NEW YORK: A New York woman charged with getting weapons training from the Daesh group was duped by her father into travelling to Syria, where she became an unwanted teenage wife to a militant soldier, her counsel told a jury Thursday.
Halima Salman, a US citizen born in Brooklyn, was 17 when her father brought the family to Turkiye in 2017 and then put her in a vehicle, and drove her into Syria without telling her where they were going and the van was surrounded by guys with firearms, her lawyer Mia Eisner-Grynberg said.
There she was caught up in the Syrian Civil War. She was kept in a room for three months and could frequently hear bombs exploding in the vicinity. Her Daesh-sympathizing father died in a bombing in 2018 when she was 17, but not before arranging her marriage to a member of the group when she was 18. She was then arrested in 2019 by anti-Daesh forces in Baghouz, Syria.
Daesh, an offshoot of Al-Qaeda which in 2014 conquered sections of Iraq and in Syria and declared a self-styled “caliphate”, is also known as Islamic State (IS). In 2019, the organization was driven from the territory it had held by a US-led international military coalition and Iraqi and Kurdish forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces. Salman was detained in the US on her return in 2024 and charged with voluntarily receiving military training with the Daesh group in 2018 when she was 18.
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