The fate of a New York woman who says she was tricked as a teenager by her father into traveling to Syria and marrying a member of the Islamic State group rests in the hands of the Brooklyn jury after her lawyer implored it on Thursday to find that she never received weapons training.
Eisner-Grynberg’s closing argument drew objections from prosecutors who thought she went too far when she called some of the government’s tactics in the case “shameful. Jurors were shown the brief video clip. She said Salman was 17 when her father put her in a van without saying where they were going and drove her from Turkey into Syria, where the van was surrounded by men with guns before she was locked in a room for three months in a land where the sound of bombs striking nearby targets could frequently be heard. But Eisner-Grynberg said her client was herself on the witness stand, someone who was in Girl Scouts studying sewing and craft making before her world was turned upside down by her father, who died after he was injured in a bombing in Syria in 2018.
For a decade, the lawyer said, Salman had “been through hell and back. “The defendant, Halima Salman, received military training from ISIS while she was in Syria, through one of its battalions,” she said in her closing. She said Salman, a U.S. citizen who was born in Brooklyn, had pledged loyalty to the Islamic State and had sent her then-husband a photograph of her with the group’s flag behind her and had also been filmed by her husband with an assault rifle that she had been trained to use. “Her statements on the stand don’t make sense,” she said. Eisner-Grynberg said the government was right to investigate her client after her time in Syria but should not have arrested her after failing to find reliable evidence.
