US charges Kansas women with leading all-female Islamic State battalion in Syria

FALLS CHURCH, Virginia — A woman who once lived in Kansas has been arrested after federal prosecutors charged her with joining the Islamic State jihadist group and leading an all-female battalion of AK-47 wielding militants.

The US Attorney in Alexandria, Virginia, announces that Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, has been charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization.

The criminal complaint was filed under seal back in 2019 but made public after Fluke-Ekren was brought back to the US yesterday to face charges. Her alleged participation in the Islamic State had not been publicly known before today’s announcement.

Prosecutors say Fluke-Ekren wanted to recruit operatives to attack a college campus in the US and discussed a terrorist attack on a shopping mall. She told one witness that “she considered any attack that did not kill a large number of individuals to be a waste of resources,” according to an FBI affidavit.

That affidavit from FBI Special Agent David Robins also alleges that Fluke-Ekren became leader of an Islamic State unit called “Khatiba Nusaybah” in the Syrian city of Raqqa in late 2016. The all-female unit was trained in the use of AK-47 rifles, grenades and suicide belts.

In all, the affidavit cites observations from six different witnesses, including some who have been charged with terrorism offenses and some who were held at prison camps for former Islamic State members.

A detention memo filed yesterday by First Assistant US Attorney Raj Parekh states that Fluke-Ekren even trained children how to use assault rifles, and that at least one witness saw one of Fluke-Ekren’s children, approximately 5 or 6 years old, holding a machine gun in the family’s home in Syria.