“Allison Fluke-Ekren brainwashed young girls and trained them to kill. She has blazed a path of terror, plunging her own children into unfathomable depths of cruelty by abusing them physically, psychologically, emotionally and sexually,” wrote First Assistant US Attorney Raj Parekh in a sentencing memo setting out the allegations of the own Fluke-Ekren children and parents have made against her.
Fluke-Ekren pleaded guilty to terrorism charges after admitting she led Khatiba Nusaybah, an all-female Islamic State battalion in which around 100 women and girls – some as young as 10 – were killed. learned to use automatic weapons and detonate suicide grenades and belts.
Parekh’s sentencing memo details how Fluke-Ekren went from growing up on an 81-acre farm in Overbrook, Kansas, to being a leader of the Islamic State, traveling from Kansas to Egypt to Libya and then to the Territory controlled by the Islamic State in Syria. Along the way, she had 12 children and five different husbands, several of whom were killed in action.
Over the years, Fluke-Ekren’s family and acquaintances have described her as the driving force behind her second husband becoming radicalized and convincing him to take her and the children to Egypt. His plans for an all-female battalion were ignored and dismissed by other terror groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, and only the Islamic State ultimately accepted his idea, prosecutors said.
Fluke-Ekren’s parents describe her as manipulative and difficult from the start. Family members describe how she laughingly recounted the story of how she tried to drown her brother in an icy lake as a child.
Perhaps most disturbing in a long list of disturbing reports are allegations by two of her children that she sexually abused her children.
“My mom was beating my body leaving my muscles clinging in agony. (She) would then go to her bedroom and masturbate to the fact that she was beating me. I could hear it from the other room,” one of Fluke-Ekren’s daughters, now an adult, wrote in a letter to the court.She is expected to testify at Fluke-Ekren’s sentencing hearing.
Fluke-Ekren’s oldest child, a son, also says he was assaulted.
“My mother is a freak who loves torturing children for sexual pleasure,” he wrote in his own letter to the court.
It is unclear to what extent the abuse allegations will affect the sentence imposed by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, as they are not directly related to crimes of terrorism. The girl will be allowed to testify at the sentencing hearing because she was a victim of terrorism – her mother enrolled her in Khatiba Nusaybah as a child. The son should not testify.
Fluke-Ekren, for its part, denies many of the abuse allegations. She complained that she was not given the opportunity to refute her family’s statements.
Fluke-Ekren “is shocked and saddened by these allegations but recognizes that Witness 1 (her daughter) suffered trauma in Syria,” defense attorney Joseph King wrote in his sentencing memorandum, which seeks a lower sentence. at 20 years. “She cannot undo the pain she caused by taking Witness-1 to Syria.”
Her son said Fluke-Ekren has long denied the abuse and people have chosen to believe her over her children.
“I know her and I know she wants to lie to get away with it, get her knuckles slapped and try to use a bloody story to gain power and access to victims again,” the son wrote. .
Other allegations included in the prosecutors’ sentencing memorandum:
— She pushed a woman to commit a suicide attack. When the woman said she could no longer carry out the attack because she was pregnant, Fluke-Ekren took in the child after it was born so the woman could continue the attack.
– She told others that her eldest son was born after she was raped by an American soldier in order to indulge herself in the terrorist groups where she sought to increase her status.
— She forced her 13-year-old daughter to marry an Islamic State fighter.
— In Libya, she sought to establish a school for girls where she showed young girls videos of Iraqi women being raped by American soldiers. “She was telling us that if we didn’t kill the ‘kuffar’ (non-believer) that we would be raped,” the girl wrote in court documents about the experience.
