On Tuesday, a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia sentenced a Kansas woman to 20 years in prison and 25 years of probation post-release for supporting the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and commanding an all-women military battalion in Syria.
Born in Lawrence, Kansas, Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, served as the leader and organiser of an all-female ISIS battalion called the Khatiba Nusaybah. She admitted to training about 100 women and girls as young as 10 in using AK-47 assault rifles, grenades, and suicide belts. In fact, she also planned to blow up a Midwest university campus and wanted to target a shopping mall by leaving a car filled with explosives in the parking lot and detonating it using a remote control; neither of these attacks was carried out.
According to a witness statement, Fluke-Ekren allegedly said that “she considered any attack that did not kill a large number of individuals to be a waste of resources.” The witness also mentioned that when Fluke-Ekren would hear about attacks in other countries outside of the US, she would “wish” for it to have “had occurred on US soil instead.”
American Woman Who Led ISIS Battalion Sentenced to 20 Years
— National Security Division, U.S. Dept of Justice (@DOJNatSec) November 1, 2022
Allison Fluke-Ekren Provided Military Training to Over 100 Women and Young Girls in Syria on Behalf of ISIS and Committed Numerous Other Terrorist Actshttps://t.co/BA4qq50Nf9
During the sentencing hearing on Tuesday, First Assistant United States (US) Attorney Raj Parekh called her the “empress of ISIS,” saying she had “brainwashed young girls and trained them to kill.” “She became a warped visionary for ISIS,” he said, adding that she had refused to cooperate with the US government when she could have been “a goldmine of intelligence.”
One of Fluke-Ekren’s daughters, Leyla, testified against her in a victim impact statement, describing how her mother had abused her and her siblings, and married her off as a “sex slave” at 13 to an ISIS fighter, whom she referred to as “my rapist,” so she could become more powerful in the terrorist group.
Ekren also spoke about an instance when her mother poured lice medication over her face as punishment, burning her eyes. “I wanted people to see what kind of person she was. I wanted it to blind me,” she said, adding that her mother had become skilled at hiding abuse.
Furthermore, in court documents, Fluke-Ekren’s son, who remained unnamed, recalled being choked to unconsciousness, locked in tight spaces until he defecated on himself, and having salt or chemicals poured onto his wounds. “My mother is a monster who enjoys torturing children for sexual pleasure,” he said, claiming that she was “very skilled in manipulation and controlling her emotions to her advantage.”
However, Fluke-Ekren vehemently denied all allegations of child abuse, calling them “outrageous” and “disgusting.” Her lawyers, Joseph King and Sean Sherlock, also called them “inaccurate, exaggerated, hyperbolic and in many cases completely false,” arguing that they were irrelevant to the current case.
WILD: Family wants no contact with Allison Fluke-Ekren, woman charged with training terrorists pic.twitter.com/9QypkBdYQu
— Robert Burton (@Robert7News) February 1, 2022
“She carved a path of terror, plunging her own children into unfathomable depths of cruelty by physically, psychologically, emotionally and sexually abusing them,” Parekh asserted on Tuesday, adding that other terrorist groups were not in favour of creating a female battalion until ISIS agreed and that even people within ISIS called her ideology “off the charts.” According to Parekh, her actions “added a new dimension to the darkest side of humanity.”
He described her background in Kansas, where she was sent to a private school and grew up in a “stable” environment. “There is nothing in Fluke-Ekren’s background that can explain her conduct, which was driven by fanaticism, power, manipulation, delusional invincibility, and extreme cruelty,” he noted, further arguing that the maximum sentence of 20 years is not sufficient for her crimes.
Nevertheless, Fluke-Ekren called herself a loving mother, saying, “We just lived a very normal life” in Syria and showed pictures of her children at a weekly pizza dinner. She also defended the all-women battalion as a self-defence group, wherein she members about gun safety and survival tactics as Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s army was closing in on Raqqa, where they lived. “Do we blame women learning to defend themselves?” she asked the court, adding, “No one can understand the horrors of a bombing until you’ve walked in its aftermath,” in a possible justification of her actions with ISIS.
However, Judge Leonie Brinkema found her testimony to be “not credible” and said that suicide vests are not defensive weapons.
According to Fluke-Ekren’s father, who served in the Vietnam war, she converted to Islam while attending the University of Kansas and was “predisposed to zealotry.” As per the court records, she fled to Egypt in order to avoid paying off her college loan, amounting to about $86,817. Later, she went to Libya and also lived in Mosul, Iraq when it was under ISIS control. She then moved to Syria, all the while “using different husbands to advocate for approval of her military training plans from the leadership in the terrorist groups with whom she was associated overseas.”
Fluke-Ekren has been married five times. Her second husband was responsible for stealing a box of US documents and an electronic device during the 2012 Benghazi attack on two US government facilities, before he was killed in an airstrike. Her third husband was a drone specialist in ISIS, and the fourth was a Bangladeshi ISIS fighter; both died in battle.
According to prosecutors, her first husband, James Fluke, whom she married in 1996, described her as a “con artist” and told authorities that “something is deeply broken inside that woman.” They had a son and daughter together before getting divorced in 2002.
Fluke-Ekren admitted to continuing her association with ISIS till May 2019 before surrendering to the Syrian authorities in 2021. She was subsequently extradited to the US on January 28 this year. “Her life after leaving ISIS reflected her disavowal of violence,” her lawyers stated.