A US woman, Allison Fluke-Ekren, pleaded guilty in a court in the Eastern District of Virginia on Tuesday for aiding ISIS.
According to a release from the Department of Justice in the US, Allison Fluke-Ekren, a 42-year-old woman hailing from Kansas, admitted to providing military training to over 100 women and young girls in Syria on behalf of ISIS and numerous other terrorist acts. According to the department, Fluke-Ekren left the US around 2008 and resided in Egypt until around 2011.
Fluke-Ekren was transferred to custody in January this year to Virginia. She had aided the terrorist organisation in reviewing and summarising US government documents, training and heading an all-women unit of the terror group called 'Khatiba Nusaybah'. According to a release, Fluke-Ekren, who was also known as Umm Mohammed al-Amriki, trained about 100 women and young girls, including wives of ISIS militants, in the use of explosives, suicide bombs and AK-47s.
According to a complaint filed by the FBI in Virginia, one of the witnesses in the case stated that Fluke-Ekren did not like Americans and she planned to attack a mall and a university in the US. Fluke-Ekren allegedly believed that any attacks that did not kill a large number of people were a waste of resources.
Before her association with ISIS, Fluke-Ekren was a teacher in Kansas. In 2018, Allison Fluke-Ekren informed one of the witnesses that she had instructed an individual in Syria to send a message to one of her family members stating that she was dead, so that the US government would not attempt to locate her. Allison Fluke-Ekren allegedly believed that it was important to kill unbelievers and die as martyrs on behalf of ISIS in Syria.
Her family appealed to the court to ban her from contacting them. BBC reported that authorities alleged that she moved to Libya and was smuggled to Syria around 2012 along with her then-husband, who, reportedly, later became an ISIS sniper before being killed in an airstrike. After his death, Fluke-Ekren is believed to have married a Bangladeshi ISIS member who specialised in making drones and was later killed in late 2016 or early 2017. She married a third time, and her last husband was believed to have been a senior ISIS commander in charge of the defence of Raqqa, which fell to coalition-backed anti-ISIS forces in 2017. A report said that she got married five times and had five children.A release said that her sentencing is scheduled for October 25 and she faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.
