Who is Allison Fluke-Ekren? Kansas mom who led ISIS battalion in Syria gets maximum sentence of 20 years
ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA: A Kansas mother who oversaw an all-female Islamic State battalion while residing in Syria was given the maximum punishment of 20 years in prison after being exposed in court by her own children who described the awful conditions and torture she subjected them to. According to the court document, the 42-year-old Allison Fluke-Ekren confessed that she was the leader of the Khatiba Nusaybah, a battalion of about 100 girls and women, some of whom were as young as 10, who were taught how to operate automatic weapons, detonate grenades, and deploy suicide belts.
Several others, including one of Fluke-Ekren's daughters, claimed to have received this training. Both the daughter and Fluke-Ekren's eldest son urged the judge to give the harshest punishment possible. In letters to the court, they claimed that their mother had physically and sexually assaulted them, describing the torture in horrifying detail. The abuse was refuted by Fluke-Ekren. Leyla Ekren, the daughter, stated during a victim impact statement she gave at the hearing that her mother's desire for control and power caused her to drag the family across the globe in search of a terrorist organization that would allow Fluke-Ekren to grow.
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According to her, her mother got good at covering up the violence she inflicted. She related a story of how her mother had punished her by dousing her with lice treatment, which caused her face to boil and her eyes to burn. Fluke-Ekren then attempted to wash the toxins off Leyla's face to cover up what she had done. Prosecutors said that the abuse she inflicted on her children from a young age helps explain how she went from an 81-acre farm in Overbrook, Kansas, to an Islamic State leader in Syria, with stops in Egypt and Libya along the way.
Meanwhile, US-born Fluke-Ekren requested a sentence of just two years so she could care for her small children. She began a long, tearful speech by saying that she accepted responsibility for her acts, but the majority of it was spent justifying and downplaying what she had done. She told the judge about her time in Syria while showing pictures of her kids at a weekly pizza dinner, “We just lived a very normal life.” She also attempted to claim that her oldest son had tricked her daughters into making the charges of abuse against her.
Although Fluke-Ekren accepted that girls and women were taught how to use automatic weapons and suicide belts, she presented this training as safety measures to prevent mishaps in a conflict zone where such weapons were widely available. At one point, Fluke-Ekren explained the need for women to defend themselves against the possibility of rape by enemy soldiers. “Sexual violence is not OK in any circumstance,” she noted. However, Judge Leonie Brinkema made clear she was unimpressed by Fluke-Ekren’s justifications and sentenced her to a maximum of 20 years in prison according to state law.