ALEXANDRIA, Va. – A Kansas professor who had converted to Islam traveled to the world’s most dangerous conflicts — Libya, Iraq, Syria — in hopes of waging war.
Syria was where the teacher, Allison Fluke-Ekren, finally left her mark: she rose to the ranks of the Islamic State, commanding a battalion of women fighters and training more than 100 women and girls, including her own daughter. .
Although her daughter finally escaped to Kansas in 2017, Mrs. Fluke-Ekren was left with the hope of dying defending the so-called caliphate and trying to trick her family in the United States into believing she was no longer alive. . She was eventually arrested in the summer of 2021, detained by unknown forces in Syria, before being taken to the eastern district of Virginia in January on charges of providing material support to terrorists.
On Tuesday, Ms. Fluke-Ekren, 42, pleaded guilty to one charge in a federal courtroom in northern Virginia. As part of a guilty plea, Ms. Fluke-Ekren detailed his role in Syria, as well as an undisclosed connection to the 2012 attacks in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.
For the FBI and prosecutors, his sentence marked the end of a seven-year hunt. Ms. Fluke-Ekren’s fierce militancy and unusually high-ranking position in the Islamic State stand out even among Americans who traveled to jihad in Syria. The case was the first to be prosecuted in the United States involving an Islamic State military leader, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Raj Parekh said during Tuesday’s hearing.
A teenage mother from Overbrook, Kan., Mrs. Fluke-Ekren slowly embraced the ideology of the Islamic State and had a talent for languages, according to Amy Farouk, a former friend.
“It was a way for her to feel important,” Ms. Farouk. “It made her have a sense of purpose.”
Efforts to reach the family of Mrs. Fluke-Ekren in Kansas was unsuccessful. But Mrs. Farouk, who said he met Ms. Fluke-Ekren around 2001, filled parts of his life. At that time, Ms. Fluke-Ekren was a professor at the Islamic School of the Great City of Kansas.
After Mrs. Fluke-Ekren had two children and their first marriage in Kansas broke up, she met an international student from Turkey, Volkan Ekren, at the University of Kansas, where they both majored in science, Ms. Farouk. Ms. Fluke-Ekren graduated in 2007 and then attended a teaching program at Earlham College, Indiana, prosecutors said.
The two eventually married and had five children together, all born in the United States.
Around the year 2008, Ms. Fluke-Ekren and Mr. Ekren moved to Cairo, where they lived in the exclusive city of Sheikh Zayed, according to Ms. Farouk, who moved there at the same time. “Life was good,” she recalled. Farouk, and noted that his friend spoke Arabic fluently.
The family moved to Libya in late 2011, Ms. Farouk. According to the declaration agreement, Ms. Fluke-Ekren and her husband were living in Benghazi at the time of the 2012 attacks on a US diplomatic complex and a nearby CIA base. Following the attacks, prosecutors said Mr Ekren claimed to have removed a box of documents and at least one electronic device from the US premises and taken them home.
Ms Fluke-Ekren admitted to helping him sort out the documents and prepare summaries that were provided to the leaders of Ansar al-Shariah, a terrorist organization 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 carrying out attacks in the country, according to the statement.
Shortly afterwards, the couple traveled to Syria, but Ms. Fluke-Ekren returned to Turkey while Mr. Ekren stayed behind and later oversaw Islamic State snipers. She joined him in Syria in 2014, but the following year they moved to Mosul, Iraq, where she helped ISIS deal with the widows whose husbands had died fighting.
The family returned to Syria and Mr Ekren was killed in an airstrike while conducting reconnaissance for a terrorist attack, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said Ms Fluke-Ekren was married to another Islamic State terrorist, a Bangladeshi man who specializes in drones and was working on a plan to drop chemical bombs using them. After the death of the man, Wamiq al-Bengali, Mrs. Fluke-Ekren married another Bangladeshi man, an Islamic State military leader responsible for defending Raqqa, Syria. He died while fighting for ISIS in 2018.
Ms. Fluke-Ekren admitted she wanted to launch attacks in the United States, even against a university that prosecutors did not identify. According to the criminal complaint, his plan was presented to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, then leader of the Islamic State, who agreed to finance it. Mr al-Baghdadi was assassinated in a raid in 2019 by US commandos.
The complaint said Ms. Fluke-Ekren led the battalion in 2016, training children on how to use AK-47 assault rifles, grenades and suicide belts. A witness saw one of Mrs.’s children. Fluke-Ekren, who was about five or six years old at the time, was holding a machine gun at his home in Syria.
He was smuggled out of Syria around May 2019 and married for the fifth time, according to the statement. But the couple broke up and Ms. Fluke-Ekren tried to turn herself in to local police near Qabasin, Syria. Two weeks later, she was taken to a detention center in Jarabulus, Syria. It is unclear who ran the prison.
Mr. Parekh said that Ms. Fluke-Ekren had left a “trail of betrayal” and that members of her family might want to make victim statements when convicted in October. He faces up to 20 years in prison.
When Judge Leonie M. Brinkema mentioned her children, Ms. Fluke-Ekren was visibly upset and started to cry.
Ms. Fluke-Ekren has at least seven children, including five with Mr. Ekren. Federal authorities took six of them to the United States, said people familiar with the matter. At least one son, a son she had with her second husband, was killed in an airstrike in Syria. Her eldest son, who had lived with her in Cairo, returned to Kansas before Mrs. Fluke-Ekren went to Libya.
Ms. Fluke-Ekren’s case is part of an aggressive effort by Virginia federal prosecutors to prosecute terrorists captured abroad.
Mohammed Khalifa, a Canadian born in Saudi Arabia who traveled to Syria in 2013 and later joined the Islamic State, was brought to the United States last year and accused of materially supporting a terrorist organization that caused 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 British ISIS cell called “the Beatles”, were eventually captured and prosecuted. The group abducted and tortured more than two dozen hostages, including American journalists James Foley and Steven J. Sotloff, both beheaded in propaganda videos.
Mr. 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 Mr Elsheikh, who is also facing a mandatory life sentence for his involvement in the brutal kidnapping scheme.