Kansas-born ‘Empress of ISIS’ Allison Fluke-Ekren sentenced to 20 years
A Kansas mom-of-four who left the US and led an all-female ISIS battalion when she lived in Syria was handed the maximum sentence of 20 years in prison after her own children denounced her in court Tuesday.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, described by prosecutors as “an empress of ISIS,” admitted that she led the Khatiba Nusaybah, a battalion in which some 100 women and girls learned how to use AK-47s and detonate grenades and suicide belts.
One of Fluke-Ekren’s daughters was among those who said she received such training. The daughter and Fluke-Ekren’s oldest son, now adults, both urged the judge to impose the harshest possible punishment on their mother, whom they accused of horrific acts.
They said they were physically and sexually abused by their mother, and described the torment they endured in detail in letters submitted to the court. Fluke-Ekren denied mistreating her kids.
The daughter, Leyla Ekren, said “lust for control and power” drove her mother to drag the family halfway across the world to find a terrorist group that would allow Fluke-Ekren to flourish, during a victim impact statement she gave at the hearing.
She said her mother became skilled at hiding the abuse she inflicted. She described a circumstance where her mother poured an off-brand lice medication all over her face as a punishment and it started to blister her face and burn her eyes.
Fluke-Ekren then tried to wash the chemicals off her daugher’s face, but Leyla Ekren resisted.
“I wanted people to see what kind of person she was. I wanted it to blind me,” she said as her mother sat a few feet away, resting her head on her hand with a look of disbelief. After her children testified, she glared in their direction.
Prosecutors say the abuse the Kansas native inflicted on her children from a young age helps explain how she went from an 81-acre farm in Overbrook to an ISIS battalion leader in Syria, with stops in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey and Libya along the way.
First Assistant US Attorney Raj Parekh said Fluke-Ekren’s family sent her to an elite private school in Topeka and that she grew up in a stable home.
Parekh said Fluke-Ekren’s immediate family was unanimous in its desire to see her punished to the maximum extent possible, a circumstance the veteran prosecutor described as extremely rare.
“There is nothing in Fluke-Ekren’s background that can explain her conduct, which was driven by fanaticism, power, manipulation, delusional invincibility, and extreme cruelty,” Parekh said.
Fluke-Ekren, aka Umm Mohammed al-Amriki, asked for just a two-year sentence so she could raise her young children. She said at the outset of a lengthy, tearful speech that she takes responsibility for her actions before rationalizing and minimizing her conduct.
“We just lived a very normal life,” she told the judge about her time in Syria, showing pictures of her kids at a weekly pizza dinner.
She denied the abuse allegations, and tried to accuse her oldest son of manipulating her daughter into making them.
She portrayed the Khatiba Nusaybah as something more akin to a community center for women that morphed into a series of self-defense classes as it became clear that the city of Raqqa, the Islamic State stronghold where she lived, faced invasion.
She acknowledged that women and girls — some as young as 10 years old — were taught to use suicide belts and automatic weapons but portrayed it as safety training to avoid accidents in a war zone where such weapons were common.
Judge Leonie Brinkema, though, made clear she was unimpressed by Fluke-Ekren’s justifications.
At one point, Fluke-Ekren explained the need for women to defend themselves against the possibility of rape by enemy soldiers. “Sexual violence is not OK in any circumstance,” she said.
Brinkema interrupted to ask Fluke-Ekren about the daughter’s allegation that she was forced to marry an ISIS fighter who raped her at the age of 13.
“She was a few weeks away from 14,” Fluke-Ekren responded in protest, later saying, “It was her decision. I never forced her.”
Parekh said that even within the Islamic State, people who knew Fluke-Ekren described her radicalization as “off the charts” and other terrorist groups refused her plans to form a female battalion until she finally found a taker in the Islamic State.
Fluke-Ekren’s actions “added a new dimension to the darkest side of humanity,” Parekh said.
In addition to forming the battalion, Fluke-Ekren admitted that while living in Libya, she helped translate, review and summarize documents stolen by her second husband from the US Special Mission in Benghazi after the deadly 2012 terrorist attack.
A criminal complaint against Fluke-Ekren was filed under seal in 2019 but not made public until she was brought back to the US to face charges in Jan. 2022.
According to court filings, while residing in Syria, Fluke-Ekren told a witness about her desire to carry out an attack on US soil.
“To conduct the attack, Fluke-Ekren explained that she could go to a shopping mall in the United States, park a vehicle full of explosives in the basement or parking garage level of the structure, and detonate the explosives in the vehicle with a cell phone triggering device,” according to a statement from the DOJ.
Fluke-Ekren was allegedly heard saying that she considered any attack that did not kill a large number of people to be “a waste of resources.”
She pleaded guilty in June to one count of conspiring to provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.
With Post wires
