Halima Salman attends Brooklyn opening statements in military training case

Courtroom sketch records the date and formal charge

Halima Salman attended opening statements at Brooklyn federal court in New York City on 13 October 2026. A courtroom sketch by Jane Rosenberg for Reuters, published by The Guardian, carried a caption identifying her as charged with knowingly receiving military training from a foreign terrorist organization. The appearance preceded the jury deliberations that ended in a conviction on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, a Brooklyn federal jury convicted Salman of receiving military training from Islamic State. The Guardian described Salman as a New York woman and a U.S. citizen. Born in Brooklyn, she was 27 at the time of the verdict. Her lawyers are asking the judge to set aside the verdict and acquit her. Federal law allows a judge to do so if the evidence presented at trial does not legally support the conviction. The Guardian reported that such requests are often made and rarely granted. The conviction carries the potential for up to 10 years in prison, and sentencing is currently set for 2 February.

Prosecutors said Salman pledged loyalty to Islamic State and willingly participated in its activities. Brooklyn-based US attorney Joseph Nocella Jr said in a statement that the verdict held Salman “accountable for joining forces with a terrorist organization”.

Salman’s lawyers argued that her father brought her to Syria, that she could not leave, and that her husband, an Islamic State fighter, issued orders she had to follow. “You try to leave, it is death,” Salman testified. She said she refused to be “married off” at age 18 and repeatedly tried to get a divorce.

Jurors were shown a video of her holding an assault rifle, a photograph of her with the group’s flag and loving text messages she sent to her husband. Salman’s husband took the video, prosecutors said she had been trained to use it, and Salman testified that she was only complying with her husband’s request to carry the rifle.

Prosecutors insisted that Salman was dishonest and had more agency in Syria than she claimed. During cross-examination, she conceded that she once sent a religious song about Osama bin Laden to her husband. Prosecutors also disputed her account of a poor marriage by citing two loving text messages she sent to her husband.

“The evidence shows that the defendant received military training from a violent, brutal, terrorist organization – an organization that is responsible for attacks across the world,” assistant US attorney Amanda Shami told the jury in a closing argument last week.

From Syria to New York

The Guardian reported that Salman’s father took her to Syria as a teenager and arranged her marriage to an Islamic State fighter. Salman testified that, when she was 17 in 2017, her father took the family on what she thought was a trip to visit relatives in Turkey. Instead, the van crossed into Syria, where masked gunmen surrounded them. Salman said she was frightened and confused and had no idea where her father was taking them. “I do blame my father for a lot of things that happened,” she testified.

Salman said she spent three months in housing run by Islamic State before reuniting with her family. The family moved twice because their homes were hit by airstrikes. On the first day of her marriage, her husband told her: “Get up, stupid wife, it’s time for you to be a wife.” She spent much of the marriage doing domestic labor for her husband and mother-in-law. Her father died after being injured in an airstrike in 2018.

Salman recalled that the last year of her marriage was particularly harrowing because constant bombings sometimes forced them to live in the streets, where she recalled seeing “dead bodies everywhere”.

The couple eventually fled with other refugees in a truck. Salman told her husband they were going to separate, and she testified that she never saw him again. She was detained in Baghuz, Syria, in 2019 by forces opposed to Islamic State. U.S. authorities arrested her when she returned to New York in 2024.

Salman, her mother and her defense attorneys wept after hearing the verdict. Still in tears, Salman and her mother later hugged each other across the railing between the audience and the courtroom well. Jurors began deliberating on Thursday and repeatedly indicated on Monday that they were struggling to reach a unanimous decision. The jurors declined to comment as they left court after the verdict, and Salman’s lawyers also declined to comment.

The U.S. government designates Islamic State as a terrorist group. The Guardian reported that the organization seized large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014 and declared the territory a caliphate. Despite its defeat in Iraq in 2017 and in Syria two years later, the group still has sleeper cells that carry out deadly attacks in both countries.