New York woman is convicted of Islamic State training after becoming a teen bride to a fighter

NEW YORK (AP) — 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 group.

Prosecutors said Halima Salman, a U.S. citizen, pledged loyalty to the extremist group and willingly participated in its activities. Jurors were shown a video of her holding an assault rifle, a photo of her with the group’s flag, and loving text messages she sent 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 told the jury in a closing argument.

The defense sought to portray Salman, now 27, as a teenager who was unwittingly trapped in Syria’s civil war, first by her father and later by an extremist husband whose orders she had to follow.

“You try to leave, it is death,” Salman testified. She said she refused to be “married off” at age 18 and repeatedly tried to get a divorce.

Salman burst into tears on hearing the verdict, as did one of her relatives in the front row. After the judge left the courtroom to speak to jurors before setting a date for sentencing, one of Salman’s relatives reached across the railing between the audience and the courtroom well to comfort her. The jury had begun deliberating Thursday.

Despite its defeat in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria two years later, Islamic State group sleeper cells still carry out deadly attacks in both countries, where they once declared a caliphate.

Born in Brooklyn, Salman was 17 when her father took the family on what she thought was a trip to visit relatives in Turkey in 2017. Instead, the van crossed into Syria, where masked gunmen surrounded them. Salman said she was frightened and confused, and had no idea where her father was taking them.

“I do blame my father for a lot of things that happened,” she testified.

She said she spent three months in housing run by the Islamic State group before reuniting with her family. They moved twice because their homes were hit by airstrikes.

On the first day of her marriage, Salman recalled, her husband told her: “Get up, stupid wife, it’s time for you to be a wife.”

She spent much of the marriage doing domestic labor for her husband and mother-in-law. Her father died after being injured in an airstrike in 2018.

Prosecutors insisted Salman was dishonest and had more agency in Syria than she claimed. They got her to concede during cross-examination that she once sent a religious song about Osama bin Laden to her husband. Prosecutors also disputed Salman’s account of a poor marriage, citing two loving text messages she sent to her husband.

Salman’s husband took a video of her holding an assault rifle, which prosecutors said she had been trained to use. When she testified, Salman said she was only complying with her husband’s request to carry the rifle.

She recalled her last year of marriage was particularly harrowing, with constant bombings leaving them sometimes living in the streets, where she recalled seeing “dead bodies everywhere.”

The couple eventually fled with other refugees in a truck, where she told her husband they were going to separate, and Salman testified that she never saw him again.

She was detained in Baghouz, Syria, in 2019 by forces opposed to the Islamic State group. She was arrested by U.S. authorities when she returned to New York in 2024.