US mother of five ‘led Isis wives defending Raqqa’

A mother of five from Kansas has been returned to the US to face charges of leading an all-female Islamic State battalion formed for a final battle to defend the city of Raqqa in Syria.

Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, will appear in a US court today to face claims that she headed a unit called Khatiba Nusaybah in the city regarded as the capital of the so-called caliphate, and planned an attack on a US university campus using a backpack filled with explosives, according to the FBI.

Witnesses said she had boasted that she could easily enter the US through Mexico and even intended to attack a shopping mall by exploding a car bomb in a basement car park with a mobile phone trigger.

Jessica Aber, a US attorney, wrote in a court affidavit that any attack that did not cause mass casualties would be deemed “a waste of resources”, by Fluke-Ekren, who was a resident of Lawrence, Kansas, and often toured Turkey and Egypt with her family.

By 2011 she was living abroad and did not return to the US. The authorities suspect she was attracted to Islamic terrorism during her stints in the region.

The US Department of Justice said Fluke-Ekren translated speeches made by Isis leaders and trained her children to use AK-47s and suicide belts. Her main responsibility was to equip the female fighters to defend Raqqa alongside their husbands against the final assault by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in 2017. In that role, prosecutors say, she trained hundreds of Islamic State wives to use suicide belts and drive vehicle bombs.

Fluke-Ekren’s third husband was in charge of all Isis troops and the operation to defend the city. Her first two husbands, also terrorists, died in Syria.

A criminal complaint said that six individuals had told the US authorities about her activities in Syria. It said she had plotted a suicide attack on a US university in 2014, when she is thought to have joined Isis. This plan was presented to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Isis leader, who approved funding for the attack, according to the FBI. It said Fluke-Ekren had been “seeking vengeance” for an American airstrike in Syria. She told an informant that the attackers would “dress like infidels”.

Isis is battling to stay relevant. Over the past few days it has launched some of its most advanced and lethal attacks in Syria and Iraq where the group had carved out a territory the size of Britain at its peak.

Prosecutors say Fluke-Ekren tried to approach an American family member a year after the Isis defeat in Raqqa to spread rumours of her death and deter the authorities from looking for her.

A sealed case against her was filed in 2019 but made public over the weekend after Fluke-Ekren was brought back to the US from Syria, where she was apprehended at a time that has not been made public. She is expected to appear in court today in Alexandria, Virginia. If convicted, Fluke-Ekren faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.