Alison Fluke-Ekren. Photo: Alexandria Virginia Sheriff’s Of/AFP/Getty Images Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, admitted leading Khatiba Nusaybah, an order in which about 100 women and girls – some as young as 10 – were taught 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 both urged the judge to impose the maximum sentence. They said they were physically and sexually abused by their mother and in letters to the court they described the abuse in horrific detail. 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 an impact statement to the victim who gave to the hearing. She said her mother was good at hiding the abuse she caused. She described an incident in which her mother poured lice medicine 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 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. She later looked at her children after their testimony. Fluke-Ekren’s status as a US-born woman who rose to leadership 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. 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 took responsibility for her actions, but spent most of her speech rationalizing and minimizing her behavior. “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 against her 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 siege and invasion. 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. That prompted an interruption from Brinkema, who asked Fluke-Ekren about the daughter’s claim that she was forced to marry an IS 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.” First Assistant US Attorney Raj Parekh described Fluke-Ekren as an “Empress of Isis” whose husbands rose to senior ranks in the Islamic State, often only to be killed in combat. Even inside Islamic State, people who knew her described her radicalization as “off the charts,” he said. Fluke-Ekren’s actions “added a new dimension to the darker side of humanity,” Parekh said.
