Comment A former Kansas teacher who became a rare female Islamic State leader and commanded her own battalion in Syria was sentenced Tuesday to 20 years in federal prison. Allison Fluke-Ekren admitted to training more than 100 women – including girls as young as 10 – to use guns, grenades and suicide explosives as Islamic State fought US-backed forces for control of Syria in 2017. Fluke’s contributions -Ekren’s involvement with the Islamic State continued after her second, third and fourth husbands were killed while working for the terrorist group and a 5-year-old son died in a tank attack, according to court records. Kansas woman who joined ISIS pleads guilty to terrorism Extremist researchers say Fluke-Ekren, 42, is the first and so far only woman in the US to be prosecuted for a leadership role in the Islamic State group. Two of Fluke-Ekren’s children described her as a thug who fantasized about carrying out terrorist attacks and who tried to indoctrinate those around her to kill “infidels.” Federal prosecutor Raj Parekh described Fluke-Ekren as the “Empress of ISIS.” “Let there be no doubt what the purpose of this order was,” said Parekh, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. He said it was “not in self-defence” and that an Islamic State document showed a member of Fluke-Ekren’s brigade “wanted to be the first to carry out a suicide operation”. Defense attorneys disputed the allegations of child abuse and characterized Fluke-Ekren as a battalion commander who never saw combat. “We didn’t even fire a gun,” Fluke-Ekren said. “I have never seen a suicide bomb go off or go off.” Former friends said Fluke-Ekren was a studious young mother who earned a degree in biology at the University of Kansas, went to graduate school in Indiana and worked as a teacher in Kansas City, Mo., before moving with her children and her second husband to Egypt in 2008. He then took a sharp turn toward extremism, estranged family members told U.S. investigators. Fluke-Ekren grew up as Allison Elizabeth Brooks on an 81-acre farm in Overbrook, Kan., the daughter of a teacher and an Army veteran who served in Vietnam, prosecutors said. “There is nothing in Fluke-Ekren’s history that can explain her behavior,” Parekh said at the sentencing. Fluke-Ekren’s father told US authorities that she had a “propensity for zeal” and “often looked for people to give her a hard time for being Muslim”. “Was she religious? Yes. He was from Central America. Before she became a Muslim, she was like a Bible-pounding Christian,” Amy Amer, a former friend of Fluke-Ekren, told the Washington Post in June. Amer said she was surprised when Fluke-Ekren started advocating extremist ideas. Fluke-Ekren pleaded guilty this year to one count of conspiracy to provide material support to a terrorist organization, admitting she aided terrorist groups while stationed in Iraq, Libya and Syria from 2011 to 2019. Fluent in English and Arabic, her assistance Fluke-Ekren included analyzing documents about Ansar al-Sharia, the group behind the attack on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans in 2012, according to its indictment. He also provided assistance to al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, prosecutors said. But it was in the Islamic State that Fluke-Ekren would gain prominent roles. How powerful is the Islamic State in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan? In 2016, Fluke-Ekren’s second husband oversaw Islamic State snipers in Syria, and she organized child care, medical services and education in the city of Raqqa, according to court documents. Fluke-Ekren trained women and young girls to use AK-47 rifles, hand grenades and explosive suicide belts in case male fighters needed help defending themselves from enemy attacks, her plea documents state. A witness who received military training as a girl said Fluke-Ekren later told her “it was important to kill the kuffar,” an Arabic word for infidels, the documents say. As male fighters lost ground in 2017 to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, the Islamic State mayor of Raqqa named Fluke-Ekren the leader of the Khatiba Nusaybah Brigade, an all-female brigade. Fluke-Ekren’s team gave medical training and religious classes, as well as teaching martial arts. He also provided classes on vehicle bombings and how to pack a “go bag” of rifles and military supplies, according to court documents filed in June. U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema imposed the maximum sentence allowed under Fluke-Ekren’s plea agreement. The judge said she did not find Fluke-Ekren’s statements during Tuesday’s hearing “absolutely credible.” Fluke-Ekren said she had only provided “unwitting” support to Ansar al-Sharia after the Benghazi attacks and told the judge she was training women to handle weapons in Syria not for terrorist purposes, but to help prevent fatalities in Syria . homes and to teach women self-defense in case enemy combatants attempted to sexually abuse them. “The vast majority of my time was spent cooking, cleaning, taking the kids to doctors, putting antiseptic on knees and mediating sibling disputes,” Fluke-Ekren said, often breaking down in tears during her remarks to the judge. Brinkema said teaching women and girls to use “suicide vests cannot be considered self-defense” and that she disagreed with Fluke-Ekren’s characterization of herself as a “passive dupe” driven into terrorist activities by her second husband . Witnesses said Fluke-Ekren planned different mass-casualty strikes, although she never carried out the attacks. A woman with ties to the Islamic State told investigators that Fluke-Ekren had the idea in 2014 to bomb an American college in the Midwest. One of Fluke-Ekren’s daughters told US investigators how the former Kansas mom “explained that she could go to a mall in the United States, park a vehicle full of explosives in the basement or garage level of the structure and detonate the explosives in the vehicle with a mobile phone activation device’. The daughter said Fluke-Ekren considered any attack that did not kill a large number of people a “waste of resources,” according to court documents. “In reality, Khatiba Nussayeb had as few as one hundred women, including members designated as babysitters, nurses and cooks,” defense attorneys Joseph King and Sean Sherlock wrote in a written sentencing hearing. “The loosely organized group had no official ranks, was issued no uniforms or weapons, never engaged in combat, nor fired upon the enemy.” In a court filing in August, Fluke-Ekren’s lawyers said her statements about carrying out terrorist attacks in the United States were responses to the “shock and horror of war” she experienced after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces or “US or US-led coalition forces,” killed Syrian civilians in bombings and airstrikes. “In 2015 one of her children was killed and another seriously injured in one such attack in a residential neighborhood,” King and Sherlock wrote. “He saw many friends, neighbors and children killed in similar incidents during the war.” Lawyers have denied the allegations of abuse by Fluke-Ekren’s children, calling them “inaccurate, exaggerated, exaggerated and in many cases completely false.” They said the allegations were first disclosed to Fluke-Ekren in September. Parekh said Fluke-Ekren tried unsuccessfully to form a women’s battalion for years before Islamic State leaders approved her plans in Raqqa. Fluke-Ekren was not charged with violent conduct, but prosecutors argued in a written sentencing hearing that she encouraged another woman to carry out her own suicide attack and arranged to adopt her child. Fluke-Ekren chose not to cooperate with US investigators after her arrest, Parekh added. “This defendant is probably a goldmine of intelligence,” Parekh said. “All the people he’s met, all the co-conspirators he’s trained — but he didn’t cooperate.” After her second husband was killed in an airstrike, Fluke-Ekren married an Islamic State unmanned aerial vehicle specialist who worked “attaching chemical weapons to drones to drop chemical bombs from the air,” according to his records court. He was also killed in an airstrike. Fluke-Ekren’s fourth husband was the Islamic State official in charge of defending Raqqa during a siege by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces at the time he was killed. Fluke-Ekren said she left Islamic State in 2019 and surrendered to Syrian authorities in the summer of 2021 “to protect her children from the hardships of living in war-torn Syria,” her lawyers wrote in a filing. . It was delivered to the US in January, after 11 years outside the United States. A daughter who spoke at Tuesday’s hearing claimed Fluke-Ekren forced her to marry an Islamic State fighter when she was 13 and he was 17. The daughter claimed the Islamic State fighter raped her. Fluke-Ekren claimed it was her daughter’s choice to marry the man. In a recorded call with the daughter in January 2021 that Parekh played in court, Fluke-Ekren said, “You can’t give up, because this is the only time you lose.” Referring to the deaths of her second husband and 5-year-old son, Fluke-Ekren said in the phone call, “You have no regrets. You feel sad but you don’t — regret is like, you hate what you did or decisions you made, but when you have your goal and you know what you’re doing and you keep moving towards it, you don’t regret it.”
