Former Kansas Teacher Allison Fluke-Ekren Charged With Leading All-Female ISIS Battalion in Syria

A former Kansas trainer who led an all-female Islamic State navy battalion and plotted terror assaults on Individuals has been nabbed in Syria, federal prosecutors stated as they unsealed the prison case late Friday.

Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, who was charged in Might 2019 with offering and conspiring to offer materials help to ISIS, a delegated terrorist group, was lastly dropped at the Jap District of Virginia on Friday evening after she was arrested in Syria.

The feds say Fluke-Ekren left the U.S. in 2008 for Egypt and migrated to Libya then Syria round 2012 along with her husband, an ISIS sniper coach. The pair “had been smuggled into Syria as a result of the terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia was not conducting assaults in Libya, and Fluke-Ekren wished to interact in violent jihad,” one witness allegedly instructed investigators.

Fluke-Ekren and her husband allegedly introduced $15,000 into Syria to purchase weapons, grenades and different navy provides. She has been concerned in an enormous array of actions on behalf of ISIS since not less than 2014, prosecutors say.

A weblog known as “4 Kansas Youngsters” created to “share the adventures of the Fluke-Ekren household” seems to point out pictures of Fluke-Ekren and her children, smiling in entrance of Egyptian pyramids and taking part in within the snow within the rural Midwest round 2010.

The Lawrence Journal-World additionally printed a 2004 article on homeschooling traits through which Fluke-Ekren is quoted explaining her dissatisfaction with public education. Homeschooling enabled her to show Arabic to her children, she stated.

However a prison grievance contains observations from six individuals who witnessed Fluke-Ekren’s actions in Syria between 2014 and 2017, allegedly she performed a job in planning and recruiting operatives for a possible assault on an American school campus. The plot by no means manifested as a result of she fell pregnant, the grievance says.

One witness recounted Fluke-Ekren presenting the faculty assault plan and saying the thought got here out of a need to hunt “vengeance” after kids had been killed when a market space in Syria was bombed by airstrikes that she blamed on america.

Fluke-Ekren was additionally a frontrunner and organizer of an ISIS navy battalion often called the Nusaybah Battalion, and he or she skilled ladies and youngsters to make use of AK-47 assault rifles, grenades and suicide belts, the prison grievance says.

She supplied lodging for ISIS recruits, taught extremist doctrine to children, and translated speeches from Turkish and Arabic to be disseminated on-line for ISIS leaders, prosecutors allege.

A witness instructed FBI brokers that on one event, they noticed certainly one of Fluke-Ekren’s sons, who she stated was roughly 5 or 6, holding a machine gun throughout a go to to her residence, which frequently had assault rifles laying round.

A member of the family of Fluke-Ekren’s additionally described her as a “jihadist” and an “ISIS member,” allegedly telling investigators that she “doesn’t like America or Individuals.” She as soon as talked about going to a U.S. shopping center and detonating a automobile piled with explosives in a parking storage, the member of the family stated, although she supposedly didn’t observe by way of as a result of her husband objected.

In keeping with the grievance, the member of the family stated that, regardless of her husband’s resistance, Fluke-Ekren “admitted that she fantasized about conducting different assaults,” and “thought-about any assault that didn’t kill numerous people to be a waste of assets.”

After the sniper-trainer husband died in an airstrike, prosecutors say Fluke-Ekren moved to ISIS headquarters in Raqqa in 2012 and married a drone specialist who additionally died about 5 years later. She then wed a navy chief who oversaw the protection of Raqqa.

In 2017, a witness who grew to become concerned with the Nusaybah Battalion whereas residing in Raqqa instructed investigators that the group was “an all-female ISIS navy unit,” whose goal “was to coach the ladies of ISIS to combat.”

Its members had been allegedly given bodily and medical coaching, attended non secular courses, and had been taught to pack a “go bag” full of rifles and navy provides. A few of these courses had been taught by Fluke-Ekren, witnesses instructed investigators.

In keeping with the grievance, Fluke-Ekren organized for a message to be despatched to her household within the U.S. in 2018 claiming she was useless so the U.S. authorities wouldn’t attempt to discover her. She additionally allegedly instructed a witness she by no means needed to return to the U.S. and meant to die as a martyr, prosecutors say.

Fluke-Ekren has an preliminary court docket look scheduled for Monday. If convicted, she faces as much as 20 years in jail.