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A New York City native became an ISIS bride at just 18 — and is now the first woman to face trial in the US as an alleged member of the ruthless terror group.
Halima Salman, now 27, has been painted by Brooklyn federal prosecutors as an ISIS-trained machine gun-toting wannabe killer, showing footage of the young woman wielding an AK-47 assault rifle in her terrorist husband’s Syria home.
“The evidence shows that the defendant received training from a violent, brutal, terrorist organization, an organization responsible for violent attacks all over the world,” Assistant US Attorney Amanda Shami told the jury Wednesday during closing statements in the week-long trial.
The feds say the Brooklyn-born Salman was a teenager when her dad moved the family — including her mother and eight siblings — to ISIS-controlled territory about a decade ago. At 18, she was married to ISIS member Abu Ali.
Jurors were shown the footage of Salman, pointing an AK-47 while walking back and forth in Ali’s Syria home, saying “You have to walk like…” before sheepishly asking if he was filming her.
She was allegedly taught how to use the weapon by Nusaybah Katiba, a female-only ISIS battalion, prosecutors said.
“I submit to you that this is not her first time with a weapon,” Shami told the court.
But jurors heard a sharply dueling narrative when Salman took the stand earlier this week in the unprecedented case.
The alleged would-be terrorist testified in her own defense that she does not support the terror group, despite evidence that she posed for a selfie in front of an ISIS flag during her marriage to Ali.
“I believe that ISIS did very scary things which deceive the way Islam is visioned,” she told the jury in an emotional day on the stand on Monday, the New York Daily News reported.
Salman testified that her ISIS-supporting father — killed in an US airstrike in 2018 — forced her to wed Ali after moving the family to an area in Syria controlled by the twisted terror group.
Ali’s family paid Salman’s father a dowry of $5,000 for the arranged marriage, held in a dingy room that looked like a garage, she said.
“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 told the jury, according to Courthouse News.
Salman sat calmly in a white hoodie and olive green hijab Wednesday afternoon as prosecutors displayed another key piece of evidence — a digital image of a paper document purportedly from ISIS saying she was qualified to carry a Kalashnikov rifle and 250 rounds of ammunition.
Investigators recovered the letter from her husband’s phone, prosecutors said, though Salman’s lawyers with the Federal Defenders of New York have questioned the authenticity of the alleged ISIS training certificate.
They’ve also argued that the government has not provided any further evidence related to her purported ISIS training, including what exactly she was allegedly trained to do.
Born in Brooklyn in 1999 to an American mother and a Turkish father, she fondly recalled family barbeques in Prospect Park and visiting the zoo and local museums, Courthouse News reported.
Salman, who has been living with relatives in New Hampshire while out on $500,000 bond, faces a maximum 10-year sentence if convicted on a charge of knowingly receiving military training from a terrorist organization.
But her father moved the family to Turkey in September 2016, and to an ISIS-controlled part of Syria soon afterward, she testified.
She told jurors that she spent two years in ISIS territory and then five years in a detention center run by the Kurdish regime that dismantled the terror group with the help of the US.
Salman was arrested in 2024 at JFK Airport in Queens after she and nine other members of her family were repatriated as part of an extensive State Department effort to bring back American citizens held in the detention centers.
Her ISIS terrorist ex-husband is believed to be in an Iraqi jail, according to a law enforcement source.
None of her relatives are facing charges, and her mother Brandy, a native of Arkansas, is attending the trial in support of her daughter.
The trial resumes Thursday morning with a closing statement from Salman’s defense team. Jurors are expected to begin deliberations by Thursday afternoon.