(Washington) An American, accused by the United States of leading a female battalion of the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria, has been charged with “material support for a terrorist organization”, the Department of Justice announced on Saturday American.
Posted at 12:28 p.m.
Aged 42 and from Kansas in the central United States, Allison Fluke-Ekren was arrested in Syria before being handed over to the FBI, the American federal police, on Friday, details the press release from the Department of Justice.
The alleged jihadist must now appear Monday in federal court in Alexandria, a suburb of the capital Washington. She faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
Her indictment represents the first case in the United States involving a woman so highly placed in the jihadist organization, according to the daily Washington Post.
For the US Department, Allison Fluke-Ekren “traveled to Syria several years ago for the purpose of committing or supporting a terrorist enterprise”.
Also known as “Umm Mohammed al-Amriki”, she is suspected of having “planned and recruited agents for a possible future attack on a university campus in the United States”. She also reportedly expressed her wish to carry out an attack in a shopping center on American soil.
The United States further accuses her of having served as the “designated leader and organizer of an ISIS military battalion, known as Katiba Nussaïba”, whose purpose was to train women in combat, notably in 2017 during the siege of Raqa in Syria, then the de facto “capital” of the IS caliphate.
The “Katiba Nussaïba” was created there at the end of 2016 as a military battalion comprising only female members of IS and married to fighters of the jihadist group. Allison Fluke-Ekren would have taken the head of this brigade shortly after its creation.
Her role also involved her training children in the use of AK-47 rifles, grenades, and explosive belts, according to the Justice Department complaint, which includes testimony from six individuals who “observed the alleged terrorist conduct” of the American between 2014 and 2017.
A witness says that Allison Fluke-Ekren would have expressed to him “her desire to carry out an attack in the United States”. For this, she would have explained to him that she “could go to a mall in the United States, park a vehicle loaded with explosives in the basement of the structure and detonate the explosives in the vehicle with a telephone”.
According to the complaint, the American considered that “any attack that did not kill a large number of individuals represented a waste of resources”.
Women make up only about 10% of those charged in the United States for their involvement in ISIS, according to a study by the Extremism Program at George Washington University.