A US lady has admitted to directing an all-female squadron in Syria for the so-called Islamic State and preparing assaults on American territory.
Allison Fluke-Ekren acknowledged to preparing over 100 women and girls for violence and pleaded guilty to one count of giving assistance to the gang. After leaving the United States in 2011, the mother and teacher-turned-IS commander worked with a terror cell in Libya before heading to Syria.
When she is sentenced in October, she might face a maximum of 20 years in jail.
After residing in Egypt and Turkey, Fluke-Ekren, 42, a former biology student and school teacher, traveled to Syria to join the organization. She was the commander of Khatiba Nusaybah, an all-female battalion located in Raqqa, Syria, before she joined IS.
According to police, her major task was to educate women and children how to use weaponry ranging from AK-47 rifles and grenades to suicide vests.
She acknowledged to training the all-female gang in a Virginia court on Tuesday, but maintained she never sought to recruit minors. According to CNN, she stated, "We didn't purposely train any underage ladies." At her sentence trial, several of the women she taught are likely to testify against her.
Fluke-Ekren also resided in Mosul, Iraq, when it was taken by IS forces under the alias Umm Mohammed al-Amriki.
One witness testified that her level of radicalization was "off the charts," a "11 or 12" on a scale of one to ten, according to prosecutors. She allegedly acknowledged to talking about terrorist strikes in the United States, including at a university and a shopping center.
According to the plea deal, she "considered any assault that did not kill a high number of victims to be a waste of resources."
Her second spouse, according to the records, was a member of Ansar Al-Sharia, the terrorist group that stormed a US compound in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
After analyzing US papers recovered from the Benghazi attack, she and her husband, who was ultimately murdered in an airstrike, produced a report for the group's leadership.
She sobbed in court when the judge asked whether she was accepting the plea deal because of her huge family. Her relatives had already petitioned the court to prevent her from contacting them.
The family claim she created a "trail of treachery," according to one US prosecutor, and they may testify against her during her sentence on October 25.