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Brooklyn woman found guilty of getting military training from ISIS in Syria

John Annese, New York Daily News on

Published in News & Features

NEW YORK — A federal jury found a Brooklyn woman guilty of getting military training from ISIS while in Syria, capping off a contentions two-week trial in Brooklyn Federal Court where the woman testified that she was forced to marry an ISIS fighter as a teen.

Halina Salman, 27, wearing a light purple hijab and pink hoodie, broke down crying as the jury left the room. Her mother, Brandy Salman, wept in the front row, cradled by a family member. Salman now faces up to 10 years in federal prison.

Jurors convicted Salman of the sole charge against her four days after she took the stand in her own defense describing her life in marital captivity after her father moved her family to ISIS-controlled territory in Syria at age 17. She told of being married off to a stranger after her 18th birthday for a $5,000 payment.

Prosecutors painted Salman as a willing ISIS participant and devoted bride who received AK-47 training with the Nusaybah Khatiba, an all-female ISIS brigade.

The jurors rejected the defense argument that the direct evidence of her training was too scant — a photo of a handwritten document on her husband’s phone, saying she was authorized to receive a weapon; a 20-second-long video taken by her husband showing her handling and “drilling” with his Ak-47; and her ISIS Name, or “kunya,” which prosecutors said she selected to include what translates as “foreign fighter.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Shami tried to cast Salman as a liar, pointing to moments after her surrender to coalition forces in Syria where, the prosecutor contended, she gave her married name and claimed she was born in Germany, not the U.S.

“The defendant’s father was an ISIS fighter. Her husband was an ISIS fighter. And the defendant herself wanted to be a foreign fighter. She named herself ‘foreign fighter.'”

She added, “The defendant made conscious choices to support ISIS, a violent and brutal organization.”

Salman’s lawyer, Mia Eisner-Grynberg of the Federal Defenders, called the case a “grave miscarriage of justice.”

 

“Halima has spent her last 10 years surviving ISIS, and the (detention) camps, and this prosecution,” her lawyer, Mia Eisner-Grynberg of the Federal Defenders, said to cap off a two-hour-long closing argument where she tried to dismantle each piece of the government’s case.

The government did not bring to you a single witness that attended a training in 2018…. Not a single shred of evidence that there was a training, that Halima went to one,” Eisner-Grynberg said. “It scares me to death that Halima can be convicted of a terrorist offense when there was no evidence of an offense.”

Salman took the stand in her own defense, telling the jury how her father tricked her and her family, getting them into the van he said would take them to visit relatives. She told the jury that she fell asleep during the ride, and awoke in Syria, surrounded by masked men armed with long gins telling her to “Hurry!” into a madafa, a crowded guest house where women and children were held against their will.

She stayed there for three months before her father returned to get her family, and not long after, her father arranged for her to be married off to an ISIS guard named Abu Ali. She described the relationship as “horrible” — she couldn’t leave the house without her husband present, she was made to serve him and his mother-in-law, both of whom belittled and body-shamed her, while bombs exploded in the ISIS-controlled territory where they lived.

“If I had a bad day, I’d try to please him so I could give myself a decent day,” she said of the selfies she sent, using a phone that had no cellular or internet connection and could only communicate through a Bluetooth app.

Salman testified she never got any sort of training, and never even saw the document purporting she had.

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