A former US schoolteacher who became a high-ranking Islamic State (ISIS) official and organized an all-female ISIS military battalion, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to supporting a foreign terrorist group, the Justice department said, according to the AFP news agency.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, admitted to engaging in "terrorism-related activities" in Syria, Libya, and Iraq between 2011 and 2019, the department said in a statement.
"Fluke-Ekren ultimately served as the leader and organizer of an ISIS military battalion, known as the Khatiba Nusaybah, where she trained women on the use of automatic firing AK-47 assault rifles, grenades, and suicide belts," the department said.
"Over 100 women and young girls, including as young as 10 or 11-years-old, received military training from Fluke-Ekren in Syria on behalf of ISIS," it added.
The department said that she had lived in Egypt and then Libya with her late husband, who was a member of the extremist Ansar al-Sharia group.
The two took documents from the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi after it was attacked in 2012 and summarized them for Ansar al-Sharia, it said.
They then went to Turkey and Syria, where her husband became a leader of an ISIS sniper group. While in Syria, the department said, she spoke of desires to bomb a shopping mall or a university campus in the United States.
Fluke-Ekren later became leader of an all-woman battalion, which undertook physical, medical and weapons training to support ISIS. She was apprehended in Syria and flown to the United States on January 28 from an undisclosed location, where she was charged with supporting a foreign terrorist organization, a charge which brings up to 20 years in prison.
Fluke-Ekren will be sentenced on October 25.
Since 2013, American prosecutors have charged hundreds of radicalized individuals, mostly with crimes related to support for ISIS.
Last April, police arrested a US couple planning to join ISIS in Yemen, just before they boarded a cargo ship bound for the country from Newark, New Jersey.
Six months earlier, an American man who was 14 years old when his father took him to Syria to join ISIS was charged with aiding a terrorist group.
In December of 2019, a Connecticut man was arrested after attempting to travel to the Middle East to join and fight for ISIS.
In July of that year, two refugees from Somalia were arrested in Arizona and accused of providing material support to ISIS.
A month prior, a man was arrested after he discussed purchasing explosives with the intention of detonating them in New York's Times Square.
Last week, a federal judge increased the sentence for a New York City man who planned to join ISIS and attacked an FBI agent to 25 years, after a federal appeals court called the original 17-year sentence "shockingly low".
Days later, a citizen of Uzbekistan who is a resident of New York City and was convicted of conspiring to and attempting to provide material support to ISIS was sentenced to 15 years in prison.