Allison Fluke-Ekren. Photo / Alexandria Sheriff's Office via The New York Times
A teacher from Kansas who had converted to Islam travelled to the most dangerous conflicts in the world — Libya, Iraq, Syria — hoping to wage war.
Syria was where the teacher, Allison Fluke-Ekren, ultimately made her mark: she rose through the ranks of the Islamic State group, commanding a battalion of female fighters and training more than 100 women and girls, including her own daughter.
Even as her daughter eventually escaped to Kansas in 2017, Fluke-Ekren stayed, hoping to die defending the so-called caliphate and trying to trick her family in the United States into believing she was no longer alive. She was finally detained in summer 2021, held by unknown forces in Syria, before being brought to the Eastern District of Virginia in January on a charge of providing material support to terrorists.
On Tuesday, Fluke-Ekren, 42, pleaded guilty to the single charge in a federal courtroom in northern Virginia. As part of a plea deal, Fluke-Ekren detailed her role in Syria as well as a previously undisclosed connection to the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including the US ambassador to that country.
For the FBI and prosecutors, her conviction marked the end of a seven-year hunt. Fluke-Ekren's hardened militancy, fervency and unusually high-level position in the Islamic State group stand out even among the Americans who travelled to wage jihad in Syria. The case was the first prosecution in the United States involving a top female military leader of the Islamic State group, the first assistant US attorney, Raj Parekh, said during the hearing on Tuesday.
A teenage mother from Overbrook, Kansas, Fluke-Ekren slowly embraced the Islamic State group's ideology and had a knack for languages, according to Amy Farouk, a former friend.
"It was a way for her to feel important," Farouk said. "It made her have a sense of purpose."
Efforts to reach Fluke-Ekren's family in Kansas were unsuccessful. But Farouk, who said she met Fluke-Ekren in about 2001, filled out portions of her life. At the time, Fluke-Ekren was a teacher at the Islamic School of Greater Kansas City.
After Fluke-Ekren had two children and her first marriage in Kansas fell apart, she met an international student from Turkey, Volkan Ekren, at the University of Kansas, where both majored in the sciences, Farouk said. Fluke-Ekren graduated in 2007 and then attended a teaching programme at Earlham College in Indiana, prosecutors said.
The two eventually married and had five children together, all of whom were born in the United States.
In about 2008, Fluke-Ekren and Ekren moved to Cairo, where they lived in the upscale Sheikh Zayed City, according to Farouk, who relocated there around the same time. "Life was good," Farouk recalled, noting that her friend spoke Arabic fluently.
The family moved to Libya in late 2011, Farouk said. According to the plea agreement, Fluke-Ekren and her husband lived in Benghazi at the time of the 2012 attacks on a US diplomatic compound and a nearby CIA base. In the aftermath of the attacks, prosecutors said Ekren claimed to have removed a box of documents and at least one electronic device from the US compound and taken them home.
Fluke-Ekren admitted to helping him sort through the documents and prepare summaries that were provided to the leaders of Ansar al-Shariah, a terrorist organisation accused of leading the attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi. In late 2012, the family left Libya because Ansar al-Shariah was no longer conducting attacks in the country, according to the statement of facts.
Shortly after, the couple travelled to Syria, but Fluke-Ekren returned to Turkey while Ekren stayed and later oversaw Islamic State snipers. She joined him in Syria in 2014, but the next year, they moved to Mosul, Iraq, where she helped the Islamic State group in handling widows whose husbands had died fighting.
The family returned to Syria, and Ekren was killed in an airstrike as he was conducting reconnaissance for a terrorist attack, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said Fluke-Ekren married another Islamic State terrorist, a Bangladeshi man who specialised in drones and worked on a plan to drop chemical bombs using them. After the man, Wamiq al-Bengali, died, Fluke-Ekren married another Bangladeshi man, an Islamic State military leader who was responsible for defending Raqqa, Syria. He died while fighting for the group in 2018.
Fluke-Ekren admitted that she wanted to launch attacks in the United States, including on a college that prosecutors did not identify. According to the criminal complaint, her plan was presented to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, then the leader of the Islamic State group, who approved funding it. Al-Baghdadi was killed in a raid in 2019 by US commandos.
The complaint said Fluke-Ekren ran the battalion in 2016, training children on how to use AK-47 assault rifles, grenades and suicide belts. One witness saw one of Fluke-Ekren's children, who was about 5 or 6 years old at the time, holding a machine gun at her home in Syria.
She was smuggled out of Syria in about May 2019 and married a fifth time, according to the statement of facts. But the couple separated, and Fluke-Ekren tried to surrender to local police near Qabasin, Syria. Two weeks later, she was taken to a detention facility in Jarabulus, Syria. It is not clear who ran the prison.
Parekh said that Fluke-Ekren had left a "trail of betrayal" and that her family members might want to make victim statements when she is sentenced in October. She faces up to 20 years in prison.
When Judge Leonie M. Brinkema mentioned her children, Fluke-Ekren became visibly upset and began to weep.
Fluke-Ekren has at least seven children, including five with Ekren. Federal authorities brought back six of them to the US, people familiar with the matter said. At least one child, a son she had with her second husband, was killed in an airstrike in Syria. Her oldest son, who had lived with her in Cairo, returned to Kansas before Fluke-Ekren went to Libya.
Fluke-Ekren's case is part of an aggressive effort by federal prosecutors in Virginia to prosecute terrorists captured abroad.
Mohammed Khalifa, a Saudi-born Canadian who travelled to Syria in 2013 and later joined the Islamic State group, was brought to the United States last year and charged with providing material support to a terrorist organisation that resulted in death. He later pleaded guilty and faces life in prison.
Two British men, El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Kotey, who were part of a notorious Islamic State cell of Britons called "the Beatles", were eventually captured and prosecuted. The group kidnapped and tortured more than two dozen hostages, including American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, both of whom were beheaded in propaganda videos.
Kotey pleaded guilty to his role in the deaths of four Americans in Syria and was sentenced to life in prison. In April, a jury convicted Elsheikh, who also faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison for his part in the brutal kidnapping scheme.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Adam Goldman
Photograph by: Ivor Prickett
© 2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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