ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) – An American woman who prosecutors say led an all-female battalion of Daesh terrorists in Syria pleaded guilty on Tuesday in a case that a prosecutor called a first of its kind in the United States.
Allison Fluke-Ekren broke down sobbing after admitting in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia to conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, a charge that carries a maximum 20-year prison sentence.
The guilty plea resolves a criminal case that came to light in January after Fluke-Ekren, 42, who once lived in Kansas, was brought to the U.S. to face accusations that she led a Daesh unit of women and young girls in the Syrian city of Raqqah and trained them in the use of automatic rifles, grenades and suicide belts.
It is the first prosecution in the U.S. of a female Daesh battalion leader, said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Raj Parekh. More than 100 women and young girls received training. And some of the girls, who were as young as 10 or 11 years old, may wish to speak at Fluke-Ekren’s sentencing hearing, Parekh said.
“Some of them may wish an opportunity to address the court because we would argue that there is lifelong trauma and pain that has been inflicted on them,” Parekh said.
Charging documents in the case trace Fluke-Ekren’s travels and activities in the Middle East over the last decade, including a move with her second husband to Egypt in 2008, though they don’t shed light on what inspired her alleged allegiance to foreign militant groups.
After moving back and forth throughout the region, including to Libya and Turkey, she settled in Syria in late 2012 or early 2013, where her husband ascended to a leadership position in the Daesh with responsibility for training snipers.
In Syria, according to one witness cited in court documents, she spoke openly about her desire to conduct an attack in the U.S., including by parking a car loaded with explosives in a shopping mall garage. Another witness said Fluke-Ekren discussed ideas for a bomb attack on a college campus in the Midwest.
Prosecutors say that after Fluke-Ekren’s second husband was killed in an air strike in Syria in February 2016 while conducting reconnaissance on a hill, she spearheaded the creation of a Women’s Center that offered medical services and child care — but also advanced weapons training — to dozens of women and young girls.
Her all-female battalion, known as Khatiba Nusaybah, began operations in 2017, with a goal of teaching female Daesh members how to defend themselves against the group’s enemies and to ‘defend’ the territory of Raqqah, prosecutors say.
In 2018, she told a witness that she had instructed someone in Syria to get a message to her family that she was dead so that the U.S. government would not try to find her.
The following year, though, she ended her affiliation with the Daesh and was smuggled out of Daesh-controlled territory, according to court documents.