Kansas girl who led all-female ISIS battalion faces sentencing

Washington — The Kansas girl who admitted she mentioned an assault on an American faculty and educated over 100 fighters in an all-female ISIS battalion in Syria, 42-year-old Allison Fluke-Ekren, faces sentencing Tuesday.

Fluke-Ekren, described in courtroom paperwork as a mom and teacher-turned-ISIS battalion chief, pleaded responsible earlier this yr to offering materials help to the terrorist community and faces a most of 20 years in jail. 

Prosecutors described her admitted actions as “monstrous,” writing in a pre-sentence submitting that Fluke-Ekren “brainwashed young girls and trained them to kill” after leaving her circle of relatives to “pursue a career in terrorism” in Libya. 

The authorities’s submitting laid out a life filled with torture and violence, which they stated she inflicted on her youthful brother, her kids and her husbands, habits that she allegedly took from her residence to battlefields in international international locations after she turned radicalized. 

In one occasion, prosecutors say the defendant’s son informed them, “The more her children reacted to the pain, the worse the abuse would get,” alleging she would put salt or chemical compounds in his cuts, punch him within the face and throw him to the ground. And in one other occasion, prosecutors allege she sexually abused her personal daughter, who’s testifying at Tuesday’s sentencing listening to. 

For her half, Fluke-Ekren’s authorized group argued that these new allegations of abuse weren’t related to the crime to which she admitted and that “she does not have adequate time or resources to fully investigate and rebut these allegations.” She stated she was “shocked and saddened” by a few of the allegations, in accordance with paperwork filed in courtroom, and questioned their veracity, outright denying lots of them. 

The authorities stated Fluke-Ekren transformed to Islam whereas attending the University of Kansas and was “predisposed to zealotry,” in accordance with her father. She fled to Egypt, Libya and in the end Syria, all of the whereas “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.” 

Once in Syria, in accordance with certainly one of at the very least six authorities witnesses who say they interacted along with her, Fluke-Ekren introduced a plan of assault to a paid U.S. international authorities supply. That plan, Fluke-Ekren admitted in courtroom earlier this yr, was to focus on an American faculty campus within the Midwest with explosives. Although Fluke-Ekren stated the plan had been introduced to the then-leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, it was in the end placed on maintain, the preliminary charging paperwork stated. 

The defendant, who glided by the title Umm Mohammed al-Amriki, additionally hung out in Mosul, Iraq, when it was managed by ISIS fighters. 

In help of the terrorist group, Fluke-Ekren educated ladies and a few younger ladies on using AK-47 assault rifles, grenades and suicide belts. She additionally commanded Khatiba Nusaybah, the all-female group of fighters educated to perpetuate the ISIS mission.

During an interplay with one other authorities witness in Syria as described in courtroom papers, Fluke-Ekren introduced an assault that may have concerned parking a automobile filled with explosives in a shopping center parking storage and detonating the bomb with a cellphone set off.

She “considered any attack that did not kill a large number of individuals to be a waste of resources,” in accordance with witness statements included within the plea papers. 

The assault on the parking storage was additionally deserted after Fluke-Ekren’s then-husband was stated to have objected. 

In the summer time of 2016, in accordance with the courtroom paperwork, Fluke-Ekren married her third husband, a Bangladeshi ISIS member who constructed drones for ISIS and labored “attaching  chemical weapons onto drones to drop chemical bombs from the air.” He was later killed. Fluke-Ekren was married 5 instances, the paperwork revealed. 

Fluke-Ekren admitted that she continued her affiliation with ISIS till May 2019, in the end turning herself in to native Syrian police in the summertime of 2021. She was transferred into U.S. custody on Jan. 28, 2022, and now faces a most of 20 years in jail because of her plea. 

Her protection lawyer wrote in presentencing papers that her childhood was “lonely” and a few of her actions overseas had been in pursuit of “self-preservation,” including she in the end disavowed her help of ISIS in 2019 and labored at a faculty and a non-governmental group in Syria.