NEW YORK: An American woman alleged to have been an Daesh group member caught by anti-Daesh forces in Syria went on trial in New York on Tuesday, charged with receiving military training from the terrorist group.
Halima Salman, 27, was one of hundreds of women who ended up in the territory controlled by the Islamic State (IS) married to terrorist fighters before being captured and detained pending their repatriation.
The fate of these women and their children has proven a sticking point for the Western countries from where some originated, with many trapped or stripped of their citizenship by their former homelands.
Salman’s mother is an American, and her family traveled from the United States to Syria when she was young.
Salman is charged with receiving military-type training from IS when she was 18, filings in Brooklyn Federal Court showed, a crime that could carry 10 years of imprisonment.
At 17, she is alleged to have traveled to an IS-controlled area of Syria in late 2016 or early 2017, via Russia and Turkiye.
“While in Syria, Salman was trained to use an assault rifle and received ammunition from an Daesh military battalion when she was 18,” the court filing said using another acronym for the group.
While there, she married German-Afghan IS fighter Abu Ali, according to court documents.
In early 2019, she was taken into custody by Syrian forces opposed to IS and was placed in a relocation camp until 2024, when Salman returned to the US and was arrested.
Salman’s defense attorney told a bail hearing that she was “the victim of her (mother’s husband) bringing her as a child to Daesh territory in Syria.”
“He brought the family, including Halima’s mother and all eight of Halima’s siblings, to Turkiye for a few months” and inadvertantly “crossed the border into Syria and ended up in a town that was occupied by the Islamic state.”
The attorney added that Salman was unaware of the man’s pro-IS beliefs.
A US-led coalition was deployed to Iraq and Syria in 2014 to fight the Daesh group, which had seized large swathes of territory, committed massacres, and forced thousands of women and children into slavery.
Kurdish forces still hold around 2,200 foreign relatives of suspected Islamic State fighters in a northeastern Syria camp, an official there told AFP earlier this month.
The Program on Extremism has identified 83 American adults who traveled to Syria or Iraq since 2011 and were affiliated with terrorist groups there.