A Kansas native who led an all-female Islamic State group while living in Syria has been sentenced to 20 years in prison, the maximum possible sentence, after her children sued her in court and exposed the horrific conditions and abuse she endured. he made them. . Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, admitted to leading Khatiba Nusaybah, an order in which about 100 women and girls — some as young as 10 — learned how to use automatic weapons and set off grenades and suicide belts. One of Fluke-Ekren’s daughters was among those who said she received such training. Fluke-Ekren’s daughter and older son, now adults, both urged the judge to impose the maximum sentence. They said they were physically and sexually abused by their mother and detailed the abuse in letters to the court. Fluke-Ekren denied abuse. The daughter, Leyla Ekren, said a “lust for control and power” led her mother to drag the family halfway around the world to find a terrorist group that would allow Fluke-Ekren to flourish, during a statement impact on the victim who gave the hearing. . She said her mother was good at hiding the abuse she caused. She described an occasion where her mother poured an alien medicine for lice all over her face as punishment and it began to blister her face and burn her eyes. Fluke-Ekren then tried to wash the chemicals off her daughter’s face, but Leyla Ekren resisted. “I wanted people to see what kind of person he was. I wanted him 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 they deposited her children, she glanced in their direction. Fluke-Ekren’s status as a US-born woman who rose to a leadership position in the Islamic State makes her story unique among terrorism cases. Prosecutors say the abuse she inflicted on her children from a young age explains how she went from an 81-acre (33-hectare) farm in Overbrook, Kansas, to an Islamic State leader in Syria, with stops in Egypt and Libya along the way. way. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Raj Parekh said Fluke-Ekren’s family sent her to an elite private school in Topeka and she grew up in a stable home. Parekh said Fluke-Ekren’s immediate family was unanimous in their desire to see her punished to the fullest extent possible, a circumstance the veteran prosecutor described as extremely rare. “There is nothing in Fluke-Ekren’s track record that can explain her behavior, which was driven by fanaticism, power, manipulation, delusional invincibility and extreme cruelty,” Parekh said. Fluke-Ekren asked for just two years in prison so she could raise her young children. She said at the start of a long, tearful speech that she takes responsibility for her actions before rationalizing and minimizing her behaviour. “We just lived a very normal life,” she told the judge of her time in Syria, showing photos of her children at a weekly pizza dinner. She denied the abuse allegations and tried to accuse her eldest son of manipulating her daughter into making them. She presented Khatiba Nusaybah as more akin to a community center for women that turned into a series of self-defense classes as it became clear that Raqqa, the Islamic State stronghold where she lived, was under attack. He acknowledged that women and girls were being 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, however, made it clear that she was unimpressed by Fluke-Ekren’s excuses. At one point, Fluke-Ekren explained the need to defend women against the possibility of rape by enemy soldiers. “Sexual violence is not okay under any circumstances,” she said. Brinkema paused to ask Fluke-Ekren about the daughter’s claim that she was forced to marry an Islamic State fighter who raped her at age 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 described Fluke-Ekren as an “Empress of ISIS” whose husbands rose through the ranks in the Islamic State, often only to be killed in combat. Even inside the Islamic State, people who knew Fluke-Ekren described her radicalization as “off the charts” and other terror groups rejected her plans to form a women’s brigade until she finally found a jailer in the Islamic State, said the Parekh. Fluke-Ekren’s actions “added a new dimension to the darker side of humanity,” Parekh said. In addition to forming the order, Fluke-Ekren admitted that while living in Libya, she helped translate, revise and summarize documents obtained from U.S. diplomatic facilities after the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi.
