An American woman who confessed to leading an ISIS women’s battalion was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, aged 29 years old and originally from Kansas, pleaded guilty in June to committing terrorist acts in Iraq, Syria and Libya over an eight-year period.
He also admitted giving military training to more than 100 women and girls, including minors 10 years, BBC News reported.
Prosecutors said prior to sentencing that the maximum sentence allowed by law would not be enough for Fluke-Ekren, but that it should be imposed anyway.
Meanwhile, her defense team sought a shorter sentence that was not specified, arguing that the woman was traumatized by her experiences in Syria.
According to documents court cases, the woman grew up in the small community of Overbrook, Kansas, and was a fanatical militant. She later rose through the ranks of ISIS.
Fluke-Ekren moved to the Middle East with her second husband, who was a member of the defunct Libyan militant group Ansar Al-Sharia in the early 1990s 2000, time in which he visited his native Kansas with some regularity, indicated the Department of Justice and public records verified by the BBC.
Near 2012, the woman was smuggled into Syria to become an active member of the Islamic State, to the point of marrying other soldiers after her husband was killed in battle. Two of her husbands died in the middle of the dispute.
In 2016, Fluke-Ekrem became a leader and organizer of Khatiba Nusayba, an Islamic State battalion that was made up exclusively of women, and was established in the de facto capital of the group in the city of Raqqa, in Syria.
U.S. officials consider it their duty in the organization was to lead military training for women, including using AK-29, grenades and suicide belts . It is also speculated that he recruited agents for a probable terrorist attack in the United States.
A sentencing memorandum issued by First Assistant U.S. Attorney Raj Parekh noted that Fluke-Ekren “brainwashed girls and trained them to kill, where her daughters were ”.
“She opened a path of terror, plunging her own daughters into unfathomable depths of cruelty by abusing them physically, psychologically, emotionally and sexually”, Parekh pointed out.
Two of her children aged 12 wrote letters to the court that their mother abused sexually from them, an accusation that Fluke-Ekren “vehemently denied”.
Although the exact number of US citizens who joined the Islamic State remains unclear, research from George Washington University suggested that some 300 people traveled or intended They did not arrive in Iraq or Syria to enlist in the terrorist group.