A woman holding United States citizenship appeared before a federal court in New York on Tuesday to face accusations that she had received weapons and combat training while serving within the ranks of the Islamic State — a group whose fighters had previously held her in Syria before her capture.
Halima Salman, 27, was among the women who came to live under Islamic State rule through marriages to fighters affiliated with the group, and who were subsequently taken into custody while awaiting decisions on their return home. The situation facing these women and their children has been a persistent point of contention for a number of Western nations, some of which have moved to revoke citizenship from those who left to join extremist groups abroad, leaving others in a prolonged state of legal limbo.
Her mother, who holds American citizenship, relocated to Syria from the United States during Salman's childhood. Court documents filed in Brooklyn Federal Court indicate that Salman, who was 18 at the time of the alleged offence, faces an accusation of undergoing military-style training under the direction of IS — a charge carrying a potential prison term of up to 10 years.
Court documents allege that, at the age of 17, she made her way to territory under IS control in Syria — entering through Russia and Turkey sometime between late 2016 and early 2017 — and that by the time she turned 18, Salman had undergone firearms training with an assault rifle and received ammunition through an ISIS military battalion. Court documents state that, during her time there, she entered into a marriage with Abu Ali, a fighter for IS who held German-Afghan nationality.
Forces aligned against the Islamic State took her into custody in early 2019, after which she spent roughly five years held at a relocation camp before returning to the United States in 2024, at which point Salman faced arrest.
At a bail hearing, Salman's defence attorney presented her as someone brought into Syrian territory as a child by her mother's husband, a man whose sympathies toward the Islamic State she had no knowledge of — the same individual who had relocated the entire family, including her mother and all eight of her siblings, first to Turkey for a period of months before the group crossed into a town then under Islamic State control.
In 2014, a coalition assembled under United States leadership deployed forces to Iraq and Syria to counter the Islamic State, an organisation that had taken control of extensive areas of land, carried out mass killings, and subjected thousands of women and children to enslavement.
Roughly 2,200 people — described as foreign relatives of individuals suspected of ties to the Islamic State — remain detained at a camp in northeastern Syria under the watch of Kurdish forces, according to a local official who spoke to a news outlet earlier this month. Researchers at the Program on Extremism documented 83 adults holding American citizenship who, at various points after 2011, made their way to Syria or Iraq and took up affiliation with jihadist organisations operating in those countries.
