Former Kansas teacher who joined the Islamic State in Syria and carried out jihadist plans in Egypt and Libya pled guilty to one count of providing support to the terrorist group on Tuesday.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, the mother-turned-ISIS female brigade leader admitted she planned an attack on an American college and trained over one hundred fighters, all-female, in Syria.
She left the US in early 2011 and reemerged in Syria in 2014 and also traveled to Egypt and Libya to carry out attacks.
Ekren, while she was in Syria, presented the plan to target an American college campus in the Midwest with explosives to a paid US foreign government source, one of the six government witnesses who interacted with her said. She said that the plan was also presented to the then-leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Ekren went by the name Umm Mohammed al-Amriki and was in Mosul when the ISIS fighters were in control of the city.
She said that she trained women – middle-aged and young – on the use of AK-47 assault rifles, grenades and suicide belts.
She was in-charge of the Khatiba Nusaybah, the all-female group of fighters trained to carry out the Islamic State’s mission.
Witness told investigators that Ekren was ‘off the charts’ radicalized and on a scale of one to 10 she was ranked ‘11 or a 12’
Ekren told the court that the training was not intentional and some of the girls were part of the crowd but First Assistant US Attorney Raj Parekh then went on to reveal that the girls testified before a grand jury under oath that they received arms-training from the Kansas mother.
It was revealed during the probes that Ekren during an interaction with another government witness in Syria presented a plan of attack involving parking a car full of explosives in a shopping mall parking garage and detonating it with a cellphone.
“Ekren considered any attack that did not kill a large number of individuals to be a waste of resources,” witness statements in the plea papers revealed.
The documents also revealed that Ekren married for the second time with an Ansar al-Sharia member. The group was responsible for the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi, Libya in 2012.
After the attack, her then-husband brought home a box of documents from the US government buildings, and together, the couple examined the contents of the box.
They both then delivered the American papers to officials in the terror group. Both of them left Libya soon after seeking to ‘engage in violent jihad elsewhere’, according to the plea agreement accessed by news agency CBS.
Fluke-Ekren remarried once more in 2016 after her former husband died, this time a Bangladeshi ISIS member who built drones for ISIS.
He also used those drones to drop chemical bombs. He also died later. Fluke-Ekren married five times.
She admitted that she was affiliated to ISIS until May 2019 and turned herself into local Syrian police in 2021. She was transferred into US custody in January 2022.
She faces a maximum of 20 years in prison as a result of her plea.
She pleaded guilty on Tuesday while the judge Leonie Brinkema mentioned her children and said she understands her decisions as Fluke-Ekren broke down in tears while she waived her rights by pleading guilty.
Read all the Latest News here
Comments
0 comment