Certified by the Caliphate, Convicted in Brooklyn

From Prospect Park to the madafa

Halima Salman was born in Brooklyn in 1999, to an American mother and a Turkish father. In September 2016, when she was 17, her father moved his wife and their nine children to Turkey, then, a few months later, into Islamic State territory in Syria. She told the jury she had dozed off in a van and woke up surrounded by armed men. The family spent about three months in a madafa, a guest house where women and children were held, until her father came back for them. Prosecutors say he served the group as a guard.

"You try to leave, it is death."— Halima Salman, testifying in her own defence, Brooklyn federal court, October 2026

In July 2017, shortly after she turned 18, he married her to a German-Afghan IS fighter he had introduced to her a few days earlier, in a room that looked like a garage. The marriage licence, she testified, set a $5,000 dowry, "payable when able". She spent the next two years cooking and cleaning for her husband and his mother, unable to leave the house without him.

Marriage licence, weapons permit

The prosecution's case rested on a handwritten IS document authorising her to receive a Kalashnikov, two magazines and ammunition, found as a photo on her husband's phone. The defence called it a fake: unlike the other IS documents shown at trial, it bore no stamp, and no witness said they had seen her at a training. Judge Natasha Merle let it in, while calling it "weak". Salman testified that she had taken it for her marriage certificate. In the caliphate, a wedding certificate and a weapons permit are apparently easy to confuse.

Jurors also saw a selfie of her in front of an IS flag, two loving text messages and a short video, filmed by her husband, of her walking around their home with an AK-47. She said she held the rifle only because he asked her to.

"ISIS did not force women to get training. Women wanted training from ISIS."— Amanda Shami, federal prosecutor, closing argument, October 2026

Free as a bird

Captured at Baghuz in March 2019, she spent five years in camps run by the Kurdish-led forces, asking, she says, about a hundred times to be sent home. Prosecutors accused her of hiding that she was American. In May 2024, her mother obtained the family's repatriation, which the State Department hailed as its largest from northeast Syria. The day before, she testified, an FBI agent told her she would be "free as a bird". At JFK airport, the FBI arrested her. Her father died in a bombing in 2018, and her ex-husband is reportedly in an Iraqi jail. No other member of the family faces charges.

Divided, then unanimous

After three days of deliberation and a note telling the judge they were divided, the jurors convicted her on October 27 of receiving military-type training from a terrorist organisation. The U.S. attorney said the verdict held her "accountable for joining forces with a terrorist organization". Her lawyer had called the prosecution "a grave miscarriage of justice", and the defence has asked the judge to set aside the verdict, a request rarely granted. She faces up to ten years in prison, with sentencing set for February 2.

She is believed to be the first woman accused of IS membership to stand trial in a U.S. federal court. According to George Washington University's Program on Extremism, 83 American adults, 14 of them women, travelled to Syria or Iraq to join terrorist groups since 2011. Kurdish forces still hold about 2,200 foreign relatives of suspected IS fighters in one camp in northeast Syria.

Her father, who negotiated her marriage, died in 2018. The caliphate's paperwork outlived him, and has just testified against her.