Jury Deliberates Fate of New York Woman Accused of ISIS Training
Defense argues the US citizen was tricked into Syria as a teen and never received weapons training.
A Brooklyn jury is currently weighing the evidence in the trial of a New York woman accused of receiving weapons training from the Islamic State group. Halima Salman, a US citizen, claims she was deceived by her father into traveling to Syria when she was 17 and never underwent any military training.
During closing arguments, Salman's attorney, Mia Eisner-Grynberg, implored the jury to find her client not guilty. She asserted that Salman was taken to Syria by her father without knowing their destination and subsequently endured months of confinement in a war zone. Eisner-Grynberg highlighted that Salman was 17 at the time and described her decade since then as having "been through hell and back."
Prosecutors, however, presented a different narrative. Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Shami argued that Salman, now 27, was dishonest on the stand when she testified that she did not receive training from ISIS in 2018, during her two-year stay in Syria from 2017 to 2019. Shami told the jury that Salman pledged loyalty to the Islamic State and provided evidence, including a video clip of Salman with an assault rifle she was allegedly trained to use and a photograph with the group's flag. Prosecutors also cited text messages Salman sent to her husband, an ISIS fighter, as evidence that her claims of a bad marriage were false.
Eisner-Grynberg countered that her client was truthful and that the government had failed to produce reliable evidence. She argued that no one testified to seeing Salman undergo weapons training and that prosecutors could not demonstrate her serious interest in the designated terror group. The defense attorney dismissed a document presented by the prosecution, found on Salman's ex-husband's phone, as lacking the group's official stamp and therefore unreliable. She characterized the prosecution's case as "optics, inference and speculation."
Salman, who has been free on bail throughout the two-week trial, was arrested in May 2024 upon her return to the United States at Kennedy International Airport. Her father died in 2018 after being injured in a bombing in Syria.