Family members of a female American ISIS leader have detailed her horrific past including sexual and physical abuse of her own children, it has been alleged.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, brainwashed young girls and trained them to kill, a prosecutor said.
Prosecutors of the ISIS leader read out the abuse allegations from her family ahead of her sentencing, for providing material support to the Islamic State group, on Tuesday.
Ms Fluke-Ekren pleaded guilty to terrorism charges in June after she admitted that she led an all-female battalion of the Islamic State in Raqqa, Syria.
She taught about 100 women and girls, including some as young as 10, to use automatic weapons, and detonate grenades and suicide belts.
"She carved a path of terror, plunging her own children into unfathomable depths of cruelty by physically, psychologically, emotionally, and sexually abusing them,” First Assistant U.S. Attorney Raj Parekh wrote in a sentencing memo.
The Kansas native moved to Egypt in 2008 before settling in Syria in late 2012 or early 2013 with her husband who was in a leadership position in the Islamic State, responsible for training snipers.
Family and acquaintances said it was she who pushed her then-husband into radicalisation and convinced him to take her and their children to Egypt.
One of her daughters, who is expected to testify at the sentencing hearing, wrote in a letter to the court that her mother would beat her.
“My mother is a monster who enjoys torturing children,” Fluke-Ekren’s oldest child, a son, wrote in another letter to the court.
The abuse allegations are not directly related to the terrorism crimes, but they demonstrate the strength of her brutal character.
It is alleged that she forced her 13-year-old daughter to marry an Islamic State fighter and she urged a woman to commit a suicide bombing.
According to one witness cited in court documents, Ms Fluke-Ekren spoke openly about her desire to conduct an attack in the US, including by parking a car loaded with explosives in a shopping mall garage.
Another witness said she discussed ideas for a bomb attack on a college campus in the US midwest.
In 2018, Ms Fluke-Ekren told a witness she instructed someone in Syria to get a message to her family that she was dead, so the US government would not try to find her.
Fluke-Ekren “is shocked and saddened by these allegations but acknowledges Witness-1 (her daughter) experienced trauma in Syria,” defence attorney Joseph King wrote in his sentencing memo.
