(Security): US woman, “Empress of ISIS” Sentenced to 20 years for Commanding all-female ISIS Unit

A judge in United States has sentenced a 42-year-old woman, Allison Fluke-Ekren who led an all-female ISIL (ISIS) battalion in Syria to the maximum sentence of 20 years in jail. This was after she pleaded guilty to “terrorism” charges earlier this year. She was captured in Syria and brought to the US in late January 2022 to face terrorism charges.

According to Allison in a very lengthy speech during a hearing in Federal Court in northern Virginia on Tuesday, November 1, 2022, she has taken responsibility for her actions. Quoting her further, “We just lived a very normal life,” she told the judge about her time in Syria, showing pictures of her children at a weekly pizza dinner.

In Court, prosecutors described Allison as the “Empress of ISIS”, accusing her of training women and girls as young as 10 years on how to use automatic weapons and detonate grenades and suicide belts. Authorities say she also discussed carrying out attacks inside the United States.

Sadly her own children denounced her in Court and described being physically and sexually abused by their mother.

Allison’s daughter said in a Victim Impact Statement read at Tuesday’s hearing that “a lust for control and power drove my mother to take the family halfway across the world to find the ISIL (ISIS) group”.

The daughter described an incident where their mother allegedly poured an off-brand lice medication all over her face as punishment, causing her face to blister and her eyes to burn. Allison then tried to wash the chemicals off, but her daughter resisted.

 “I wanted people to see what kind of person she was. I wanted it to blind me,” she said.

Allison vehemently denied the abuse allegations. And she also portrayed the all-women brigade she led as a commander as akin to a community center for women that morphed into a series of self-defence classes as it became clear that the city of Raqqa, the ISIL (ISIS) stronghold where she lived was being attacked. 

Prosecuting, first Assistant US Attorney Raj Parekh said even within ISIL (ISIS), people who knew Allison described her ideology as “off the charts”.

To Parekh, Allison’s actions “added a new dimension to the darkest side of humanity”.

Her family is from the US Midwest, worked as a teacher in the US before leaving the country and subsequently joining ISIL (ISIS) in Syria, according to the Department of Justice.

For the records, ISIL (ISIS) controlled large swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria from 2014 until its territorial defeat late in 2017. During that time, the group, which had declared a “caliphate” and inspired attacks on civilian targets across the world, attracted thousands of foreign fighters, including from Europe and the US.

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