A woman from Kansas once known as a doe-eyed "all-American girl" will remain in custody before facing terrorism charges for allegedly leading a female Islamic State fighting squadron.
Allison Fluke-Ekren, 42, is accused of training children as young as six to use machine guns and planning to commit "violent jihad".
She was denied bail after appearing in court in Virginia on Thursday.
She faces up to 40 years in prison.
How the former school teacher, who said she prefers to go by the surname Ekrens, went from Midwestern wife to terror fanatic who rose in the ranks of the Islamic State (IS) group to command her own all-female battalion is a mystery.
Larry Miller, who was Ms Ekren's science teacher when she was a teenager in Topeka, Kansas, in the 1990s, told the BBC he was utterly stunned by the news of her IS ties.
"She never did anything that indicated to me that she wanted to harm another living thing," he said, recalling one occasion when she caught a lizard on a class field trip, holding it carefully so other students could study it. "I can't understand how someone who has such a love of nature and people would do that."
According to US authorities and public records reviewed by the BBC, Ms Ekren spent time living in the Middle East in the late 2000s with her then-husband and children, splitting time abroad with visits back to Kansas. She recorded details of what appeared to be a normal life on a blog from 2008-10.
In or around 2012, she was smuggled to Syria, US authorities said, and engaged in a life of terrorism thereafter, marrying several IS operatives after her first husband died and training women and girls to use AK-47 guns, detonate bombs and use suicide belts.
One witness alleged that they had observed one of Ms Ekren's children, then aged five or six, holding a machine gun at her residence while living in Syria.
