A 42-year-old woman from Kansas who was convicted of leading an ISIS battalion has been sentenced to 20 years in prison.
A Kansas mother who was convicted of leading an ISIS battalion was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Tuesday.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, pleaded guilty in June to expressing interest in carrying out terrorist attacks in the United States in support of ISIS on six separate occasions between 2014 and 2017, according to court documents unsealed in February.
In letters to the court, her family described Fluke-Ekren as a “monster.” In court on Tuesday, her adult daughter said her mother forced her to marry an ISIS fighter who raped her when she was only 13.
“My mother is a monster who enjoys torturing children for sexual pleasure. My mother is a monster very skilled in manipulation and controlling her emotions to her advantage,” wrote her son, who remains unnamed in court documents filed by the Justice Department last week. “My mother is a monster without love for her children, without an excuse for her actions.”
Fluke Ekren trained over 100 women and young girls, some just 10 years old on how to use automatic weapons, grenades and suicide belts, according to the Justice Department.
“Allison Fluke-Ekren brainwashed young girls and trained them to kill,” court documents say. “She carved a path of terror, plunging her own children into unfathomable depths of cruelty by physically, psychologically, emotionally, and sexually abusing them. For at least eight years, Fluke-Ekren committed terrorist acts on behalf of three foreign terrorist organizations across war zones in Libya, Iraq, and Syria.”
She also urged her daughter to delete messages shared between them to make sure she wasn’t caught in Syria where she had taken her children and was evading U.S. law enforcement, according to audio recordings played in court. Her daughter in court documents said she would inflict pain on her children, picking out what each one disliked the most and inflicting that damage upon them, then getting off on the pleasure of doing so, court documents say.
Fluke-Ekren was arrested in Syria earlier this year and transferred to U.S. custody, according to the DOJ.
