Willing terrorist or forced to marry ISIS fighter? Halima Salman goes on trial in Brooklyn

John Annese, New York Daily News on Oct 13, 2026

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NEW YORK — A federal jury will sort out whether a young Brooklyn woman on trial for charges she got automatic weapon training from ISIS is a terrorist or a victim of an oppressive Islamic state, in what’s believed to be the first U.S. court trial of an alleged female ISIS member.

Halima Salman was 17 when her father brought her and her family to Syria and married her off to an ISIS fighter — and federal prosecutors hope to convince the jury that the young ex-Brooklynite joined the terrorist group and got military training to use an AK-47.

But Salman’s lawyers say the government is only giving the jury a “cherry-picked” part of a much larger picture. They argue that her father forced her into going to Syria, where she was trapped in a life that offered women few options but to do what ISIS and her husband told her.

Salman, now 27, is on trial in Brooklyn Federal Court, charged with knowingly receiving military training from a terrorist organization, a charge which carries a maximum 10-year sentence. Law enforcement sources say she’s the first alleged female ISIS member to face a federal court trial in the U.S.

“After the defendant turned 18, she married an ISIS partner who was a few years older than her. You’ll see a photograph of the defendant’s wedding day in front of an ISIS flag between July 2017 and March 2018,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Amir said in his opening statement Tuesday. “After she arrived in Syria, got married, came of age, the defendant received military training by ISIS, and the defendant practiced that military training.”

The evidence against Salman will include video of “holding, aiming, and walking with a deadly assault rifle,” Amir said, and after “extremist content” she exchanged with her husband.

Defense lawyer Marissa Sherman of the Federal Defenders countered that the government won’t provide a scrap of evidence about what her training entailed, how many others attended it or who they were, how long it lasted, or where it was held.

“You will not hear from a single witness about any of these questions…. Not only can the government not tell you about the training, you will not hear from a single witness that Halima went to a training,” Sherman said in her opening. “The reason the government cannot put her there is because she wasn’t there.”

In hearings prior to the trial, Salman’s defense team questioned the validity of a photo of Salman’s husband showing a handwritten “authorization to grant a weapon” document that’s expected to be admitted into evidence.

Salman’s father took her family from John F. Kennedy Airport to Syria by way of Moscow and Turkey in 2016, according to the feds, and after her 18th birthday and marriage, she joined an all-female battalion made up of ISIS brides.

Her father was killed in what’s been described in court proceedings as either a rocket strike or a bomb blast, and, her lawyers said in 2024, she paid a smuggler to help get her out of Syria, ditched her husband and fled to Iraqi Kurdistan, knowing she’d wind up in a detention camp.

She flew into JFK with her mother and eight siblings in May 2024, as part of a complex repatriation effort hailed by then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken as “the largest single repatriation of U.S. citizens from northeast Syria to date.”

After she landed, though, federal authorities pulled her aside and arrested her.

“Halima Salman was 17 years old when her father took her to ISIS territory in the middle of the night. She was 18 when her father married her off to an ISIS fighter,” Sherman said. “She is not an ISIS fighter or ideologue. She did not commit or threaten any acts of violence.”

Salman’s photo with ISIS flags behind her was nothing more than a selfie in her new marital home, taken when she was a teenager who wasn’t allowed to go outside without permission. And the video of her with an assault rifle is nothing more than a 20-second snippet showing her briefly walking around with her husband’s weapon, nothing more.

She added, “We all, including Halima, agree that ISIS is a terrorist organization that committed horrible atrocities.”

Jurors so far have heard from a U.S. military service member who oversaw the processing of ISIS members and their families surrendering as the caliphate fell to coalition forces in 2019, an FBI agent who interviewed Salman in the al-Roj detention center in Syria in November 2023 and an expert of the rise and fall of ISIS.

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