US woman pleads guilty to leading all-female Daesh/ISIS unit

US woman pleads guilty to leading all-female Daesh/ISIS unit

Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, acknowledges leading group that trained more than 100 women, girls, some as young as 10

By Michael Hernandez

WASHINGTON (AA) - An American woman has pleaded guilty to forming and leading an all-female Daesh/ISIS militant battalion to fight on the terror group's behalf in Syria, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.

Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, admitted to conspiring to provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization, and is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 25, the agency said in a statement. She faces up to 20 years in prison.

She specifically acknowledged forming the Khatiba Nusaybah in which she trained more than 100 women and girls, some as young as 10, to fight on Daesh/ISIS's behalf to defend its former capital of Raqqah in Syria, according to the department.

Fluke-Ekrean, a trained teacher and convert to Islam from the state of Kansas, is the first American woman to be successfully prosecuted for holding a leadership role in the international terror group.

Court documents say Fluke-Ekren moved to Egypt with her second husband, Volkan Ekren, a now deceased member of the Ansar al-Sharia terror group, in 2008 before moving to Libya in 2011. In 2012, she would travel from Libya to Turkey and then to Syria, which was in the midst of a spiraling conflict.

Her husband would become the Daesh/ISIS leader for snipers in Syria in 2014 and around that time she would speak about her desire to stage an attack on the US, a witness told the court. In 2016, she was appointed to found and lead a "women's center" in Raqqah where she would train women and girls on AK-47 assault rifles, grenades and suicide belts.

The Khatiba Nusaybah would formally begin operations in February 2017 as Daesh/ISIS's territorial holdings began to collapse in Syria. Raqqah fell in October of that year.

Fluke-Ekren attempted to flee, telling an individual to inform her family that she died in Syria with the intent of evading capture, according to her plea agreement. She was brought to the US in January after being held in custody in Syria.


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