[SIZE=7]Kansas Woman Who Joined ISIS Left a ‘Trail of Betrayal’[/SIZE]
Adam Goldman - 4h ago
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A teacher from Kansas who had converted to Islam traveled 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, 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, Ms. 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 the summer of 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.
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On Tuesday, Ms. Fluke-Ekren, 42, pleaded guilty to the single charge in a federal courtroom in Northern Virginia. As part of a plea deal, Ms. Fluke-Ekren detailed her role in Syria as well as a previously undisclosed connection to the 2012 attacks in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.
For the F.B.I. and prosecutors, her conviction marked the end of a seven-year hunt. Ms. Fluke-Ekren’s hardened militancy, fervency and unusually high-level position in the Islamic State stand out even among the Americans who traveled 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, the first assistant U.S. attorney, Raj Parekh, said during the hearing on Tuesday.
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© Ivor Prickett for The New York TimesFighters with the Syrian Democratic Forces in Raqqa, Syria, in 2017.
Ms. Fluke-Ekren was a “damaged person,” a teenage mother from Overbrook, Kan., who slowly embraced the Islamic State’s ideology and had a knack for languages, according to Amy Farouk, a former friend.
“It was a way for her to feel important,” Ms. Farouk said. “It made her have a sense of purpose.”
Efforts to reach Ms. Fluke-Ekren’s family in Kansas were unsuccessful. But Ms. Farouk, who said she met Ms. Fluke-Ekren in about 2001, filled out portions of her life. At the time, Ms. Fluke-Ekren was a teacher at the Islamic School of Greater Kansas City.
After Ms. 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, Ms. Farouk said. Ms. Fluke-Ekren graduated in 2007 and then attended a teaching program at Earlham College in Indiana, prosecutors said.
Kansas Woman Who Joined ISIS Left a ‘Trail of Betrayal’ (msn.com)