A 20-year-old Alabama woman joined ISIS after receiving an innocent graduation gift

A 20-year-old woman from a Birmingham, Alabama, suburb has left the US to join the Islamic State militant group in Syria, the local broadcaster WIAT reported on Monday.

Hoda Muthana made contact with militants through social media and had been distancing herself from other Muslims in Hoover for more a year before leaving, said family spokesman Hassan Shibly, according to WIAT. Her family reportedly fled Yemen for the US more than 20 years ago.

Hoda's father, Mohammed, told BuzzFeed that his daughter's introduction to social media started with the smartphone he gave her as a high-school graduation gift in 2013.

She wasn't technically allowed to have social-media accounts or post photos of herself (though her brothers were), but she apparently found a way around that.

Mohammed said he sometimes took her phone to check what was on it. He told BuzzFeed: "When I get the phone from her, sometimes she scared, and I thought, 'What do you have?'"

During the year and a half before she left for Syria, Hoda became more devoutly religious. She told BuzzFeed that it was due in part to Islamic lectures she found on the internet.

Hoda said her parents noticed her becoming more religious and "liked the change until they saw me getting 'jihadi.'"

In 2013, Hoda secretly set up a Twitter account that allowed her to find and connect with Islamic State members and supporters, including Aqsa Mahmood, who left her home in Scotland to join the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

On Hoda's Twitter account, has she directed Americans who were too cowardly to join ISIS to attack non-Muslims in the US, according to BuzzFeed. She tweeted: "Go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over 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. Kill them."

Mohammed told BuzzFeed: "I believe she been brainwashed. She’s not that kind of girl. They brainwashed her."

When Hoda left for Syria, she told her family that she was going on a college trip to Atlanta. She then reportedly contacted her sister from Turkey to say she was going to join ISIS, according to BuzzFeed.

A growing problem

The report came as US authorities said they had charged six young Somali-American men from Minnesota with planning to join the fighters who have declared an Islamic caliphate on land they have seized in Syria and neighboring Iraq.

Western countries have become increasingly worried about the numbers of citizens signing up with jihadi groups, fearing they could return to launch attacks at home.

Hoda's family's spokesman, who is also an attorney and chief executive the director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Florida, said the woman's family was devastated when she left in November and had been working with authorities ever since, WIAT reported.

"They have been going through unimaginable pain and hardship for the past few months," he told reporters on Monday at a news conference broadcast by WIAT.

Reuters could not independently verify the report. The news of Muthana's departure was first reported by BuzzFeed on Friday.

(Reuters reporting by Curtis Skinner in San Francisco)

SEE ALSO: This Scottish teenager went from reading Harry Potter to recruiting for ISIS in Syria

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