Halima Salman took the witness stand this week to deny she ever backed the terror group that trained her to fire an AK-47.
The Brooklyn-born woman, 27, testified Monday that her ISIS-supporting father forced her into an arranged marriage at 18 after dragging the family to Syria, and that she has rejected the group’s ideology despite prosecutors’ claims she posed as a willing fighter.
“I believe that ISIS did very scary things which deceive the way Islam is visioned,” Salman told the jury, according to reports from the courtroom.
Her testimony came in the first-ever U.S. Trial of a woman charged with membership in the brutal terrorist organization. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have spent the week-long trial painting her as a trained combatant, showing jurors footage of her wielding the assault rifle inside her terrorist husband’s Syrian home.
In the video, Salman walks back and forth with the weapon, saying “You have to walk like…” before breaking off to ask whether her husband was filming her. Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Shami told jurors Wednesday that the clip reveals practiced ease with the firearm.
“I submit to you that this is not her first time with a weapon,” Shami said in her closing statement.
Prosecutors also displayed a digital image of what they called an ISIS training certificate, recovered from her husband’s phone, stating Salman was qualified to carry a Kalashnikov rifle and 250 rounds of ammunition. Her lawyers with the Federal Defenders of New York have challenged the document’s authenticity and noted the government has not detailed what specific training she allegedly received.
“The evidence shows that the defendant received training from a violent, brutal, terrorist organization, an organization responsible for violent attacks all over the world,” Shami continued Wednesday.
Salman’s path to the defendant’s chair began in 1999, when she was born in Brooklyn to an American mother and Turkish father. She recalled family barbecues in Prospect Park and trips to the zoo and local museums before her father relocated the clan — her mother, eight siblings and herself — to Turkey in September 2016, then onward to ISIS-controlled Syrian territory.
Within that war zone, her father arranged her marriage to ISIS member Abu Ali in what she described as a grim garage-like room. Ali’s family paid a $5,000 dowry for the teenage bride.
“I was scared. I had a very bad feeling about it. I was wondering if this was what was supposed to happen to me. My heart was burning,” Salman testified, according to Courthouse News.
Her father was killed in a U.S. Airstrike in 2018. Salman spent two years in ISIS territory before the Kurdish-led forces that dismantled the caliphate with American help transferred her to a detention center, where she remained for five years.
None of her relatives face charges. Her mother Brandy, an Arkansas native, has attended the trial to support her daughter, who was living with relatives in New Hampshire on $500,000 bond before the proceedings began.
Salman was arrested in 2024 at JFK Airport after she and nine family members were repatriated through a State Department effort to bring American citizens home from the Kurdish-run camps. Her ex-husband is believed to be imprisoned in Iraq, according to a law enforcement source.
If convicted on the single charge of knowingly receiving military training from a terrorist organization, she faces a maximum 10-year sentence.
The trial resumes Thursday morning with the defense team’s closing statement, and jurors are expected to begin deliberations by Thursday afternoon.