'ISIS Bride' HodaMuthana Was an ISIS Propagandist, Not Some Brainwashed Child by A.J. Caschetta The Washington Examiner February 26, 2019
Lawyers and supporters of the woman dubbed the American"ISIS bride" portray her as a misguided, "brainwashed" girlwho simply made a mistake. In fact, she was an ISIS propagandist and strategistwhose innovative ideas proved to be operationally effective.Much of Hoda Muthana's online activity disappeared when heraccounts were suspended, along with some 125,000 others shut down betweenmid-2015 and February 2016.
But the tweets that have survived reveal far morethan just some harmless cheerleading for the Islamic State.Most of the media have focused on the sensational story of ayoung girl born in Alabama who left home to join the Syrian jihad. Interest inher Twitter activity has focused on the image where she and three other ISISbrides show their soon-to-be-burnt passports and her observation that"Soooo many Aussies and Brits here. But where are the Americans, wake up ucowards." But like her urging fellow Muslims to "Terrorize the kuffarat home," this is pretty much standard ISIS propaganda, nothing special orinnovative.After her first husband, Suhan Abdul Rahman, was killed inMarch 2015,
Muthana's tweets changed. The day after she announced that he had"fought in the front lines until he attained shahadah," she revealedan innovative, strategic side. Her call for jihadis to " take down"then-President Barack Obama with the advice to "look up Obama's scheduleon the white house website" was followed by the most significant ofMuthana's archived tweets, whose text ran as follows:"Americans wake up! Men and women altogether. You havemuch to do while you live under our greatest enemy, enough of your sleeping! Goon drive-bys and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive allover them. Veterans, Patriot, Memorial etc Day parades..go on drive by's +spill all of their blood or rent a big truck n drive all over them. Killthem."
This March 19, 2015 tweet was prescient. The media seemsobsessed with the shock value of a 20-year-old American girl urging her fellowMuslims to "drive all over" the infidels, but far more significantare its operational directions predating, arguably precipitating, the evolutionof "truck jihad."Prior to Muthana's advice, jihadis had used vehicles todrive into people, but with underwhelming results. Coincidentally or not, afterher tweet, the effectiveness and frequency of the tactic increaseddramatically.Vehicular jihad began in 2006 when Mohammad Reza Taheri-azardrove a rented Jeep Grand Cherokee onto a pedestrian area at the University ofNorth Carolina at Chapel Hill, injuring 9 people. Taheri-azar later confessedthat he chose a four-wheel drive vehicle thinking it would enable him to"run over things and keep going."
Four years later, the second issue of the Al-Qaeda onlinemagazine Inspire contained an article titled "The Ultimate MowingMachine," that advised jihadists to "use a pickup truck as a mowingmachine, not to mow grass but mow down the enemies of Allah."The plan began with "a 4WD pickup truck," and thengot bizarre by directing readers to "weld on steel blades on the front endof the truck ... a set of butcher blades or thick sheets of steel. They do notneed to be extra sharp because with the speed of the truck at the time ofimpact, even a blunter edge would slice through bone very easily. You may raisethe level of the blades as high as the headlights."This onerous, overly complicated plan was thankfully neverput into action and vehicle attacks subsided for several years, at least untilMuthana resurrected the tactic with a far more practical plan of using a large,unmodified truck to target parades and festivals.Over a year after Muthana's tweet, the parameters of truckjihad were regularized in November 2016 in the online ISIS magazine Rumiyah,Issue #3.
An article titled "Just Terror Tactics," follows Muthana'slead in both type of vehicle and targets. It cautions against SUVs and in favorof larger, heavier, load-bearing trucks. It recommended attacking people atlarge outdoor celebrations, exactly as Muthana had advised.Absent of forensic analysis of all her online activity, itis difficult to determine whether Muthana was in fact the originator of thisdeadly adjustment to an earlier, less successful tactic, or merely in aposition to overhear and repeat a new strategy.One thing is certain though: Muthana disseminatedoperational advice intended for terrorists, and what she advised was latercarried out, culminating in the injury and deaths of hundreds of innocents intruck attacks in France, Germany, Sweden, many in England, Spain, Canada, andNew York.
A.J. Caschetta is a Ginsburg-Ingerman fellow at the MiddleEast Forum and a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
