The journey of an American mother who became a jihadist and leader of an IS battalion

An American jihadist pleaded guilty on Tuesday to “material support for a terrorist enterprise”, after a radical drift that led her to the rare post of leader of a female battalion of the Islamic State (IS) group. Allison Fluke-Ekren, a 42-year-old mother, admitted before a federal judge to having provided military training to more than 100 women in Syria and to having plotted attacks against her country.

During a hearing in Alexandria, in the suburbs of Washington, “Oum Mohammed al-Amiriki” notably admitted having taught his associates, some of whom were only 10 or 11 years old, to handle assault rifles or explosive belts, according to a statement from the Department of Justice. Judge Leonie Brinkema has accepted her guilty plea and will hand down her sentence on October 25. She faces up to 20 years in prison.

Unlimited radicalization

Concretely, the American justice accuses him of having, between 2012 and 2019, supported jihadist organizations in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Asked to place her on a scale of radicalization ranging from one to ten, a person who knew her at that time felt that she “came out of the grid” and deserved an “eleven or twelve”, according to documents submitted to the procedure.

Nothing, however, seemed to destine her for such a course. Born Allison Brooks, she grew up on a farm, had an uneventful schooling and married in a Methodist church in the late 1990s. Having become Mrs. Fluke, she had two children before divorcing. She quickly remarried a man named Volkan Ekren and converted to Islam. In 2004, she testified in an article devoted to home schooling and posed with a Muslim headscarf. In 2008, the family moved to Egypt. On her blog, Allison Fluke-Ekren chronicles her life as a teacher, their visits to the pyramids, the birth of a new boy… Her last publications date from 2010.

A former friend explained on the ABC channel that she had noticed her radicalization during this stay. Disturbed by the impact of the Arab Spring, she “was very supportive of the Islamic State, which she said was doing good things to help women and children,” said the witness, on condition of anonymity.

She wanted to organize an attack in an American university

In 2011, Allison Fluke-Ekren traveled to Libya with her husband and children. According to the US Department of Justice, her husband stole documents after the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, and she helped him analyze and summarize them for Ansar al-Sharia, a jihadist group linked to al-Qaeda. They joined Syria around 2012. She first stayed six months, then went back to Turkey, before returning and settling there permanently in 2014 with the children.

In the meantime, her husband has become a sniper for IS. With a knowledge of weapons, acquired on her parents’ farm, she is responsible for training other wives of fighters in the basics of using AK-47s and grenades. To “revenge” children killed in a bombing, she proposes to organize an attack in an American university and boasts, in front of witnesses, of having obtained a promise of financing from the leaders of the IS. Pregnant, she gives up this project.

She tried to pretend to be dead

A little later, she foments a new plan: to attack a shopping center in the United States. This time, her husband dissuades her from taking action. In 2016, he died in a bombing and, a few months later, she remarried another IS fighter, a Bangladeshi specialist in drone attacks. After his death, she married another member of the group, in charge of the defense of Raqa, according to the indictment.

At the same time, it forms a women’s battalion, “Katiba Noussaïba”, which entered into action in February 2017 to help defend Raqa. After the fall of the city, she asks a witness to tell her family that she is dead, in order to avoid legal proceedings. This ploy did not work. In January 2022, she was repatriated to the United States. His career after the fall of the caliphate is not known, nor the conditions of his arrest, or the fate of his children.