FBI accuses American woman of prominent role in IS terror group
The FBI has arrested an American woman who federal prosecutors said had risen through the ranks of the Islamic State group in Syria to become a battalion commander, training women and children to use assault rifles and suicide belts, the Justice Department disclosed Saturday.
The woman, Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, a former teacher from Kansas, was charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization. The circumstances of her capture in Syria were not immediately known, but the FBI flew her to Virginia on Friday to face prosecution.
Investigators said FlukeEkren was smuggled into Syria in 2012 from Libya. She traveled to the country, according to one witness, because she wanted to wage “violent jihad,” Raj Parekh, a federal prosecutor, wrote in a detention memo that was made public Saturday.
According to a criminal complaint filed in 2019, a witness told the FBI that Fluke-Ekren and her husband brought $15,000 to Syria to buy weapons. Her husband, the witness said, eventually rose to be the commander of all snipers in Syria in 2014. He later died in an airstrike while conducting a terrorist attack on behalf of the Islamic State group, investigators said. Fluke-Ekren met her husband in the United States, according to court documents.
According to the detention memo, the mayor of the Syrian city of Raqqa, the militant group’s self-proclaimed capital, approved the opening of a military battalion to train women to help defend the city. FlukeEkren, investigators said, soon became the leader and organizer of it.
Witnesses said that Fluke-Ekren taught classes for members of the battalion, and on one occasion, a young child of hers was seen holding an assault rifle. One witness said that more than 100 women and girls had received training from Fluke-Ekren.
A witness also said that Fluke-Ekren claimed to have tried to send a message to her family with the goal of tricking them into believing she was dead so the U.S. government would stop trying to find her.
She told the witness that she never wanted to return to the United States and wanted to die a martyr in Syria.
A military court in Congo has condemned about 50 people to death nearly five years after the murders of United Nations investigators Michael Sharp and Zaida Catalan in central Congo’s Kasai region.
The President of the Kasai Occidental Military Court, Brig. Gen. Jean-Paulin Ntshayokolo said Saturday that of the 54 defendants, one officer is sentenced to 10 years for violating orders and two others were acquitted.
Those sentenced to death will serve out life sentences, as Congo has observed a moratorium on the death penalty since 2003.
Sharp, who was American, and Catalan, of Sweden, were assassinated on March 12, 2017 in the Kasai Central region while on a field visit with representatives of Kamwina Nsapu, a militia active in Kasai whose customary chief JeanPierre Mponde was killed by Congolese army troops in August 2016.
Sharp, the panel’s coordinator and expert on armed groups, and Catalan, a humanitarian expert,
UN experts’ slaying:
embarked on the field visit from Kananga, the provincial capital of Kasai Central, toward the locality of Bunkonde.
The two U.N. experts were investigating the violence in Kasai on behalf of the U.N. Security Council. Their bodies were then found in a shallow grave two weeks later.
Threat on Biden: A Kansas man who told a Secret Service agent that he was “coming for” President Joe Biden was charged Friday with making threats against the president, according to federal court documents.
The man, Scott Ryan Merryman, made the threats over three days, starting Tuesday, when he called police in Independence, Kansas, and said he was heading to Washington, D.C., to see the president, according to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.
The U.S. Secret Service called Merryman on
Wednesday, and he told an agent that he had been instructed by God to visit Biden and to lop off “the head of the serpent in the heart of the nation,” according to an affidavit written by Lisa Koerber, an agent with the Secret Service.
Merryman said that he was not referring to Biden and that he was not making a threat against the president, the affidavit said.
It was not clear if Merryman had a lawyer, and he did not respond to messages for comment Saturday.
Nebraska fire: Two schoolage children are among those killed after fire broke out early Saturday at a home in rural northern Nebraska.
The Norfolk Daily News reported that firefighters were called to a home in the small town of Pierce at 5:46 a.m. The newspaper, citing an emergency responder who spoke on condition of anonymity, reported “multiple deaths.”
No one was answering
phones at the Pierce Fire Department office on Saturday. A woman answering the phone at the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office declined comment except to say more information would be released later.
Pierce Public Schools posted on its Facebook page that it was opening the high school Saturday to students seeking support due after “the loss of Pierce High and Pierce Elementary students.”
Taiwan relations: Taiwanese Vice President William Lai held a video call with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — his second meeting with a senior U.S. politician in two days — on topics including human rights in China.
Pelosi, who has called for a diplomatic boycott of next month’s Beijing Winter Olympics, reiterated her concern about Chinese human rights abuses, according to a senior Democratic aide familiar with the call. She also discussed
strong bipartisan support in Congress for Taiwan, according to the aide.
Vice President Kamala Harris greeted Lai at the inauguration of Honduran President Xiomara Castro on Thursday, a fleeting encounter that risks increasing tension between Washington and Beijing.
Lai, whose country is regarded by China as a breakaway province, described Pelosi as a friend of Taiwan and a champion of human rights.
China regularly protests any interactions by foreign officials with those from Taipei. Lai and Harris chatted for about 30 seconds according to Kolas Yotaka, spokesperson for the Taiwanese president’s office, who added that Lai thanked the U.S. for its “rock-solid” support of the island.
The U.S. has recognized Beijing under its “one China policy,” without clarifying its position on Taiwan’s sovereignty, making for notoriously delicate diplomacy.