Kansas woman who led ISIS battalion sentenced to 20 years in prison on terrorism charge
A Kansas native who left the U.S. a decade ago and later organized and led an all-female ISIS battalion was sentenced Tuesday to 20 years in prison for participating in a conspiracy to support terrorism, according to prosecutors.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, formerly of Topeka, was sentenced in the Eastern District of Virginia for leading Khatiba Nusaybah, a female military battalion meant to defend ISIS interests in Raqqa, a city in Syria. Fluke-Ekren pleaded guilty to the single felony charge in June.
Officials believe Fluke-Ekren trained more than 100 women and girls as young as 10 as part of her work for ISIS.
The group, created in 2016, was taught how to defend against enemies of ISIS in part by sneaking behind enemy lines with AK-47s and detonating explosives once their ammunition ran out, according to prosecutors.
They said Fluke-Ekren and others also trained members in martial arts, medical training, driving courses, ISIS religious classes and packing a “go bag” with rifles and other military supplies.
According to a summary of facts filed in court, Fluke-Ekren studied biology at the University of Kansas and education at Earlham College in Indiana before she moved to Egypt with her second husband in 2008. She later traveled through and also committed terrorist attacks in Libya, Syria and Iraq, per court documents.
After the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. Special Mission and CIA Annex in Benghazi, prosecutors said Fluke-Ekren helped her husband review and summarize stolen U.S. government documents and later provided them to leaders in the terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia, of which her husband was a member. He eventually rose through the ISIS ranks to become the head of snipers, according to court documents, and was later killed in a drone strike. Fluke-Ekren reportedly married two other ISIS men who were also killed.
On several occasions, prosecutors said Fluke-Ekren described plans for terrorist attacks against the United States.
She told one witness that she wanted to fill a vehicle with explosives and park it in the basement or parking garage of a shopping mall and detonate it using a cell phone triggering device. She talked about learning to make bombs and explosives and said any attack that didn’t kill a large number of people was a waste.
Fluke-Ekren would hear about attacks in other countries and say she wished they had happened in the United States instead. She also said she wanted to use explosives to attack a college campus in the Midwest.
In 2018, Fluke-Ekren told an individual to send a message to a family member saying she was dead so the U.S. government wouldn’t try to locate her. She also told a witness that it was important to die as martyrs on behalf of ISIS and that they should kill all disbelievers.
Fluke-Ekren’s children also submitted testimony, telling the court their mother had abused them throughout their lives. Fluke-Ekren’s adult daughter told the court that while living in Syria, her mother pushed her to marry an ISIS fighter who later raped her when she was 13.
Recordings of phone conversations from January 2021 showed Fluke-Ekren instructing her daughter to delete messages between them, so she could avoid capture in Syria.
In his victim impact statement, Fluke-Ekren’s son told the court that his mother tried convincing him multiple times to move to Syria so that he couldn’t give U.S. authorities information that could compromise her.
Fluke-Ekren was located outside the United States in January 2011 and transferred into custody in January 2022.
This story was originally published November 2, 2022 at 12:35 PM.
