeo said she "is not a U.S. citizen and will not be admitted into the United States. She does not have any legal basis, no valid U.S. passport, no right to a passport, nor any visa to travel to the United States."

Muthana was born to a Yemeni diplomat in New Jersey and moved to New York and then Washington, D.C., before finally settling with her family in Alabama as a seventh grader, she said.

While children born in America are granted citizenship under the 14th Amendment, children of foreign diplomats are not because they are not under the "jurisdiction of" the U.S., according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Still, children of diplomats can apply for residency and then eventually citizenship, per USCIS.

Here's the official announcement. Apparently somebody is working at State despite the snow day.