Jury deliberates in trial of New Yorker who became a teen bride to an Islamic State fighter

NEW YORK (AP) — A New York woman accused of receiving weapons training from the Islamic State group was tricked by her father into traveling to Syria, where she became an unwilling teen bride to a militant fighter, her lawyer told a jury Thursday.

Halima Salman, a U.S. citizen born in Brooklyn, was 17 when her father took the family to Turkey in 2017, then put her in a van without saying where they were going and drove into Syria, where the van was surrounded by men with guns, according to her lawyer, Mia Eisner-Grynberg.

There, she became caught up in the Syrian Civil War. She spent three months locked in a room while the sound of bombs striking nearby targets could frequently be heard. Her father, an Islamic State sympathizer, died after he was injured in a bombing in 2018, but not before arranging for her to marry a member of the group when she turned 18. She was then detained in Baghouz, Syria, in 2019 by forces opposed to the Islamic State.

When Salman returned to the U.S. in 2024, she was arrested and charged with willingly undergoing military training with the Islamic State in 2018, when she was 18.

“Find her not guilty,” Eisner-Grynberg told a jury Thursday as Salman used her clothing to wipe away tears. She said Salman had “been through hell and back" since leaving New York, where she had been in the Girl Scouts and studied sewing and craft making.

Prosecutors insist Salman had more agency in Syria than she claims.

In her closing arguments Wednesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Shami portrayed Salman, now 27, as dishonest and manipulative.

She said Salman had pledged loyalty to the Islamic State and sent her then-husband a photograph of her with the group's flag. She had also been filmed by her husband with an assault rifle she had been trained to use. Jurors were shown the brief video clip.

During the trial, Salman took the witness stand and testified that her marriage was bad before she left Syria and divorced her husband. The prosecutor, Shami, disputed that account of a poor marriage, citing two loving text messages Salman sent to her husband.

“Her statements on the stand don't make sense,” Shami said.

Eisner-Grynberg said the government was right to investigate Salman after her time in Syria but should not have brought charges after failing to find anyone who had seen her undergoing weapons training. She said prosecutors could not show that Salman ever took a serious interest in the Islamic State, which has been designated by the United States as a terror group.

“You can come back here in five minutes with a not-guilty verdict,” Eisner-Grynberg told jurors. “This is a grave miscarriage of justice,” she said of the prosecution.