Jury weighs fate of US woman who says father forced her into Syria’s war zone when she was a teen

The fate of a New York woman who says she was tricked as a teenager by her father into traveling to Syria and marrying a member of the Islamic State group rests in the hands of the Brooklyn jury after her lawyer implored it on Thursday to find that she never received weapons training.

“Find her not guilty,” Mia Eisner-Grynberg told a jury in Brooklyn federal court as he client, Halima Salman, used her clothing to wipe away tears before standing to hug her attorney after her two-hour summation.

Eisner-Grynberg’s closing argument drew objections from prosecutors who thought she went too far when she called some of the government’s tactics in the case “shameful.”

Eisner-Grynberg didn’t back down, telling Judge Natasha C. Merle that there was no rule that she must be “polite” as she argues on Salman’s behalf.

She said Salman was 17 when her father put her in a van without saying where they were going and drove her from Turkey into Syria, where the van was surrounded by men with guns before she was locked in a room for three months in a land where the sound of bombs striking nearby targets could frequently be heard.

For a decade, the lawyer said, Salman had “been through hell and back.”

A day earlier, Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Shami portrayed Salman, who is 27, as dishonest and manipulative when she testified earlier this week that she never underwent training with the Islamic State group in 2018, halfway through her time in Syria from 2017 to 2019.

“The defendant, Halima Salman, received military training from ISIS while she was in Syria, through one of its battalions,” she said in her closing.

She said Salman, a U.S. citizen who was born in Brooklyn, had pledged loyalty to the Islamic State and had sent her then-husband a photograph of her with the group’s flag behind her and had also been filmed by her husband with an assault rifle that she had been trained to use. Jurors were shown the brief video clip.

Salman, who has remained free on bail throughout the two-week trial, was arrested in May 2024 at Kennedy International Airport when she returned to the United States.

Shami criticized Salman’s claims on the witness stand that her marriage was bad before she left Syria and divorced her husband, a fighter for the Islamic State group. The prosecutor cited two loving text messages Salman had sent to her husband.

“Her statements on the stand don’t make sense,” she said.

But Eisner-Grynberg said her client was herself on the witness stand, someone who was in Girl Scouts studying sewing and craft making before her world was turned upside down by her father, who died after he was injured in a bombing in Syria in 2018.

Eisner-Grynberg said the government was right to investigate her client after her time in Syria but should not have arrested her after failing to find reliable evidence.

She said prosecutors failed to find anyone who had seen her undergoing weapons training and could not show that Salman ever took a serious interest in the organization that was designated by the United States as a terror group.

“You can come back here in 5 minutes with a not-guilty verdict,” Eisner-Grynberg told jurors, saying there was no proof at all that Salman had attended military training or that she supported the Islamic State group.

“The entire case is just optics, inference and speculation,” she said, discounting a document prosecutors said they found on Salman’s ex-husband’s phone that they insisted proved she had received military training. Eisner-Grynberg noted that it lacked the Islamic State group’s stamp that is found on every other document of theirs.

“This is a grave miscarriage of justice,” she said of the prosecution.