An American woman, originally from Kansas, finally confessed to her role in leading a battalion of all-female ISIS recruits and planning to carry out attacks on American soil.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, who has also become known under the alias Umm Mohammed al-Amrik, was first detained and then charged by the FBI this past January, and has officially given a plea of guilty to a single count of Aiding ISIS and also confessed to giving training to well over 100 women and girls. She also confessed to the planning attacks on various American targets, which seemed to include a shopping mall and a university.
“To conduct the attack, Fluke-Ekren allegedly explained that she could go to a shopping mall in the United States, park a vehicle full of explosives in the basement or parking garage level of the structure, and detonate the explosives in the vehicle with a cell phone triggering device. Fluke-Ekren allegedly considered any attack that did not kill a large number of individuals to be a waste of resources,” questioned the Department of Justice.
Formerly a school teacher and a mother of seven kids of which five of them were born in America, Fluke-Ekren departed from the United States to head to Egypt back in 2008 before finally making the move to Libya in 2011. As stated in the court documents, Fluke-Ekren and the “others with whom she traveled” were then sent into Syria in 2012. Allegedly, Fluke-Ekren was moved due to the terror group Ansar al-Sharia, the group that took credit for carrying out the attack against the American compound in Benghazi back in 2012, has stopped carrying out attacks in Libya, and Fluke_Ekren sought out a more “violent jihad.” Court documents also unveiled that her spouse, who had been killed in an airstrike back in 2016, was also known to be a part of Ansar al-Sharia and that the pair had written a report for the leaders of the terror group in the wake of looking over government documents that were stolen as part of the attack.
While working with ISIS, Fluke-Ekren led Khatiba Nusaybah, a battalion made up entirely of females that were operating in the de-facto capital city of Raqqa, Syria. Her primary role was giving weapons training to children and women, mostly in the use of AK-47s, suicide vests, and grenades. Fluke-Ekren testified that she never knew that some of the people she was training were underage, making the claim that “we didn’t intentionally train any young girls,” as reported by CNN.
As reported by witnesses at her trial, the radicalization levels of FLuke-Ekren were “off the charts” and “an 11 or 12” out of 10.
The sentencing for Fluke-Ekren is slated to happen in October and she is looking down the barrel of up to 20 years imprisonment.