{"id":32601,"date":"2019-02-20T05:24:14","date_gmt":"2019-02-20T05:24:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=32601"},"modified":"2019-02-20T05:24:14","modified_gmt":"2019-02-20T05:24:14","slug":"us-weighing-options-on-american-daesh-sympathizer-in-syria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=32601","title":{"rendered":"US weighing options on American Daesh sympathizer in Syria"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nWASHINGTON: The United States said Tuesday it wanted to ensure foreign terrorists remain off the battlefield as it weighed options on an American detained in Syria who says she wants to return home.
The United States has urged European powers to take back hundreds of their citizens who fought with the Daesh group in Syria, but acknowledged the situation was complex in the rare case of an American terrorist.
Hoda Muthana, a 24-year-old from Alabama who became a prominent online agitator for the extremists, said in an interview published Sunday with The Guardian that she had been brainwashed online and \u201cdeeply regrets\u201d joining the movement.
While declining to discuss Muthana\u2019s case specifically, State Department deputy spokesman Robert Palladino said that the status of US citizens detained in Syria \u201cis by definition extremely complicated.\u201d
\u201cWe\u2019re looking into these cases to better understand the details,\u201d he told reporters.
Palladino said that the United States generally did not see a different solution between what to do with US fighters and with foreigners, saying the fighters pose \u201ca global threat.\u201d
\u201cRepatriating these foreign terrorist fighters to their countries of origin, ensuring that they are prosecuted and detained \u2014 that\u2019s the best solution, preventing them from returning to the battlefield,\u201d he said.
The situation of foreign terrorists detained by US-allied Kurdish forces has taken a new urgency as President Donald Trump plans to withdraw US troops from Syria.
The Syrian Democratic Forces say they may have to refocus on fighting Turkey, which has vowed to crush Kurdish fighters it links to separatists at home.
Trump has contemplated reopening the US military base at Guantanamo Bay to take in new foreign inmates, while Britain on Tuesday revoked the citizenship of a female terrorsist who wanted to return home with her newborn baby.
Neither option would likely pass muster in the cases of US citizens, who enjoy strong legal protections under the Constitution.
Muthana, who was married three times to terrorists and has a son with one of her husbands, fled her family in 2014 to join the Daesh group in Syria, where she took to Twitter to urge attacks on fellow Americans.
In the interview with The Guardian, Muthana said that she was \u201creally young and ignorant\u201d when she joined Daesh and has since renounced radicalism.
\u201cI believe that America gives second chances. I want to return and I\u2019ll never come back to the Middle East,\u201d she told the newspaper.
Hassan Shilby, a lawyer for Muthana, told ABC television\u2019s \u201cGood Morning America\u201d that the young woman had been \u201cbrainwashed and manipulated\u201d and is \u201cabsolutely disgusted\u201d by the person she became.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON: The United States said Tuesday it wanted to ensure foreign terrorists remain off the battlefield as it weighed options on an American detained in Syria who says she wants to return home.The United States has urged European powers to take back hundreds of their citizens who fought with the Daesh group in Syria, but…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":32602,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/32602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}