Kansas teacher who led all-female Isis brigade is sentenced to 20 years

‘She carved a path of terror, plunging her own children into unfathomable depths of cruelty,’ US Attorney says

Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison and 25 years of supervised release after pleading guilty to leading an all-female Isis battalion in Syria and training young women to fight with guns, grenades and suicide devices.

The Kansas woman previously admitted in US federal court in Alexandria, Virginia that she was the leader of the Khatiba Nusaybah in Raqqa.

She pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiring to provide material support for terrorism and experts said she is the first American woman to be prosecuted for having a role with Isis, according to The Washington Post.

Court papers stated that after university in the US, she moved with her second husband and children to Egypt in 2008 and helped terrorist groups in Iraq, Libya and Syria for eight years.

“Over 100 women and young girls received military training from Fluke-Ekren in Syria on behalf of ISIS,” federal prosecutors wrote in court filings.

They described her as “a fervent believer in the radical terrorist ideology of Isis for many years”.

Fluke-Ekren said at a hearing on 7 June 2022 that she was not aware that some of the girls she trained were underage and claimed, “we didn’t intentionally train any young girls”.

Allison Fluke-Ekren (Alexandria, Va., Sheriff's Office)

In her plea agreement with the Department of Justice, she said she helped her husband analyse US documents stolen by the terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia in a 2012 attack on a US government facility in Benghazi, Libya.

She also admitted having discussed plans for terrorist attacks in the US, including using a van full of explosives in a parking lot under a shopping mall. A witness said she stated any attack that did not kill a large number of victims was a waste of resources.

Fluke-Ekren, who broke down during the June hearing at the mention of her children, was arrested in Syria and taken into custody in the US in January.

She was born in Lawrence, Kansas, with her father and grandfather being veterans of the US military, according to USA Today.

Experts have said that the 42-year-old is a rare case of a powerful woman in the world of Islamic Jihad, which tends to be dominated by men.

Before her sentencing, prosecutors argued that the highest possible sentence of 20 years in prison wouldn’t be enough but that it should be handed down.

Her lawyers instead argued that the sentence should be shorter because of the trauma and loss she has suffered.

She lost three husbands and two children abroad, experienced post-traumatic stress syndrome in Syria and quit using violence when she left Isis in May 2019 her attorneys have argued.

Her oldest son and daughter have accused her of physical and sexual abuse, according to prosecutors.

In a sentencing memo, First Assistant US Attorney Raj Parekh said that she “brainwashed young girls and trained them to kill”.

“She carved a path of terror, plunging her own children into unfathomable depths of cruelty by physically, psychologically, emotionally and sexually abusing them,” he said.

Her attorneys, Joseph King and Sean Sherlock, said Fluke-Ekren argued that the allegations in the memo were “inaccurate, exaggerated, hyperbolic and in many cases completely false”.

Prosecutors say she grew up on a farm in Overbrook, Kansas that they described as “picturesque and bucolic” and a “loving and stable home”.

Her grandfather was in the Navy during the Second World War and her father was in the Army in Vietnam, prosecutors said.

Court documents reveal that one of her daughters accused her of tormenting her younger brother when she was an adolescent. The daughter said that Fluke-Ekren would do it “for fun” and that she once attempted to drown him in an icy lake.

After getting pregnant at the age of 16, she married her first husband James Fluke in 1996, court records state. Before their 2002 divorce, they had a son and a daughter.

Mr Fluke said she was a “con artist,” adding that “something is deeply broken inside that woman,” according to prosecutors.

Fluke-Ekren’s son has shared allegations of years of abuse.

He has said that she choked him until he was unconcious, that she locked him in small spaces until he defecated, and that she poured salt or chemicals where he had been wounded, according to USA Today.

“My mother is a monster who enjoys torturing children for sexual pleasure,” he said. “My mother is a monster very skilled in manipulation and controlling her emotions to her advantage.”

Prosecutors also said the son told them that “the more her children reacted to the pain, the worse the abuse would get,” according to CBS News.

Her daughter also said she was molested. She said that in Egypt, at the age of six, she was slapped with such force that her cheek bruised in the shape of her mother’s fingers, court documents say.

“My mother would beat my body, leaving my muscles cramping in agony,” the daughter alleged.

Fluke-Ekren’s attorneys said they had neither the time nor the resources to answer all the allegations against her but they said that she remembered her father as being “disapproving, distant, fake and judgmental” and her mother as being a victim of “severe and incapacitating depression”.

“She vehemently denies the allegations of abuse and many of the characterizations of her in these paragraphs and points out there were no prior complaints lodged against (her) by her large extended family to any authority,” the lawyers said.

Fluke-Ekren met her second husband Volkan Ekren while studying biology at the University of Kansas. It was during this time she converted to Islam, USA Today reported.

They moved to Cairo, Egypt in 2008 after she had started a graduate teaching program at Earlham College in Indiana in June of the previous year.

Several relatives said she left the US to avoid paying student loans totalling $86,817, according to USA Today.

Her lawyers say she left ISIS in May 2019 after the death of her fourth husband, Mohammed Doe.

She later married another man, Mahmood Mustafa, with no connections to the terror group, and attempted “to bring safety and stability to her children and to allow herself to settle down and live as normal a life as possible,” her lawyers argued.

The attorneys said she worked for an NGO and taught at a school before attempting to surrender to local police in the summer of last year.

After being held for seven months, she was transferred back to the US in January of this year.

“Her life after leaving ISIS reflected her disavowal of violence,” her attorneys claimed.