Fluke Ecklen, 42, is the first and so far only American woman to be indicted for her leadership role in IS, according to militant movement researchers. Fluke-Ekren’s two children were abusers who fancied Fluke-Ekren to carry out terrorist attacks and tried to trick those around them into killing “disbelievers.” I explained. Federal prosecutor Raj Parekh called Fluke Ekren “the Empress of ISIS.”
“There is no doubt as to what the purpose of this battalion was,” said Parekh, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. “It wasn’t in self-defense,” he said, adding that documents from Islamic State showed members of Fluke Ekren’s brigade “wanted to be the first to carry out a suicide operation.”
Defense counsel disputed the child abuse allegations and characterized Fluke Ekren as a battalion leader who had never actually taken part in combat.
“We didn’t even shoot guns,” said Fluke Ecklen. “I have never seen a suicide bomb go off or explode.”
According to a former friend, Fluke Ekren earned a degree in biology from the University of Kansas, attended graduate school in Indiana, and worked as a teacher in Kansas City, Missouri before moving out with her children and second husband in 2008. She turned sharply to extremism after arriving in Egypt in 2016, an estranged family member told US investigators.
Fluke-Ekren grew up on an 81-acre farm in Overbrook, Kansas as Alison Elizabeth Brooks. Alison Elizabeth Brooks is the daughter of a teacher and she was a veteran who served in Vietnam, prosecutors said.
“There is nothing in Fluke Ekren’s biography that could explain her actions,” Parekh said in the ruling. Fluke-Ekren’s father told U.S. officials that she “had a fanatical tendency” and “often sought out people to give her a difficult time being a Muslim.”
“Was she religious? Yes. She was from Central America. Before she was Muslim, she was like a Bible-breaking Christian,” says Amy Ammer, a former friend of Fluke Ekren. told The Washington Post in June.Amer said he was surprised when Fluke-Ekren began to endorse extremist ideas.
Fluke-Ekren this year pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges of providing material support to terrorist groups, admitting to assisting terrorist groups while in Iraq, Libya and Syria from 2011 to 2019. Fluke-Ekren, who is fluent in both English and Arabic, aided her in the 2012 attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya that killed four Americans, according to her guilty plea. The group behind the Ansar is analyzing her al-Shariah documents. Prosecutors said she also supported Al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group.
But it was Islamic State where Fluke-Ekren played a key role.
In 2016, Fluke-Ekren’s second husband oversaw Islamic State snipers in Syria and organized child care, medical services and education in the city of Raqqa, according to court documents. Fluke Ecklen trained women and girls to use AK-47 rifles, grenades and suicide bombers in case the male fighters needed help defending themselves against enemy fire, he said. Her petition states: According to a witness who had military training as a girl, Fluke Ekren later told her, “It was important to kill khfar, the Arabic word for unbeliever.” , says the document.
In 2017, as male fighters were losing power to the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, the mayor of ISIS in Raqqa named Fluke Ekren as the leader of the all-female battalion, Khativa Nusayba. The Fluke-Ekren group not only taught martial arts, but also gave medical training and religious classes. It also offered courses on vehicle bombing and how to pack rifles and military supplies into “go bags,” according to court documents filed in June.
U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema imposed the maximum sentence allowed under Fluke Ecklen’s plea bargain. The judge said he didn’t find Fluke Ekren’s statement “completely credible” at Tuesday’s hearing. Fluke Ekren said she had only “unknowingly” provided assistance to Ansar al-Sharia in the aftermath of the Benghazi attack, telling the judge that she was not a terrorist target, but a deadly force inside Syria. It said it is training women to handle weapons in Syria to prevent serious accidents, in order to teach women self-defense in case enemy fighters attempt to sexually abuse them.
“Most of my time was spent cooking, cleaning, taking the kids to the doctor, rubbing disinfectant on my scraped knees, and reconciling sibling rivalries,” he said. Fluke Ekren said, often shedding tears during her remarks to the judge.
Brinkema said that “teaching women and girls to use suicide vests cannot be considered self-defense,” said Fluke Ecklen, a “passive impostor” who was involved in terrorist activities by her second husband. said he did not agree with the characteristics of
Witnesses said Fluke Ekren never carried out the attack, but planned various mass casualty attacks. One of Fluke-Ekren’s daughters told investigators that her former Kansas mother “would go to a shopping mall in the United States and bomb the basement of a building or the parking lot level.” He told US investigators that he could park a vehicle full of explosives and detonate them,” he told U.S. investigators. Car interior with mobile phone trigger device. ” Daughter According to court documents, Fluke-Ekren said it considered attacks that did not kill large numbers of people “a waste of resources.”
“In reality, Khatiba Nussayeb had only 100 women, including members designated as babysitters, nurses and cooks,” defense attorneys Joseph King and Sean Sherlock ruled. I wrote it in my reasons. “The loosely organized groups had no formal ranks, were not issued uniforms or weapons, did not participate in battles, and did not fire at their enemies.”
In an August court filing, Fluke Ekren’s attorney said her statements about carrying out terrorist attacks in the United States were a reflection of the “war shock” she experienced in the wake of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces. and terror”, or “the United States or a coalition led by the United States,” killed Syrian civilians in bombings and airstrikes.
King and Sherlock say, “In 2015, one of her children was killed in an attack on a residential neighborhood and another was seriously injured.” I saw him killed in a similar incident.”
Lawyers have denied allegations of abuse from Fluke Ekren’s children, saying they are “inaccurate, exaggerated, exaggerated and, in many cases, outright false.” It said it was first disclosed to Fluke-Ekren in September.
Parekh said Fluke Ekren had tried unsuccessfully for years to raise a women’s battalion before Islamic State leaders approved her plans in Raqqa. Fluke-Ekren was not charged with her assault, but her prosecutor claimed she encouraged and arranged for another woman to carry out her own suicide attack. adopt her child.
Fluke-Ekren chose not to cooperate with US investigators after her arrest, Parekh added.
“This defendant is probably a storehouse of intelligence,” Parekh said. “All the people she met, all the co-conspirators she trained — but she didn’t cooperate.”
After her second husband was killed in an airstrike, Fluke-Ecklen married an IS unmanned aerial vehicle expert who worked “to attach chemical weapons to drones to drop chemical bombs from the air.” He too was killed in an airstrike. Fluke-Ekren’s fourth husband, at the time he was killed, was an IS official in charge of Raqqa’s defense during the siege by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.
Fluke-Ekren said it renounced Islamic State in 2019 and surrendered to Syrian authorities in the summer of 2021. She was turned over to U.S. custody in January after spending her 11 years outside the U.S.
A daughter who spoke at a hearing Tuesday claimed Fluke Ekren forced her to marry an Islamic State fighter when she was 13 and he was 17. A combatant raped her. Fluke-Ekren claimed it was her daughter’s choice to marry a man.
“You can’t give up, because that’s the only time you lose,” Fluke Ekren said in a recording of a call Parekh played in court with his daughter in January 2021.
Speaking on the death of his second husband and five-year-old son, Fluke Ecklen said by phone: You feel sad, but you are not – Regret is like hating something you did or a decision you made. Regret. ”
