An American woman from Kansas confessed to leading a battalion of all-female ISIS recruits and plotting terror attacks on American soil.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, also known by the alias Umm Mohammed al-Amrik, was originally detained and charged by the FBI in January, and has pleaded guilty to one count of aiding ISIS and confessed to training over 100 women and girls. She also admitted to plotting attacks on American targets, specifically a university and a shopping mall.
“To conduct the attack, Fluke-Ekren allegedly 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. Fluke-Ekren allegedly considered any attack that did not kill a large number of individuals to be a waste of resources,” the Department of Justice stated.
Fluke-Ekren is a former school teacher and a mother of at least seven children, five of whom were born on American soil, and left the United States for Egypt in 2008, before moving to Libya in 2011. According to court documents, Fluke-Ekren and “others with whom she traveled” were moved into Syria in 2012. Allegedly, Fluke-Ekren relocated because the terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia — the organization responsible for carrying out the 2012 attack on the American compound in Benghazi — had ceased conducting attacks in Libya, and Fluke-Ekren wanted to be involved in “violent jihad.” Court documents also revealed that her husband, who was killed in an airstrike in 2016, was also affiliated with Ansar al-Sharia and that the couple had drafted a report for terrorist leaders after analyzing government documents stolen during the attack.
While with ISIS, Fluke-Ekren led Khatiba Nusaybah, an all-female battalion operating in its de-facto capital of Raqqa, Syria. Her main role was providing weapons training to women and children, primarily with AK-47s, grenades, and suicide vests. Fluke-Ekren testified that she did not know that some of the trainees were underage, claiming “we didn’t intentionally train any young girls,” according to CNN.
According to witnesses at her trial, Fluke-Ekren’s radicalization levels were “off the charts” and “an 11 or 12” out of 10.
Fluke-Ekren will be sentenced in October and faces up to 20 years imprisonment.