NEW YORK – A New York woman whose father took her to Syria as a teenager and arranged her marriage to an Islamic State fighter was convicted Tuesday of receiving weapons training from the militant organization.
Prosecutors argued that Halima Salman, a U.S. citizen, pledged allegiance to the extremist group and voluntarily took part in its activities. Jurors saw a video of Salman holding an assault rifle, a photograph of her beside the group’s flag and affectionate messages she sent to her husband.
“The evidence shows that the defendant received military training from a violent, brutal, terrorist organization — an organization that is responsible for attacks across the world,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Shami said during her closing argument.
The defense presented Salman, now 27, as a teenager who was swept unwillingly into Syria’s civil war — first by her father and later by an extremist husband whose commands she was forced to obey.
“You try to leave, it is death,” Salman testified. She said she resisted being “married off” at 18 and made repeated efforts to obtain a divorce.
Salman began crying when the verdict was read, while a relative sitting in the front row also broke down. After the judge left to speak with jurors before scheduling sentencing, one of Salman’s relatives reached over the railing separating the audience from the courtroom well to comfort her. The jury had started deliberating Thursday.
Although Islamic State forces were defeated in Iraq in 2017 and Syria two years later, the group continues to maintain sleeper cells capable of deadly attacks in both countries, where it once proclaimed a caliphate.
Salman was born in Brooklyn and was 17 when her father took the family on what she believed would be a trip to visit relatives in Turkey in 2017. Instead, their van crossed into Syria, where masked gunmen surrounded them. Salman testified that she was frightened, confused and unaware of where her father was taking the family.
“I do blame my father for a lot of things that happened,” she told the court.
She testified that she spent three months in housing controlled by the Islamic State before rejoining her family. They relocated twice after airstrikes destroyed their homes.
Salman recalled that on the first day of their marriage, her husband told her: “Get up, stupid wife, it’s time for you to be a wife.”
She said most of the marriage was spent performing domestic work for her husband and mother-in-law. Her father died in 2018 after suffering injuries in an airstrike.
Prosecutors maintained that Salman was not truthful and exercised more freedom in Syria than she acknowledged. During cross-examination, she admitted sending her husband a religious song about Osama bin Laden. They also challenged her description of the marriage as abusive, pointing to two affectionate messages she sent her husband.
Salman’s husband recorded a video of her holding an assault rifle, which prosecutors said she had been trained to operate. On the witness stand, Salman said she held the weapon only because her husband told her to do so.
She described the final year of the marriage as especially terrifying. Continuous bombings sometimes forced them to live in the streets, where she recalled seeing “dead bodies everywhere.”
Eventually, the couple fled with other refugees in a truck. Salman said she told her husband they were separating and never saw him again.
Forces opposing the Islamic State detained her in Baghouz, Syria, in 2019. U.S. authorities arrested Salman after she returned to New York in 2024.
