The Chilling Timeline of the ISIS Bride Who Wants to Return to America

Claudia Rosett

Hassan Shibly, attorney for Hoda Muthana, the Alabama 

woman who left home to join the Islamic State in Syria,

. . . "But there's another timeline that ought to matter here. Not for legal purposes, but in the broader context of how Hoda Muthana's story is now playing to the American public. What about the timeline of high-profile ISIS atrocities -- the context in which she made her choices?

"In the media coverage of this case, all that bloody record of deliberately inflicted human agony seems to have faded into some remote and misty past, summarized in maybe a sentence or two -- or symbolized on the TV news by short video clips of ISIS fighters waving black flags and shooting guns, with no obvious target. As far as I'm aware, no media outlet has so far juxtaposed an interview of Hoda Muthana with such signature ISIS footage as videos of American hostages, on their knees, about to be beheaded by ISIS; or that young Jordanian pilot burned alive in a cage.

"Instead, we're invited to focus our attention and sympathies on a young woman in a headscarf, holding her infant son or pushing him in a stroller around a refugee camp, telling her assorted media interlocutors that in joining ISIS she made a "big mistake." This past week she told ABC News that she regrets joining ISIS, and she hopes Americans will "excuse me because of how young and ignorant I was."

"Was it really nothing but youth and ignorance? Hoda was 20 when she went to Syria to join ISIS -- older than many of the victims whose sufferings ISIS was gloating over at the time. She's now 24, and only now, with ISIS stripped of its caliphate -- thanks to others, including members of the American military who risked or gave their lives to fight the terrorists she joined -- is she publicly disavowing ISIS. And though in her recent interviews she's been expressing plenty of regret about the misfortunes ISIS brought to her own life, she's said almost nothing about what ISIS did, while she urged and cheered it on, to thousands upon thousands who had no choice at all. They are not on camera in these interviews. Many of them are dead." . . .