A New York woman whose father took her to Syria as a teenager and arranged her marriage to an Islamic State fighter was convicted on Tuesday of receiving weapons training from the militant group.
Prosecutors said Halima Salman, a US 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.
Brooklyn-based US attorney Joseph Nocella Jr said in a statement that the verdict held Salman “accountable for joining forces with a terrorist organization”.
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, her mother and even her defense attorneys wept after hearing the verdict. Still in tears, Salman and her mother later hugged each other across the railing between the audience and the courtroom well.
Jurors, who began deliberating on Thursday, had repeatedly indicated on Monday that they were struggling to reach a unanimous decision. The members declined to comment as they left court after the verdict.
Salman’s lawyers also declined to comment. They are asking the judge to set aside the verdict and acquit her, as federal law allows if a judge finds the evidence presented at a trial does not legally support a conviction. Such requests are often made but rarely granted.
Salman’s conviction carries the potential for up to 10 years in prison. Sentencing currently is set for 2 February.
The Islamic State group, which the US government designates as a terrorist group, seized large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014 and declared the territory to be a caliphate. Despite its defeat in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria two years later, the group still has sleeper cells that carry out deadly attacks in both countries.
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.
“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 US attorney Amanda Shami told the jury in a closing argument last week.
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 that her last year of marriage was particularly harrowing, as constant bombings sometimes forced them to live 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 Baghuz, Syria, in 2019 by forces opposed to the Islamic State group. She was arrested by US authorities when she returned to New York in 2024.
