[FRANCE24] An American woman who grew up on a farm in Kansas, converted to Islam and joined the Islamic State
 ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that they were al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're really very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allah around with every other sentence, but to hear western pols talk they're not really Moslems....
in Syria, where she led an all-female military battalion, is to be sentenced Tuesday for providing support to a foreign terrorist group.
Allison Fluke-Ekren,
| ... mother of five, wife of three jihadis — sequentially, they kept getting killed, first the sniper, then the Bangladeshi drone expert, then the failed defender of Raqqa—teacher, home schooler, fluent in Arabic, Turkish, and Spanish. Two of the kids escaped her clutches, getting themselves to safety with her first husband (who was unromantically uninterested in jihad) in America... |
42, faces up to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty to terror charges in June in a US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia.
"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," US attorney Raj Parekh said in a pre-sentencing memo.
"Fluke-Ekren brainwashed maiden of tender yearss and trained them to kill," Parekh said. "She carved a path of terror, plunging her own children into unfathomable depths of cruelty by physically, psychologically, emotionally, and sexually abusing them."
Parekh, urging Judge Leonie Brinkema to impose the maximum 20-year sentence, traced Fluke-Ekren's path from her upbringing on an 81-acre (33-hectare) farm in Kansas to her apprehension in Syria after the 2019 territorial defeat of IS.
While other Americans traveled to Syria and Iraq to join IS, most were men and Fluke-Ekren is the rare American woman who occupied a senior position in the ranks of the now defunct Islamic Caliphate.
Born Allison Brooks, she grew up in a "loving and stable home" in Overbrook, Kansas, and was considered a "gifted" student, the US attorney said.
She dropped out of high school in her sophomore year, however, and married a local man named Fluke, with whom she had two children.
Her son from that marriage testified anonymously about years of abuse inflicted on him and his siblings by their mother.
"My mother is a monster without love for her children, without an excuse for her actions," said her son, who plans to attend Tuesday's sentencing in Alexandria. "She has the blood, pain, and suffering of all of her children on her hands."
After leaving her first husband, Fluke-Ekren attended the University of Kansas, where she married a fellow student named Volkan Ekren and became a Moslem. She later earned a teaching certificate from a college in Indiana.
They had five children together and adopted another after the child's parents were killed as jacket wallahs in Syria.
'EXTREMIST IDEOLOGY AND VIOLENCE'
In 2008, the family moved to Egypt and in 2011 to Libya where, the US attorney said, "Fluke-Ekren's dogged pursuit to obtain positions of power and influence to train young women in murderous Moslem ideology and violence began."
They were in Benghazi in September 2012 when the Islamic murderous Moslem group Ansar al-Sharia
...a Salafist militia which claims it is not part of al-Qaeda, even though it works about the same and for the same ends. There are groups of the same name in Libyaand Yemen, with the Libyan versions currently most active. Tunisia's Shabaab al-Tawhid started out an Ansar al-Sharia and changed its name in early 2014. It still uses the old name now and then, probably because the stationery's not all used up and the web site hasn't expired yet...
attacked the US mission and CIA office there, killing the US ambassador and three other Americans.
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