Tareena Shakil

Tareena Shakil (born 1989) is a British terrorist who is notable for being the first, and only, British woman convicted of having travelled to Syria to join the Islamic State.

In October 2014, Shakil flew from East Midlands Airport to Turkey with her recently-born son, lying to friends by saying that she was going on a family beach holiday, before crossing into ISIS stronghold Syria.

On the day she arrived in Syria she messaged friends and told them she would not be returning to Britain and told her family it was her responsibility as a Muslim to kill the 'murtadeen' (apostates) and that she wanted to die a martyr.

In one message she said that "this is my jihad" and in others urged people to come and fight for ISIS.

Shakil claims that she never sent messages that advocated killing people and has "never agreed" with killing anybody, but when a relative attempted to persuade her that it was not a Muslim's duty to kill and that The Prophet had never said so, she replied that "it's part of our deen (duty) to kill the murtadeen".

She would later tell police she had only joined because she wanted to become a "Jihadi bride", although she conflictingly claimed in the 2021 documentary on her that she had never realised when researching ISIS before she left that women were expected to get married when there, claiming she had found nothing that had said that.

However, police later discovered that she had regularly engaged with a number of blogs about ISIS before she left to Syria which were written by foreign women who had travelled there, and these made it clear that it was an expectation for all women to marry in the Islamic State.

After Shakil arrived in Syria she lived in the ISIS capital Raqqa in a house for single women who were preparing to marry foreign fighters.

She posted photos of her posing with the Islamic State flag, made her child wear an ISIS-branded balaclava and posed him with an AK-47.

In the lead-up to going to Syria, she had been in contact with ISIS extremists including Sally-Anne Jones and Aqsa Mahmood, had posted an ISIS flag on her Facebook profile and sent people messages that were supportive of the group, including images of ISIS fighters and religious passages that she believed justified the group's actions.

She says that she put the IS flag on her profile to "support the caliphate", but now claims that she did "not know" at that time that the flag was related to the Islamic State.

She changed her Facebook biography, encouraging people to "take to arms" if they were angered by events in Syria.

Shakil had also followed people on Twitter who celebrated ISIS fighters.

She had become interested in Syria after a series of pro-Palestinian marches in the UK in the summer of 2014, and engaged with "attractive" ISIS Portuguese fighter Fabio Pocas online, enticed by his profile pictures with weapons and his accounts of attempting to establish an Islamic "caliphate" in Syria.

Pocas himself is notorious for committing some of ISIS's most publicly shocking acts, with it believed that he had involvement in the kidnapping of British photojournalist John Cantlie and him also being credited by IS for making the execution video for the burning alive of the Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kasasbeh in a cage.

By the time Shakil became engaged in the topic of Syria, IS had carried out a number of public beheadings of Westerners they had kidnapped, which made international news and which there was front-page coverage of in the UK.

Prominent examples such as the cases of US citizens James Foley and Steven Sotloff led to widespread outrage, as well as the beheadings of British aid workers David Haines and Alan Henning.

Shakil accepts that she was fully aware of this "horrific" violence before she chose to travel there, but still willingly decided to go with her one-year-old son.

According to Shakil, once in Islamic State territory, she was "shocked" to see the Islamic State flag and soon decided that she had made a 'mistake' and wanted to return.

She would later complain that there was "no police there for me to ring to help".

At the time she decided to leave Raqqa was coming under military bombardment from opposing forces, which may have been the reason she decided to leave the 'caliphate'.

She successfully escaped by bribing a taxi driver to drive her to the Turkish border where she surrendered to Turkish border guards.

She was arrested as soon as she flew back to London Heathrow by British police.

There have been a number of critics of Shakil's escape story, particularly due to her claims that she had been initially allowed to leave the home for single women by its authoritarian owner to go and buy internet credit.

Experts at her later trial would testify that this would not be possible because of extreme limits on married women's movement in the streets of Raqqa, let alone for non-married women.

Shakil initially told police that it had "never been her intention to enter Syria" and that she had been kidnapped there, something she now admits was a lie.

At trial Shakil claimed she had been 'forced' to pose with the machine guns and only went because she wanted to live under sharia law.

"Oddly", The Guardian commented, she told the jury that she had only put her child in an ISIS balaclava because the toddler "enjoyed wearing hats".

The prosecution, however, asserted that she in fact knew full well what she had been doing when she went to Syria, as evidenced by the fact that she had not only encouraged acts of terrorism in messages to others but called for others to come and fight for the Islamic State and had researched Syria since 2014.

Shakil, however, continued to claim that "I just wanted to live an Islamic life, not to kill anybody".

She accepted that she was aware of the eminent news reports about ISIS before had gone, but said she hadn't heard they were committing atrocities, something her trial judge would later reject as manifestly false.

Evidence such as a picture she had taken with an assault rifle was presented.

She was sentenced to six years' imprisonment in 2016 for willingly joining the terrorist group and for encouraging terrorist acts online.

She had chosen to take her toddler son to Syria with her, and was later discovered to have made the one-year-old child pose with an AK-47 and wear Islamic State balaclavas for photographs.

Both during and in the months before she travelled to join ISIS she posted content on social media supporting the Islamic State and justifying their actions, telling people to "take to arms".

She messaged friends on the day she arrived in Syria saying that it was her 'responsibility' as a Muslim to kill 'murtadeen' apostates and that she wanted to die a martyr and carry out Jihad, yet would later claim that she had never agreed with killing anyone.

Amongst other lies her trial judge concluded she made were her claims that she had not known that ISIS had committed atrocities before she went, her stories that she had been "kidnapped" to Syria (before admitting she had gone of her own free will), and what The Guardian described as her 'odd' claims that she had only put her child in an ISIS balaclava because the toddler "enjoyed wearing hats".

Shakil claimed that she soon grew disillusioned with the Islamic State she had chosen to join and wanted to escape, later complaining that there was "no police there for me to ring to help".

She returned to the UK but was quickly arrested.

She was released from prison in 2018 and was subsequently the subject of the 2021 ITV documentary Tareena: Return from ISIS, in which she gave interviews.