Kansas woman pleads guilty to terrorism

Prosecutors in January charged Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, with leading an all-female battalion of Islamic State (ISIS) militants in Syria. Fluke-Ekren moved from Kansas to Egypt in 2008, then to Libya, landing in Syria in 2014. She has been married five times, and almost all of her husbands were killed while working for ISIS, according to court documents. Prosecutors said Fluke-Ekren began training roughly 100 women and girls to fight using AK-47 assault rifles, grenades, and suicide belts in 2016.

Did she plan an attack in the U.S.? Prosecutors said Fluke-Ekren wanted to recruit operatives to attack a college campus in the United States and discussed a terrorist attack on a shopping mall. She tried to fake her death in 2018 to evade U.S. investigators. But she admitted that she continued her affiliation with ISIS until May 2019. She handed herself over to local Syrian police in 2021. She was transferred to U.S. custody Jan. 28 and pleaded guilty Tuesday. She faces a maximum 20-year sentence.

Dig deeper: Listen to Josh Schumacher’s report in The World and Everything in It podcast on new efforts to ferret out domestic terrorists.