ISIS jihadi mother: I wish I had gone on holiday instead
Radicalised woman who fled to Syria reveals new life back in Birmingham
SHE was the young Birmingham mother who ran away with her one-year-old son to join Islamic State in Syria in 2014.
Tareena Shakil was nicknamed the ‘Towie Jihadi’ when it emerged the fan of reality TV shows such as The Only Way Is Essex had fled to the Middle East.
Now, after serving time in jail, the runaway jihadi bride says she wishes she had gone on holiday instead.
Shakil, now 32, and her son were seen posing with guns in ‘abhorrent’ photos after leaving the city and being smuggled across ‘desert land’ into Syria.
The former health care worker escaped when the Islamic State ‘were at their peak’ and was later jailed for six years for joining the group and encouraging acts of terrorism.
Speaking in an ITV documentary, she said no one understood what she had lived through at the time and she did what she had to do in order to survive.
During the filming – in which she became the first British citizen to return to the UK from IS and speak publicly – she was shown walking along the busy Stratford Road in Birmingham in scenes from her new life.
“If I could go back, I would’ve gone to Turkey on holiday and come back, I should’ve come back,” she told the documentary.
“It was easier to stay. I came back knowing what I’d have to face. That’s been very hard.
“It’s easy for everybody to say, ‘she did this, she did that’, but you really have no idea what I was living through, nobody does.”
Shakil has a job and home now, after she was released following three years in prison in June 2018.
After initially being banned from being within two miles of any airport and not allowed on certain roads in Birmingham, she now has her British passport back and no longer has an electronic tag.
“I understand there’s a lot of fear about me right now, but at the end of the day, a picture speaks a thousand words, and without the prior explanation, human nature, we judge, that’s what we do,” she said, reflecting on being back in the community.
The hour-long documentary revealed how Shakil came to be in Syria, from her dropping out of university and her ‘unhappy’ marriage.
She was a “bright child” and the first in her family to attend university.
While there, she met her future husband – who came from a “conservative Muslim family”.
She started to wear traditional Muslim dress and eventually dropped out of her studies.
“When I would come home, there’d always be a fight that I hadn’t been to university, that I’d been hanging out with other people,” she said.
“He was a very jealous individual. I decided it wasn’t worth the headache and I chose to be with that person as opposed to choosing my future or my career.”
Transcripts from Shakil’s trial recorded more than a dozen police reports of domestic violence at the couple’s home.
“I used to say please God, take me away from this. I’m tired of living this misery. I’m tired of being so sad. I used to say, please God, just free me from this,” she said.
Shakil separated from her husband in 2014 – just months before the start of a new war in Gaza.
She began looking into Pro-Palestinian marches and to search on Facebook before reaching out to a man who transpired to be a ‘recruiter’.
“We started talking to each other and the conversation just led to religion. ‘Where do you live?’ “I live in England. ‘It’s not good for you to live there, it’s not a Muslim country’.
“He said: ‘Right now, you and your son are hanging over the fire of Jahannam [hell] and you’re doing that to your son by choosing to stay there.’
In 2014, she booked a one-week holiday in Antalya in Turkey for herself and her son.
She boarded a plane to Gaziantep, said to be a well-known staging post for ‘want-to-be Jihadis’, with intentions to cross into Syria.
Once she arrived, she called a contact given to her via Facebook exchanges with the IS fighter and was taken to an Islamic State safe-house in the city.
“I remember saying to myself, I can’t just go down and say, I want to go now because they’re not going to let me go now, I already know too much.”
Alongside other British and Russians, she was smuggled across the Syrian border.
Shakil said: “A van came and drove us to desert land and it was the border, and they were just like ‘run’.
“We eventually reached the Syrian part of the land where there was a white truck waiting, and they just helped us on.
“That was the first time I had seen in real life the black flag, it was just waving in the wind. That was such a shock.”
She lived in a house with around 60 women for eight weeks, where she said they weren’t allowed phones, nor allowed to leave unless for marriage.
A photo emerged of her posing with an AK47 assault rifle and there were also photos of her toddler son posing in a balaclava. A separate image showed the child posing next to an AK47.
Cited in the Birmingham Crown Court trial as the most ‘abhorrent’ photos, the judge rejected her account that another woman at the house took the photo.
She claimed there was a ‘lot of pressure’ on her as, coming from Britain, she was naturally ‘subject to suspicion’.
“A couple of women were very vocal about being unhappy, those girls were taken and we never saw them again,” she said.
“Three or four men came and took them. You don’t want it to be you on that van.”
Pressure was mounting on Shakil to find a husband, with a few people suggested to her as potential partners.
When the head of the house decided to allow her to leave to buy an internet code, Shakil seized the moment to make a bolt for freedom, taking buses and a taxi to reach the Turkish border.
“I grabbed my bag, I grabbed my son, I ran over the field. From that second, when I was on Turkish soil, I knew I was safe.”
She was taken to a detention centre and a flight back to Heathrow, where she was arrested and her son taken from her.
She was charged with joining Islamic State and encouraging acts of terrorism.
The jury found her guilty and she was jailed for six years, three of which were on licence.
Shakil: Return from ISIS is available to stream on ITV Hub.
It was easier to stay. I came back knowing what I’d have to face. That’s been very hard Tareena Shakil