ALEXANDRIA (AFP) – An American woman who joined Daesh in Syria, leading an all-female military battalion, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison by a U.S. court.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, who grew up on a farm in Kansas, was sentenced in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, after pleading guilty to providing material support to a terrorist organization.
Prosecutors told the court that for more than eight years, Fluke-Ekren “committed terrorist acts on behalf of three foreign terrorist organizations across war zones in Libya, Iraq, and Syria,” including training other women and young girls to undertake attacks for Daesh.
Fluke Ekren “in effect became the empress of Daesh,” said U.S. attorney Raj Parekh. “She brainwashed young girls and trained them to kill,” he said.
The sentencing stage of her case included dramatic, anonymous testimony from one of her sons about years of abuse inflicted on him and his siblings.
“My mother is a monster without love for her children, without an excuse for her actions,” said the son. “She has the blood, pain, and suffering of all of her children on her hands.”
Fluke-Ekren occupied a senior position in the ranks of the now defunct ‘Daesh caliphate’.
Born Allison Brooks, she grew up in a “loving and stable home” in Overbrook, Kansas, and was considered a “gifted” student, the U.S. attorney said.
After leaving her first husband, Fluke-Ekren attended the University of Kansas, where she married a fellow student named Volkan Ekren. She later earned a teaching certificate from a college in Indiana.
They had five children together and adopted another after the child’s parents were killed as suicide bombers in Syria.
In 2008, the family moved to Egypt and in 2011 to Libya where, the U.S. attorney said, “Fluke-Ekren’s dogged pursuit to obtain positions of power and influence to train young women in extremist ideology and violence began.”
They were in Benghazi in September 2012 when the militant group Ansar al-Sharia attacked the U.S. mission and CIA office there, killing the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.