Kansas woman who led all-female ISIS battalion sentenced to 20 years in prison
Allison Fluke-Ekren, a Kansas woman who led an all-female ISIS battalion in Syria, was sentenced to 20 years in prison Tuesday in a federal courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia.
In June, Fluke-Ekren pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to provide support to ISIS, telling the judge she didn’t know that some of the 100 women she led and trained to use guns and explosives were children, some as young as 10.
During her decade of working with ISIS and others to wage a violent jihad – traveling from Libya to Egypt and eventually Syria – Fluke-Ekren discussed plans for terrorist attacks in the US and trained other women in ISIS on how to use AK-47s, grenades and suicide belts, according to her plea agreement.
In the sentencing hearing Tuesday, prosecutor Raj Parekh called Fluke-Ekren the “Empress of ISIS” who “brain washed young girls and trained them to kill.”
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/01/politics/isis-kansas-woman-who-led-battalion-sentenced/index.html
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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/us/politics/isis-fluke-ekren-trial.html
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ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Leyla Ekren, a quiet but scrappy girl from rural Kansas, lost her childhood in Syria, where her mother dragged her after war broke out more than a decade ago. Even as she fell ill with typhoid fever, her mother, a hardened militant who would ascend the ranks of the Islamic State, demanded that she undertake military training. As delirium and pain ravaged her mind and body, Leyla, then 10, found her effervescence evaporating. She just wanted to die.
“I got closer and closer to death, my mind started to deteriorate,” she said. “My ribs showed through my skin like a ladder. My stomach was sunken in like a bowl. My nose would bleed all the time. I would have random seizures as my body started to collapse. My mother did nothing.”
She survived, yet her mother, Allison Fluke-Ekren, again bent Leyla to her will, forcing the girl to marry an Islamic State fighter when she was 13. He raped Leyla. In the fall of 2017, with the help of the U.S. government, Leyla, now several months pregnant and still in her teens, made her way home to Kansas, where she gave birth.
The extent of the Islamic State’s atrocities in Syria are well known, but this tale, backed by interviews, testimony and court documents, is an extraordinary account of one daughter’s abuse at the hands of her mother. Just as extraordinary was her willingness to help federal investigators locate Ms. Fluke-Ekren, who was brought back to the United States in January to face prosecution and pleaded guilty months later to providing material support to a terrorist organization.
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