NEW YORK (AP) — In March 2003, Zeinab Taleb-Jedi was a middle-aged widow who found herself trapped in a cold, dusty bunker in Iraq as invading U.S. forces began blowing up buildings and inflicting casualties all around her.

"The noise was overwhelming and frightening," the Iran-born U.S. citizen said in a statement recounting the air raids around Camp Ashraf, a stronghold for Iranian exiles about 60 miles north of Baghdad. "The attacks terrified me."

Taleb-Jedi, 52, escaped serious harm. But more than five years later, she remains stuck in legal limbo in New York, facing federal terrorism charges labeling her a leader of a militant group advocating the violent overthrow of the Iranian government.

Her largely overlooked arrest and protracted prosecution have outraged civil rights advocates, who accuse federal authorities of trampling free speech by overzealously enforcing laws against providing material support to terrorist groups.

Defense attorney Justine Harris has questioned why "the government would want to put this woman in jail for associating with a group whose goal is regime change in Iran, arguably a central tenet of our own foreign policy."

Taleb-Jedi has been linked to the People's Mujahedeen Organization of Iran, a group designated a terrorist organization by the State Department in 1997. Prosecutors say she became an English teacher in 1999 at the organization's Iraq headquarters, Camp Ashraf, and that two informants have since identified her as a member of a leadership council.

In a pending motion to dismiss the case, Harris claims the government has never specified how her client purportedly supported terrorism, "other than teaching English — itself an entirely innocuous act."

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