In late 2014, a young woman named Hoda Muthana slipped away from her Alabama home to travel to Syria as one more volunteer for the Islamic State. Over the ensuing years, her parents, Ahmed Ali and Sadiqa, experienced the rise and fall of the caliphate through their daughter’s WhatsApp messages, which morphed from semi-reassuring updates on her whereabouts to terrifying statements of ideological passion. She pleaded for her parents, who were from Yemen, to join her in Raqqa: “You and Mom have to come, we’ll all die here together and go straight to jannah,” to heaven. On Twitter, she posted for her international following under the name Umm Jihad—the Mother of Jihad—inciting her readers to drive vans into crowds, among other acts of war. American troops, she wrote, “cry for their lives while we cry for our death.”

For the first couple of years she was gone, Hoda appeared content with her chosen life, and strenuously resisted her father’s pleas to surrender to the United States. But throughout 2017 and 2018, ISIS was crumbling under the concurrent assaults of Kurds, Americans, Turks, Iranians, and Russians, and she started to realize she had made a terrible mistake. She lost two successive husbands in battles against the encroaching coalition. By the middle of 2018, as famine set in within the shrinking territory ISIS still controlled and civilians were reduced to eating fried grass, as if in some biblical siege, Hoda began to lose faith in the cause. She grew more afraid of dying in exile than facing trial back home, concerned not only for herself but also for her infant son, her child with a Tunisian ISIS recruit. Whatever happened to her, she told her father, she wanted the boy to have a life.



The trouble was that getting out was as dangerous as staying. Flight was punishable by death. Ahmed Ali feared she would fall into the hands of Syrians, Turks, or Russians—which meant, at absolute best, imprisonment by authorities who answered to nobody in particular and wouldn’t care that Hoda was an American citizen. To the south, Iraq had sentenced thousands to death—including European nationals—on even the vague suspicion of ISIS membership. So Ahmed Ali tried to get his daughter into American hands. Together with Charles Swift, a lawyer from the Constitutional Law Center for Muslims in America, he negotiated with the FBI to be prepared to receive her if she made it into allied territory. Meanwhile, he and Swift texted Hoda maps indicating the locations of approaching American and Kurdish forces.

During each of Hoda’s attempts to escape, she left her phone behind so as to avoid being caught with incriminating evidence. Twice she was apprehended; both times, she evaded punishment by convincing the guards she was looking for food. Finally Swift, a former Navy lawyer, texted her: “When the guard post disappears from the lines ... that means the opposition is close. They will start worrying about themselves and stop worrying about you.” Then, he told her, walk toward the sounds of cannons.

In late 2018, as Iraqi forces closed in on the village of Sousa, Hoda set off across the desert with her son. The Muthanas waited two nerve-wracking, helpless days, until Ahmed Ali’s phone buzzed with an unknown number: Hoda had been picked up by a unit of the independent Kurdish soldiers called peshmerga. Swift expected she would make a quick return home and get a plea bargain—an outcome that would put an end to the Muthana family’s limbo, if not to Hoda’s difficulties. The lawyer knew Hoda would face interrogation and prosecution when she returned to the United States, but he had no doubt that she would be able to return. He had spent more than 15 years defending people on the fringes of the war on terrorism. He was a counsel on the Supreme Court case that had successfully argued that the Bush administration’s military commissions for trying Guantánamo detainees were unconstitutional. He had won an acquittal for Noor Salman, the widow of Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen.