Kansas woman who led all-female ISIS brigade pleads guilty to federal terrorism charges

A Kansas woman pleaded guilty to one count of providing support to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham on Tuesday, admitting she discussed planning an attack on an American college and trained over one hundred fighters in an all-female contingent in Syria.

The woman, Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, admitted in US federal court in Alexandria, Virginia that she was the leader of the Khatiba Nusaybah in Raqqa and now faces up to 20 years in prison.

She pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiring to provide material support for terrorism and experts said she is the first American woman to be prosecuted for having a role with Isis, according to The Washington Post.

Court papers stated that after university in the US, she moved with her second husband and children to Egypt in 2008 and helped terrorist groups in Iraq, Libya and Syria for more than six years. Fluke-Ekren was described as “a fervent believer in the radical terrorist ideology of Isis.”

She said at Tuesday’s hearing that she was not aware that some of the girls she trained were underage and claimed, “We didn’t intentionally train any young girls.”

In her plea agreement with the Department of Justice, she said she helped her husband analyse US documents stolen by terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia in a 2012 attack on a US government facility in Benghazi, Libya.

Once in Syria, Ekren presented a plan of attack to a paid U.S. foreign government source. That plan, Ekren admitted in court Tuesday, was to target an American college campus in the Midwest with explosives. Although Ekren said the plan had been presented to the then-leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, it was ultimately put on hold, the initial charging documents said.

Fluke-Ekren was arrested in Syria and taken into custody in the US in January. She will be sentenced on October 25.