HORRIFYING details of the case of an American woman who allegedly plotted to kill innocent people in shocking attacks in the US have emerged, as she stands trial for supporting terrorism tomorrow.
Allison Elizabeth Fluke-Ekren, 42, helped train children and woman with suicide belts and machine guns, planned horrific attacks on US students and in US shopping malls, and even faked her own death to avoid arrest, feds allege.
The DoJ released a press release on Saturday announcing that Fluke-Ekren is being charged with providing and conspiring to provide material support to the designated terrorist organization that is the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, also known as ISIS.
The feds say Fluke-Ekren, who was known to go by a string of names including Umm Mohammed al-Amriki, Umm Mohammed, and Umm Jabril, left the US in 2008 for Egypt and migrated to Libya then Syria around 2012 with her husband, an ISIS sniper trainer.
The pair “were smuggled into Syria because the terrorist organization Ansar al-Sharia was no longer conducting attacks in Libya, and Fluke-Ekren wished to engage in violent jihad,” one witness allegedly told investigators.
Fluke-Ekren and her husband allegedly brought $15,000 into Syria to buy weapons, grenades and other military supplies. She has been involved in a vast array of activities on behalf of ISIS since at least 2014, prosecutors say.
After her husband died in an airstrike in early 2016 as he attempted a terrorist attack, she later that year she married a Bangladeshi ISIS member, who died shortly after their marriage. Fluke-Ekren went on to marry a “prominent” ISIS military leader, the complaint says.
A blog called “4 Kansas Kids” created to “share the adventures of the Fluke-Ekren family” appears to show photos of Fluke-Ekren and her kids, smiling in front of Egyptian pyramids and playing in the snow in the rural Midwest around 2010.
A witness told FBI agents that on one occasion, they saw one of Fluke-Ekren’s sons, who she said was roughly 5 or 6, holding a machine gun during a visit to her home, which often had assault rifles laying around.
She is accused of being leader and organizer of an ISIS military battalion, known as the Khatiba Nusaybah, in order to train women on the use of automatic firing AK-47 assault rifles, grenades and suicide belts.
Additionally, Fluke-Ekren allegedly provided ISIS and ISIS members with services, which included providing lodging, translating speeches made by ISIS leaders, training children on the use of AK-47 assault rifles and suicide belts and teaching extremist ISIS doctrine.
She also discussed a plan with a witness in 2014 to attack a college in the US by planting a backpack with explosives, justifying the attack as retaliation for children who died in US airstrikes.
One witness reported the mother saying that the idea came out of a desire to seek “vengeance” after children were killed when a market area in Syria was bombed by airstrikes that she blamed on the United States.
An ISIS leader approved funding for the attack, but it was put on hold after Fluke-Ekren learned she was pregnant, the report says.
Fluke-Ekren also allegedly discussed attacking a shopping mall in the US by using a device to detonate a vehicle full of explosives in the parking lot, but she was unable to proceed with the plan due to opposition from her husband, according to the complaint.
According to the complaint, the family member said that, in spite of her husband’s resistance, Fluke-Ekren “admitted that she fantasized about conducting other attacks,” and “considered any attack that did not kill a large number of individuals to be a waste of resources.”
As alleged by the same witness, it was told she would hear about external attacks taking place in countries outside the United States and would comment that she wished the attack occurred on United States soil instead.
A family member of Fluke-Ekren’s also described her as a “jihadist” and an “ISIS member,” allegedly telling investigators that she “does not like America or Americans.”
To stop the US government from finding her, Fluke-Ekren sent a message to one of her family members through a third party saying she was dead, according to a witness who learned of it in 2018.
Court papers say that Fluke-Ekren was apprehended in Syria before being transferred to the FBI’s custody in the Eastern District of Virginia on Friday, but it’s unclear when she was captured, or how long she was in custody in Syria.
She was brought back to the US on Friday to face charges in federal court.
A pair of assistant US attorneys named Raj Parekh and John T. Gibbs from the Eastern District of Virginia are prosecuting the case.
“Fluke-Ekren has been a fervent believer in the radical terrorist ideology of ISIS for many years, having traveled to Syria to commit or support violent jihad,” Parekh said Friday in a memo.
Fluke-Ekren is set to appear in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia on Monday at 2pm, where she’ll likely be appointed an attorney.
Fluke-Ekren is charged with providing and conspiring to provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.
If convicted, she faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Actual sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum penalties.
