NEW YORK — In a day of emotional testimony, a Brooklyn woman accused of getting military training from ISIS told jurors about how her controlling father spirited her and her family into ISIS-controlled territory in Syria at age 17, and forced her into a subservient arranged marriage at age 18.

Dressed in a blue hijab, her face uncovered, and a bright pink hoodie, Halima Salman, 27, described a life under the thumb of the oppressive terrorist state as a young, confused woman with no option except to follow ISIS’s strict rules on how women should dress and act.

“I’m nervous and scared,” the Brooklyn native said, quietly, at the start of her testimony when asked by her lawyer, Mia Eisner-Grynberg, how she felt on the stand. “It’s scary.”

A day before her arrest in 2024 on charges she trained with ISIS to use an AK-47, Salman sat down with an FBI agent who gave him happy news after years in detention camps, she testified Monday — she’d be going home to the U.S. to reunite with her family, and “was free as a bird.”

That turned out not to be the case.

When she landed at JFK Airport to be repatriated alongside her family, the feds arrested her on a charge that could land her in prison for 10 years.

Salman spoke about her life after her arrest and release on bond, living with her family in New Hampshire, a sharp contrast from the warzone where she lived in Syria, and the detention centers after ISIS fell.

“It’s all green. It’s a really nice place,” she said, talking about how she’s worked toward getting a high school degree and focused on her DIY hobbies, decorating, crocheting, beading, and making baked goods to sell at a gas station and to tourists.

Salman testified she doesn’t support ISIS, telling the jury, “I believe that ISIS did very scary things which deceive the way Islam is visioned.”

Federal prosecutors hope to convince a jury that Salman was a willing participant in the terrorist group while living in ISIS-controlled territory in Syria, alleging she got military training, married an ISIS member, and joined an all-female battalion.

They point to a hand-written document, found on her husband’s cell phone, that purports she received certification for the weapon, a brief cell phone video he made of her picking up his AK-47 in their home before she asked not to be recorded, and a selfie posing in front of an ISIS flag.

On Monday, Salman testified that she never received training of any sort, and that she couldn’t even leave her house in al-Mayadin, an ISIS-occupied town in Syria, without her husband present. The Syrian Army recaptured the town in October 2017.

Throughout her testimony, Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Shami repeatedly interrupted with objections, trying to cut short her descriptions of her pre-ISIS childhood and social-life, when she lived in Brooklyn and, later, Egypt, her feelings after her father took her to live in Syria, the rules women had to follow there, and the “horrible” first few days of her arranged marriage.

Salman described her father as “short-tempered, aggressive and very stubborn,” and in 2016, while her family was on a trip to Turkey, they piled into a van, expecting to visit relatives.

She dozed off, she said, and when she woke up, armed ISIS men surrounded the vehicle. “They were rushing people into the building that the van was in front of,” she said.

She and her family was made to stay in a “madafa” for about three months, a cramped guest house where women and children were held against their will, until her father came back to retrieve them. She was forced to trade her blue hijab for a black one, and a veil to cover her face.

After her father came back, they stayed in two homes, both of which were bombed, then moved to al-Mayadin, and when she was 18, she was married off.

“My father, he told me, ‘I’m gonna bring somebody over… and that will be the person that you will eventually marry,” she said.

Eisner-Grynberg showed a picture of Salman sitting on a silver couch, under an ISIS flag, her face stern on her wedding day. “I was scared. I had a very bad feeling about it,” she said. “I was wondering to myself if this was what was supposed to happen to me. My heart was burning.”

She went to live with her husband, who she knew as Abu Ali, and his parents, and she was expected to do as they said, she testified. That often meant waking up before everyone every day to bake bread and clean the house, while she was berated and body-shamed, she said. Her father died in a bomb blast, she said.

She had a phone, but no cell service, and sent her husband pictures with a Bluetooth app.

She explained the picture with the flag as a “pretty” photo of herself she she took to keep him happy. “If I had a bad day, I’d try to please him so I could give myself a decent day,” she said. “It didn’t mean anything.”

Salman said she asked for a divorce three times, but wasn’t able to split with him until their house was destroyed in the fighting, and they took a long journey to a spot where she ultimately surrendered to coalition forces in 2019.

In her cross-examination, Shami pressed Salman on the inconsistencies in her paperwork after her surrender, accusing her of still using her married name and lying about being an American while in detention.

Shami pressed Salman on why she hadn’t asked to be repatriated during her roughly five years in Syrian Defense Force-run detention camps, and she countered she had, “probably a hundred times, whoever I could speak to.”

When the prosecutor asked why she listed Germany as her country of birth, she testified that she had done no such thing, countering that the SDF members who collected her info were young, and “a lot of them are also illiterate.”

On re-direct, Salman said the SDF might have collected bad information because her mother-in-law did all the talking when she surrendered, but there, the prosecutor scored a point, asking at the end of her testimony, “Are you aware that your mother-in-law was arrested two months earlier?”

The trial continues Tuesday.

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