An American woman who joined ISIS in Syria, leading an all-female military battalion, was sentenced to 20 years in prison by a US court Tuesday.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, who grew up on a farm in Kansas, was given the maximum possible sentence by US District Judge Leonie Brinkema after pleading guilty to terror charges in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.
"You're obviously a very intelligent woman," Brinkema told Fluke-Ekren, rejecting her claims that she was manipulated by her Turkish-born second husband.
"There's no question that you were providing material support to a terrorist organization," the judge said.
For more than eight years, Fluke-Ekren was engaged in a "terrorism crime spree" across war zones in Libya, Iraq, and Syria, including training other women and young girls to undertake attacks for the ISIS, US Attorney Raj Parekh said.
Fluke-Ekren adopted the nom de guerre Umm Mohammed al-Amriki and "in effect became the empress of ISIS," Parekh said. "She brainwashed young girls and trained them to kill."
Her sentencing included dramatic remarks to the judge by one of her daughters.
Leyla Ekren, who was married off to an ISIS militant in Syria when she was just 13 years old, said her mother was motivated by a "lust for control and power."
"I want people to see what kind of person she was," her daughter said.
"She abandoned me in Raqqa with my rapist," she said in a reference to her ISIS fighter-husband.
At one point prosecutors played audio recordings of telephone conversations between Fluke-Ekren and her daughter taped by the FBI.
Her daughter, who was in the public gallery, plugged her ears with her fingers as the tapes were played aloud.
In a written statement to the court, her son Gabriel, who like his sister waived anonymity, said his mother is a "monster without love for her children, without an excuse for her actions."
"She has the blood, pain, and suffering of all of her children on her hands," he said.
Fluke-Ekren, who was wearing a dark green prison jacket and black headscarf, addressed the court and asked the judge for a "compassionate sentence" of just two years in prison.
"I deeply regret my choices," she told the judge. "To anyone who has been hurt by my actions I ask forgiveness."
