UK Edition
American woman pleads guilty to leading female Islamic State brigade
Allison Fluke-Ekren, once a teacher in Kansas, admits she taught Syrian children as young as six to use rifles, grenades and suicide belts
An American woman who led an all-female battalion of Islamic State militants in Syria is facing 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to provide material support for terrorism.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, was accused of training children as young as six to use AK-47 rifles, grenades and suicide belts, as well as discussing plans to bomb a shopping centre in the US.
Fluke-Ekren, who once lived in Kansas where she worked as a teacher, admitted in federal district court in Virginia that she was the leader of the Khatiba Nusaybah, a female battalion that prepared to defend Islamic State-controlled Raqqa, Syria, in 2017.
She is the first American woman to be prosecuted for a leadership role in the terrorist group.
Fluke-Ekren moved to Egypt in 2008, and from there went to Libya and then Syria. Starting in late 2016, according to prosecutors, she led an all-female Islamic State unit in Raqqa, which served as the terrorist group’s seat of power for several years.
A detention memo says she also trained children on how to use assault rifles and at least one witness saw one of her children - who was approximately six or seven years old - holding a machine gun in the family’s home in Syria.
“We didn’t intentionally train any young girls. They may have been in attendance,” Fluke-Ekren said at the hearing on Tuesday.
She later agreed with prosecutors that she had given military training to over 100 women and young girls.
Fluke-Ekren was accused of helping female members of the Islamic State prepare for a Kurdish siege of Raqqa by training them in martial arts and packing “go bags” of rifles and other weapons, according to court documents.
She also wanted to recruit operatives to attack a college campus in the US, according to prosecutors, and discussed a terrorist attack on a shopping centre. She told one witness that “she considered any attack that did not kill a large number of individuals to be a waste of resources,” according to an FBI affidavit.
But she was eventually detained after the group’s downfall and brought to the US to face charges.
She will be sentenced in October.