Trump slams door on American-born Islamic State bride

A US-born former Islamic State propagandist will not be allowed to go home to the US.

Hoda Muthana’s lawyer Hassan Shibly. Picture: AP

US President Donald Trump said yesterday he was barring a US-born former Islamic State propagandist from returning home, making the highly unusual case that she is not a US citizen.

Mr Trump’s refusal to admit 24-year-old Hoda Muthana comes just as he is pressing Europeans to repatriate their own ­Islamic State fighters, and will ­likely face legal challenges, as US citizensh­ip is extremely difficult to lose.

The US decision on Ms Muth­ana comes amid debate in ­Europe on the nationality of extremists. Britain this week revoked the citizenship of Shamina Begum, who travelled to Syria and wants to return­ to her country of birth.

Britain asserted that she was entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship due to her heritage, but the Dhaka government yesterday denied that she was eligible, leaving her effect­ively stateless.

Mr Trump said on Twitter that he had “instructed” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “not to allow Hoda Muthana back into the country” — a break with usual US protocol not to comment on indiv­iduals’ immigration issues.

“Ms Hoda Muthana is not a US citizen and will not be admitted into the United States,” Mr Pompe­o said in a terse statement. “She does not have any legal basis, no valid US passport, no right to a passport, nor any visa to travel to the United States.”

The US generally grants citizen­ship to everyone born on its soil and the Alabama-raised Ms Muthana is believed to have travelled­ to Syria on a US passport.

But a US official said a later investig­ation showed that she had not been entitled to her passport, adding: “Ms Muthana’s citizenship has not been revoked because she was never a citizen.”

In a loophole that could boost the government case, Ms Muth­ana’s father had been a diplomat from Yemen and children of diplomats are not automatically given citizenship.

Her lawyer, Hassan Shilby, showed a birth certificate that demonstrated she was born in New Jersey in 1994, and said her father had ceased being a diplomat “months and months” before her birth. “She is a US citizen. She had a valid passport. She may have broken the law and, if she has, she’s willing to pay the price,” Mr Shilby said from his office in Tampa.

He said Ms Muthana wanted due process and was willing to go to prison if convicted. “We cannot get to a point where we simply strip citizenship from those who break the law. That’s not what America is about. We have one of the greatest legal systems in the world, and we have to abide by it.”

At the weekend, Mr Trump took to Twitter to chastise Europ­ean allies that have not taken back hundreds of Islamic State prisoners caught in Syria, where he plans to withdraw US troops.

Comparatively few Americans have embraced radical Islam. The Counter Extremism Project at George­ Washington University in the US capital has identified 64 who went to join ­Islamic State in Syria or Iraq.

Ms Muthana, raised in a strict household in Hoover, Alabama, said she was brainwashed by social media messages and headed to Syria without her parents’ knowledge in 2014.

Shortly afterwards, she posted on Twitter a picture of herself and three other women who appeared to torch their Western passports, including an American one. She went on to post vivid calls on social media to kill Americans, glorifying the ruthless extremist group, not­orious for its beheadings, that once ruled vast swaths of Syria and Iraq.

But with Islamic State down to its last stretch of land, Ms Muth­ana said she had renounced extremis­m and wanted to return home with her toddler son, born to one of her three jihadist husbands.

“To say that I regret my past words, any pain that I caused my family and any concerns I would cause my country would be hard for me to really express properly,” she said in a handwritten note to her lawyer.

AFP