GREENE: I mean, there are hundreds of ISIS fighters, as well as women and children, who are being detained by coalition forces still today. I mean, here, I guess, the technicality, again, is that the administration is arguing that she isn't a citizen. He's urged all countries to take back their citizens. Isn't this exactly what the Trump administration has been urging European countries to do, though - to bring home people who joined ISIS? GREENE: There's a lot of technicalities - a lot of technicalities, maybe, to work through. One possible reason is that the State Department may be saying her father was a Yemeni diplomat, so he - the family would've been under Yemeni jurisdiction, except the lawyer says the father gave up the diplomat's job before she was born. and that she did have a valid passport that she used to travel to Syria. So she's got - he's got a birth certificate showing she was born in the U.S. Muthana's lawyer, however, says that he has evidence that she is an American citizen. And President Trump tweeted his support for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's decision. no valid passport or right to a passport, nor a travel visa. They say they've got - that she has no legal basis to be in the U.S. SHERLOCK: So they're saying that she isn't a U.S. So talk about what the Trump administration is arguing here, in terms of refusing to let her back here. She's ready to serve time in prison if she has to. I mean, her lawyer says she wants to repay her debt to society. GREENE: Well, and return to the United States not, like, to be free. She has a child now, and she wants to return to the U.S. SHERLOCK: She also says that all this made her wake up and change. We would see kids seeing dead bodies in public. HODA MUTHANA: We would see dead bodies in public. But then, she says, she saw a lot of the violence of ISIS firsthand. The New York Times reports that she posted - she used a pseudonym to post messages on Twitter that actually called for attacks on Americans. It does seem that, for a while, she was convinced about ISIS' mission. And from there, she crossed into Syria to join ISIS. But then she duped her parents into thinking that she was going on a college trip, but then, you know - every parent's nightmare - bought a plane ticket with the tuition money to Turkey. SHERLOCK: Well, so she was a student in Alabama, as far as we know. GREENE: So how did Hoda Muthana end up in Syria in the first place? And what happened to her? What was she doing during her time with ISIS? GREENE: So what's going to happen next here? Let's turn to NPR's Ruth Sherlock, who has been following this story from Beirut. MARTIN: But the Trump administration says she is not a citizen and will not be allowed to come back to the United States. HASSAN SHIBLY: She is disgusted by the person she was. Her family's lawyer spoke to NPR this week. She eventually fled the caliphate and is now living in a Kurdish refugee camp. Her name is Hoda Muthana, and she was a student at the University of Alabama when she decided in 2014 to just leave her life behind and travel to Syria to join the Islamic State. We begin with the story of a 24-year-old woman who fled America to join ISIS.
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