In spring 2024, a U.S. military plane landed at Kennedy Airport, carrying a family of 10 Americans who had spent years in detention camps for relatives of dead Islamic State fighters.
One of the passengers, a young woman, was promptly arrested. Federal prosecutors say that the woman, Halima Salman, an American citizen, was trained by ISIS on how to use an AK-47.
She is believed to be the first woman accused of being an ISIS member to go on trial in U.S. federal court. The trial begins with opening statements on Tuesday in Brooklyn.
Ms. Salman was 17 when her father brought her, her mother and eight siblings to ISIS-controlled territory in Syria. Federal prosecutors say she went by the name Umm al-Khattab al-Muhajir and have provided photos of her posing in front of the Islamic State’s flag.
Her lawyers have argued that she was taken to Syria as a child and did not harbor the ideology of Islamic State.
“Halima Salman was an American teenager when her father married her off to an ISIS fighter in Syria, where she survived hell on earth,” Samuel Jacobson, a lawyer for Ms. Salman, said in a statement.
Ms. Salman, now 27, her mother and her siblings were among the tens of thousands held in miserable conditions at the detention centers after ISIS lost its territorial stronghold.
Her trial is one example of how countries have been dealing with the return of citizens who were accused of joining the Islamic State. Yet it also comes as the Trump administration has largely abandoned efforts like the ones that brought Ms. Salman back to the United States, which was carried out by the Biden administration.
Compared to countries like the United Kingdom, the United States had relatively few citizens who left to join the Islamic State. Ian Moss, who as deputy coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department was responsible for the repatriation of Ms. Salman and her family, said the United States under Mr. Biden was pushing other countries to bring their citizens out of the region.
“We needed to be able to demonstrate that we, too, were not just capable but also willing to do what we were asking those other governments to do,” Mr. Moss said.
During Ms. Salman’s trial, jurors will have a glimpse into the bureaucratic tendencies of the terror group, which at one point ran its own D.M.V. A central piece of evidence against Ms. Salman is a paper form from ISIS that allowed her to possess one Kalashnikov rifle, along with two magazines and 150 bullets.
By one account, Ms. Salman’s journey began innocuously enough. In 2016, when the family was in Turkey, Ms. Salman’s father told them that they were going camping, according to an account provided by one of Mr. Salman’s brothers to a researcher for Human Rights Watch. After traveling for a few days, he informed them that they were in Syria, according to the account.
Her father was enlisted to stand guard for the Islamic State, according to prosecutors, while Ms. Salman and her sister both married men who had traveled from other countries to join ISIS. And after turning 18 in 2017, Ms. Salman chose to train with ISIS, prosecutors say.
Ms. Salman’s father died in a rocket attack in Syria, in 2018, but she and the rest of her family remained in Syria until 2019, when they were captured by Syrian forces fighting ISIS. For the next five years, they remained in the detention camps.
In May 2024, the Biden administration repatriated Ms. Salman, her mother and the rest of the surviving family members. Ms. Salman was then arrested and charged.
While hundreds of Americans traveled in an attempt to join ISIS, only 83 adult Americans successfully landed in Iraq or Syria and joined the Islamic State, according to a 2022 report from the George Washington University Program on Extremism. Fourteen were women, while between 12 and 30 were minors at the time.
“The Islamic State was not something that was only attractive to men,” said Matthew Levitt, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank.
One woman who held a prominent position in the organization was Allison Fluke-Ekren, from Kansas, also known as Umm Mohammed al-Amriki. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison after she pleaded guilty to leading Islamic State’s female military battalion, which prosecutors said included training children on how to use suicide belts and assault rifles.
That battalion approved Ms. Salman’s weapons training, according to the letter provided by prosecutors. In court filings, lawyers for Ms. Salman argued that there were no photos of Ms. Salman receiving training from the battalion.
The document, which prosecutors say was found on a phone belonging to the ISIS fighter who was Ms. Salman’s husband, was titled “Authorization to Grant a Weapon.”
“If you have any questions, please contact the brothers at Diwan al-Jund,” the document reads.
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