Allison Fluke-Ekren, a Kansas woman who admitted training more than 100 women and girls to use rifles and suicide vests, was just sentenced to 20 years in prison. Prosecutors called her “the empress of ISIS.”
Researchers of extremist movements say Fluke-Ekren, 42, is the first and so far only U.S. woman to be prosecuted for an Islamic State leadership role. Two of Fluke-Ekren’s children described her as an abuser who fantasized about carrying out terrorist strikes and who sought to indoctrinate those around her to kill “disbelievers.” Federal prosecutor Raj Parekh described Fluke-Ekren as the “empress of ISIS.
Former friends have said Fluke-Ekren was a studious young mother who earned a biology degree at the University of Kansas, went to graduate school in Indiana and worked as a teacher in Kansas City, Mo., before moving with her children and second husband to Egypt in 2008. She then took a sharp turn toward extremism, estranged family members told U.S. investigators.Fluke-Ekren grew up as Allison Elizabeth Brooks on an 81-acre farm in Overbrook, Kan.
Fluke-Ekren pleaded guilty this year to a conspiracy charge of providing material support to a terrorist organization, admitting that she aided terrorist groups while in Iraq, Libya and Syria from 2011 to 2019. Fluent in both English and Arabic, Fluke-Ekren’s assistance included analyzing documents for Ansar al-Sharia, the group behind the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans in 2012, according to her guilty plea.
Brinkema said that teaching women and girls to use “suicide vests cannot possibly be considered self-defense” and that she disagreed with Fluke-Ekren characterizing herself as a “passive dupe” who was led into terrorist activities by her second husband.Witnesses said Fluke-Ekren planned different mass-casualty strikes, though she never carried out the attacks. A woman with Islamic State ties told investigators that Fluke-Ekren had the idea in 2014 to bomb a U.S. college in the Midwest.
In a court filing in August, Fluke-Ekren’s attorneys said her statements about carrying out terrorist attacks in the United States were responses to “the shock and horrors of war” she experienced after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, or “U.S. or U.S.-led coalition forces,” killed Syrian civilians in bombings and airstrikes.“In 2015 one of her children was killed, and another severely injured, from such an attack on a residential neighborhood,” King and Sherlock wrote.
“This defendant is probably a gold mine of intelligence,” Parekh said. “All the people that she’s met, all the co-conspirators that she’s trained — but she didn’t cooperate.”
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