A woman from the United States who was raised on a farm in Kansas, converted to Islam, and then joined the Islamic State in Syria, where she oversaw an all-female combat unit, is scheduled to get her sentence on Tuesday for aiding a foreign terrorist organisation.
After pleading guilty to terrorism-related charges in June in a US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, now faces up to 20 years in prison.
“For at least eight years, Fluke-Ekren committed terrorist acts on behalf of three foreign terrorist organizations across war zones in Libya, Iraq, and Syria,” US attorney Raj Parekh said in a pre-sentencing memo.
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“Fluke-Ekren brainwashed young girls and trained them to kill,” Parekh said. “She carved a path of terror, plunging her own children into unfathomable depths of cruelty by physically, psychologically, emotionally, and sexually abusing them.”
In order to convince Judge Leonie Brinkema to inflict the maximum 20-year sentence, Parekh described Ekren’s life from her Kansas farm upbringing until her capture in Syria following the territorial defeat of IS in 2019. Fluke-Ekren was captured in Syria.
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Even though other Americans also went to join IS in Syria and Iraq, most of them were men, and Fluke-Ekren is the lone American woman to have held a top position within the now-defunct Islamic Caliphate.
She was referred to as a “talented” student and was born Allison Brooks; the US attorney claimed that she grew up in a “loving and stable environment” in Overbrook, Kansas.
(With inputs from agencies)
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