(NewsNation Now) — A woman who used to live in Kansas led an all-female military battalion on behalf of ISIS, and provided material support to the foreign terrorist organization, an unsealed criminal complaint filed in 2019 alleges.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, a United States citizen, was arrested and charged, the U.S. attorney in Alexandria, Virginia, announced Saturday.
Fluke-Ekren previously had been apprehended in Syria and was transferred into the custody of the FBI on Friday to face these charges. Her first appearance at the federal courthouse in Alexandria is set for 2 p.m. Monday.
The criminal complaint alleges that Fluke-Ekren, 42, who used to live in Kansas but has not been in the U.S since 2011, traveled to Syria several years ago to commit or support terrorism.
“Since her departure from the United States, Fluke-Ekren has allegedly been involved with a number of terrorism-related activities on behalf of ISIS from at least 2014,” the complaint said.
These activities allegedly include planning and recruiting operatives for a potential future attack on a college campus inside the United States and serving as the appointed leader and organizer of an ISIS military battalion known as the Khatiba Nusaybah. This group would train women on the use of automatic firing AK-47 assault rifles, grenades and suicide belts, the criminal complaint said.
Fluke-Ekren allegedly provided ISIS members and the organization itself with lodging, translated speeches made by ISIS leaders and trained children on how to use a variety of weapons.
“Fluke-Ekren has been a fervent believer in the radical terrorist ideology of ISIS for many years, having traveled to Syria to commit or support violent jihad,” a detention memo filed Friday by First Assistant U.S. Attorney Raj Parekh states.
Accounts from six separate individuals who observed what they said was terrorist activity from 2014 to 2017 were detailed in the complaint. At least one witness saw one of Fluke-Ekren’s children holding a machine gun in the family’s home in Syria when they were only five or six.
“Fluke-Ekren allegedly told a witness about her desire to conduct an attack in the United States. To conduct the attack, Fluke-Ekren allegedly explained that she could go to a shopping mall in the United States, park a vehicle full of explosives in the basement or parking garage level of the structure, and detonate the explosives in the vehicle with a cell phone triggering device,” the Justice Department wrote.
Court papers show that Fluke-Ekren moved to Egypt in 2008, and traveled frequently between Egypt and the U.S. over the next three years.
In 2012, she moved to Syria, prosecutors believe, and in early 2016, her husband was killed in the Syrian city of Tell Abyad while trying to carry out a terrorist attack.
Fluke-Ekren married an ISIS member who specialized in drones later that year, but then he also died in late 2016 or early 2017, according to prosecutors. Four months after that, she remarried again to an Islamic State leader.
The AP reports that court records don’t indicate how she was captured or how long she was in custody,