A Kansas woman who led an Islamic State battalion has been sentenced to 20 years in prison after her children shared harrowing victim impact statements of their experience.
Allison Fluke-Ekren provided military training to over 100 women and young girls in Syria on behalf of ISIS and committed numerous other terrorist acts, the Department of Justice said in its announcement of the sentencing.
The 42-year-old, who is also known as Umm Mohammed al-Amriki, was sentenced Tuesday in the Eastern District of Virginia. The former Kansas resident left the United States in September 2011 and went to work to “engage in terrorist acts in multiple countries,” including Syria, Libya, and Iraq, the Department of Justice said.
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She “ultimately served as the leader and organizer of an ISIS military battalion, known as the Khatiba Nusaybah, where she trained women on the use of automatic firing AK-47 assault rifles, grenades and suicide belts,” according to the Justice Department.
In an emotional sentencing hearing, two of Fluke-Ekren’s children wrote letters detailing their abuse at the hands of Fluke-Ekren, beginning in Kansas and continuing overseas when they were minors.
“My mother would beat my body, leaving my muscles cramping in agony. [She] would then go to her room and masturbate over the fact that she beat me. I could hear her from the other room,” the daughter wrote.
In his letter, her son wrote: “My mother is a monster who enjoys torturing children for sexual pleasure.”
Additionally, Fluke-Ekren’s daughter delivered a victim impact statement Tuesday detailing the “severe” abuse inflicted upon her as a minor in Syria, including coercing her to marry an ISIS fighter, who then raped her, when she was only 13 years old.
Fluke-Ekren’s son also delivered a statement that described his mother’s attempts to convince him to leave the United States for Syria.
“You made me give up everything just so you could go on your next adventure,” he quoted one of his messages to his mother, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Both son and daughter pleaded with the court to stop their mother from ever contacting them again. That request was granted by the judge.
Fluke-Ekren has denied the abuse accusations and while she “is shocked and saddened by these allegations,” she “acknowledges Witness-1 [her daughter] experienced trauma in Syria,” defense attorney Joseph King wrote previously.
“She carved a path of terror, plunging her own children into unfathomable depths of cruelty by physically, psychologically, emotionally, and sexually abusing them,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Raj Parekh said last week in a sentencing memo that revealed allegations that Fluke-Ekren’s children and parents had made against her.
After a stint in Libya in 2011 where she and her second husband stole documents from a U.S. compound in Benghazi and delivered them to the hands of the leadership of Ansar al-Sharia, the couple moved to Turkey and then to Syria, where Fluke-Ekren’s second husband ascended through the ranks of ISIS and ultimately became the “emir” (leader) of ISIS snipers in Syria.
In 2014, Fluke-Ekren boasted about her desire to conduct an attack on the U.S. “Fluke-Ekren explained that she could go to a shopping mall in the United States, park a vehicle full of explosives in the basement or parking garage level of the structure, and detonate the explosives in the vehicle with a cell phone triggering device,” the Department of Justice said.
“Fluke-Ekren further said that she considered any attack that did not kill a large number of individuals to be a waste of resources. Fluke-Ekren would hear about external attacks taking place in countries outside the United States and would comment that she wished the attack had occurred on United States soil instead.” She had also discussed the possibility of bombing the campus of a U.S. college in the Midwest.
In 2016, after moving to Mosul, Iraq, Fluke-Ekren obtained authorization from the “Wali,” the ISIS-appointed mayor of Raqqa, in order to establish a Women’s Center. That same year, the “Khatiba Nusaybah” was born—a military battalion composed solely of female ISIS members. Fluke-Ekren’s main objective as the leader and organizer of the Khatiba Nusaybah battalion was to teach female ISIS members how to defend themselves against ISIS’ enemies, including helping male fighters defend ISIS-controlled Raqqa.
Training included the use of weapons, including automatic firing AK-47 assault rifles, grenades, and suicide belts packed with explosives, but the battalion also provided certain members with instruction on physical training including martial arts, medical training, VBIED driving courses, ISIS religious classes and how to pack and prep a “go bag” with rifles and other military supplies.
