World News | US Woman to Plead Guilty to Leading Islamic State Battalion
Get latest articles and stories on World at LatestLY. An American woman pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organisation, stemming from her leadership of an all-female battalion of Islamic State militants in Syria.
Alexandria (US), Jun 7 (AP) An American woman pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organisation, stemming from her leadership of an all-female battalion of Islamic State militants in Syria.
Allison Fluke-Ekren entered the plea in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia and faces up to 20 years in prison.
Fluke-Ekren, who once lived in Kansas, was brought to the US in January to face a criminal charge of providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization. She moved to Egypt in 2008 and starting in late 2016, according to prosecutors, she led an all-female Islamic State unit in the Syrian city of Raqqa that was trained in the use of AK-47 rifles, grenades and suicide belts.
A detention memo filed by First Assistant US Attorney Raj Parekh says she trained children how to use assault rifles and at least one witness saw one of her children - approximately 6 or 7 years old - holding a machine gun in the family's home in Syria.
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Prosecutors have also said Fluke-Ekren wanted to recruit operatives to attack a college campus in the US and discussed a terrorist attack on a shopping mall. She told one witness that "she considered any attack that did not kill a large number of individuals to be a waste of resources," according to an FBI affidavit.
A criminal complaint against Fluke-Ekren was filed under seal in 2019 but not made public until she was brought back to the US to face charges. (AP)
(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)