A woman who was taken to Syria as a teenager was convicted on Tuesday of charges that she trained with the Islamic State terror group.
The woman, Halima Salman, an American citizen from Brooklyn who was brought to ISIS-controlled territory by her father when she was 17, was found guilty by a federal jury after a weeklong trial and three days of deliberation.
After the verdict was read, Ms. Salman, 27, buried her head into her hands and started sobbing, as did Mia Eisner-Grynberg, one of her lawyers.
When the door shut behind the last juror to leave the courtroom, Ms. Salman embraced her mother in the front row. “I love you so much, Mom,” she said as she kissed her mother on the top of her blue headdress. Her mother wept and then collapsed.
Ms. Salman, who faces up to 10 years in prison at sentencing, is believed to be the first woman accused of being an ISIS member to stand trial in federal court. She was brought back to the United States with her family in May 2024 as part of a repatriation effort by the State Department, which, under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., had been pushing U.S. allies to bring back Americans who had joined ISIS.
When her family left the plane at Kennedy Airport in New York, Ms. Salman was promptly arrested by F.B.I. agents. She was later indicted on one count of receiving military training from a foreign terrorist organization.
During the trial, prosecutors presented an image of an ISIS document written in Arabic, one that allowed her to possess a Kalashnikov rifle, along with two magazines and 150 bullets. The document, which prosecutors said showed Ms. Salman had received weapons training, was recovered from the phone of her husband, an ISIS fighter originally from Germany, according to prosecutors.
They also showed jurors images of Ms. Salman posing in front of the ISIS flag, as well as a video of her holding and pointing an assault rifle.
Amanda Shami, a federal prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, said during her closing argument that Ms. Salman had not been coerced to take up arms for the group and that ISIS had offered women significant opportunities to lead its operations.
“ISIS did not force women to get training,” Ms. Shami said. “Women wanted training from ISIS.”
Ms. Salman’s lawyers forcefully fought the charges, arguing that the prosecution had overreached and that the ISIS document was not authentic.
The defense lawyers said that Ms. Salman had been a victim of her father, who brought her, her mother and her eight siblings to ISIS-controlled territory in 2016, when the group still held large swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq.
And the jury seemed torn over Ms. Salman’s guilt. On Tuesday morning, they sent a note to Judge Natasha C. Merle saying they were still “divided in coming to a unanimous decision.” Judge Merle responded that it was “very desirable” that they reach a verdict.
Last week, Ms. Salman took the unusual step of testifying in her own defense. She told jurors that she had believed the document was a marriage certificate and that her father had made her marry her husband.
“I do blame my father for a lot of things that he did to my family,” Ms. Salman said in court.
Soon after arriving in Syria, prosecutors said, Ms. Salman adopted the name Umm al-Khattab al-Muhajir. The name “al-Muhajir,” which translates to “immigrant” in Arabic, was often chosen by fighters from outside Iraq and Syria.
Ms. Salman’s father, who served as a guard for ISIS, died in a rocket attack in 2018, prosecutors said. As the group lost its territory in 2019, Ms. Salman, her mother and her siblings were captured by coalition forces opposing ISIS.
For the next five years, the family was held in miserable conditions in Syrian detention centers set aside for the family members of captured ISIS members. When the family was brought back on a military plane, Antony J. Blinken, then the American secretary of state, called it the “largest single repatriation of U.S. citizens from northeast Syria.”
Under President Trump, the United States has stopped relying on Kurdish-led forces as its primary partner in fighting the Islamic State, which no longer controls territory in Syria and Iraq but has carried out attacks. Instead, Washington has turned to the Syrian government, which is now led by Ahmed al-Shara, a former Al Qaeda affiliate who has rebranded himself as a moderate.
During the heyday of the Islamic State, tens of thousands of people, mostly men, left to join the group. But compared to allies like Britain, the United States has had relatively few citizens leave to join ISIS.
Eighty-three American adults, including 14 women, have traveled to Syria or Iraq to join terrorist groups in the region since 2011, according to a February 2022 report from the George Washington University Program on Extremism. An additional 12 to 30 U.S. minors traveled to the region during that time, the report estimated.
The post Brooklyn Woman Found Guilty of Training With ISIS in Syria appeared first on New York Times.
