Allison Fluke-Ekren, a Kansas woman who led an ISIS battalion in Syria, was sentenced to 20 years in prison Tuesday in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.
In June, Fluke-Ekren pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide support to ISIS, telling a judge she didn’t know some of the 100 women she led and trained to use weapons and explosives were children, some as young as 10. .
During her decade working with ISIS and others to wage a violent jihad — traveling from Libya to Egypt and eventually Syria — Fluke-Ekren discussed plans for terrorist attacks in the U.S. and trained other women in ISIS on how to use AK-47s, grenades and suicide belts, according to her agreement.
At Tuesday’s sentencing hearing, prosecutor Raj Parekh called Fluke-Ekren the “Empress of ISIS” who “brainwashed young girls and trained them to kill.”
“She became a twisted visionary for ISIS,” Parekh said, telling the court Fluke-Ekren was tasked with creating the all-female order. “She was drawn to death and destruction.”
Parekh also said that Fluke-Ekren had repeatedly lied to the United States government and refused to cooperate, adding that it could be “an intelligence gold mine.”
During Tuesday’s hearing, one of her daughters, Leyla Ekren — who assisted the US government in the case against her mother — testified that her mother abused her and her siblings and married her off as “a slave to sex”.
“You have in your mind how you were at 10 or 15,” Ekren said, telling the judge that she was given as a bride to an ISIS fighter – whom Ekren referred to several times as “my rapist” – when she was 13. her mother could gain more power in the terrorist organization.
Her mother, Ekren said, had a “lust for power” and “dark desires.”
Ekren testified that her mother abused her and her siblings, describing one instance where she poured lice medicine into Ekren’s face, burning her eyes. “I wanted it to blind me” so people would see what her mother had done, she said.
Fluke-Ekren testified that she was horrified by the child abuse allegations and claimed they never happened.
In court testimony Tuesday, Fluke-Ekren painted herself as a loving mother and caretaker of whatever community she was in, telling the judge that she was dragged by her husbands — several of whom died fighting for ISIS — in Libya and Syria. .
Fluke-Ekren, in a lengthy, tearful statement, told the judge that she had only trained women in survival techniques, gun safety and self-defense as Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian army began closing in on Raqqa, where she lived.
“Are we blaming women who learn to stand up for themselves?” asked the court, adding that the trauma of war cannot be understood by outsiders.
“No one can understand the horror of a bombing until you walk through its aftermath,” Fluke-Ekren said, suggesting that those horrors and the fear she felt for herself and her children explained many of her actions with ISIS.
Before handing down the sentence, the maximum Fluke-Ekren faced after her plea deal, District Judge Leonie Brinkema said she did not find her testimony credible, noting — among other things — that suicide vests are not defensive weapons.
Her daughter and son, Gabriel, watched in silence in the courtroom as their mother was sentenced. Her six minor children have been placed in foster care, Fluke-Ekren told the court.
