Apos;TOWIE Jihadi apos 32 Says She apos;regrets Everything apos; About Joining ISIS

A young mother who became the first British woman to be jailed for joining [/news/isis/index.html ISIS] today said she 'regrets everything', claiming she was 'taken advantage of' by online groomers. 
Tareena Shakil was nicknamed the ' [/tvshowbiz/towie/index.html Towie] jihadi' when it emerged that the fan of reality TV shows such as The Only Way Is Essex had fled to the Middle East in 2014 - despite being aware ISIS was guilty of terrible atrocities. 
The 32-year-old, who had a western upbringing listening to the Spice Girls and taking part in talent competitions, was jailed after returning to Britain a year later, with detectives stumped as to how she managed to flee Syria and concluding she still posed a 'serious risk'. 
The mother - who shared photos from Syria of her posing with guns and dressing her baby in an ISIS hat - remains the only woman in Britain to have been imprisoned for joining Islamic State.
In a rare interview since being released in 2018, having served less than half of her six-year sentence and undergoing a deradicalisation programme, Shakil, 32, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: 'I regret every last thing about running away to Syria with my child and I live with those consequences every day.
'I've been educated about things that IS would say that were not true, it's been a long journey and along the way I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of different people, including imams in prison and mentors outside.' 
Tareena Shakil was nicknamed the ' Towie jihadi' when it emerged that the fan of reality TV shows such as The Only Way Is Essex had fled to the Middle East in 2014 
Shakil, (pictured) from Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, was photographed in Syria wearing an Isis balaclava, along with her son, and posing with an AK-47
Aged 24, Shakil told her family she was taking her son on a Turkish beach holiday.

Instead, using her student loan to fund the trip, she crossed the border into Syria and headed for Raqqa, a stronghold of Islamic State in Syria (Isis).
Shakil, from Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, was photographed in Syria wearing an Isis balaclava, along with her son, and posing with an AK-47.
She used Twitter rants to encourage others to join the fight.
Her father, Mohammed, described how - growing up - she was the 'perfect daughter' who was always studying and never went to nightclubs.  
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Shakil has previously admitted knowing of Islamic State atrocities before she left for Syria, but said she was groomed by recruiters online.
'It's not something you're aware of that at this moment I'm being recruited or at this precise moment I'm vulnerable,' she said.

'That awareness comes after and it came after for me.
'And I remember feeling really sad, bitter and taken advantage of. And also ashamed of myself that I had allowed it to happen.
'When you lived under ISIS, conversations were often listened to and you were generally expected to behave in a certain way,' she said.
'There were two girls who were unruly and men came in a van and took them away - we never saw them again.'
Mandy claimed the then 26-year-old, who posed with her son wearing a black balaclava bearing the slogan of ISIS, was looking for happiness when she left to make a new life under the terror group in Raqqa
Shakil insisted she had been completely deradicalised and was no longer a threat.
'It's been seven years since I ran away, I've done three years in prison and three years outside - I've done everything that's asked of me,' she said.
'I've built a normal life for myself - I work, nothing bad has happened and I have no intention to do anything apart from get on with my life.'
Shakil, who now lives in Birmingham, fled Syria and was arrested when she touched down at Heathrow having flown back from Turkey.
She told police and jurors at her trial in 2016 that she had been kidnapped and forced to pose by Isis.

But Judge Melbourne Inman described her defence as 'lie after lie', and said she had 'embraced IS' and was 'willing to become a martyr'.
Detectives believe she wed an IS fighter in Syria, but the marriage quickly turned sour.
Asked in an earlier interview what she thinks of Isis bride Shamima Begum, who has been stripped of British citizenship and languishes in a Syrian camp, she said: 'I can't say, 'Don't bring them back' - that makes me a hypocrite because I've been in a very similar situation.
'It's not the same situation because I escaped.

There may be reasons these people didn't escape. It's not easy to escape from there - it's life and death, not everybody has it in them.'
  Every mum's worst nightmare: How an innocent Spice Girls fan raised by an ordinary middle-class parent grew up into a hate-filled fanatic jailed for running away to join ISIS in Syria
Angella Johnson for the Mail On Sunday 
It's the quintessential holiday snap.

Standing beside her proud mum, her younger sister and a furry fairground toy, a carefree Tareena Shakil beams at the camera during a weekend trip to Blackpool.
That was the summer of 2010. But just four years later, Tareena - by then a university drop-out and a married mother of one - abandoned her family home to join the murderous [/news/isis/index.html Islamic State] in its war-ravaged [/news/syria/index.html Syrian] stronghold of Raqqa.
It was from there she posted sinister images on Facebook wearing a black Niqab beside the terror group's flag.

She is also pictured holding her toddler son, who is wearing an IS-branded balaclava.
In other photos, she posed with an AK47 assault rifle, holding a handgun and wearing an IS balaclava alongside Facebook messages saying: ‘This is my jihad' and encouraging others to take up arms.
Her British mother Mandy in an exclusive and harrowing interview with The Mail on Sunday revealed how her ‘smiley' eldest daughter, who loved the Spice Girls, ended up with the terror group before she fled and returned to Britain. 
And Mandy told how she struggled to comprehend how her daughter could have taken her then 14-month-old son on a holiday flight to Turkey before crossing into Syria and posing him in an IS balaclava next to guns, in what the judge described as one of the most abhorrent features of the case.
A smiling Tareena Shakil and her mother Mandy on a family weekend to Blackpool in 2010, four years before she fled the UK with her toddler son and joined IS in Syria
A week before the sit down, 26-year-old Tareena had been convicted of being a member of IS and encouraging terrorism.

She is the first woman to return from the so-called caliphate to be convicted of the offence and was jailed for six years.
Passing sentence at Birmingham Crown Court, Mr Justice Inman said: ‘Most alarmingly, you took your toddler son to Syria knowing how he would be used.'
Though he said it was clear that she had been ‘radicalised', she had shown no remorse and had actively ‘embraced Isis' knowing her son's future would be as a fighter for the group.
Her parents, however, found it difficult to believe their daughter acted of her own free will.
Speaking exclusively to The Mail on Sunday, Mandy said: ‘I still can't understand how my lovely, sweet and bright child ended up in a warzone with my grandson. It is beyond my comprehension.
‘She was such a lovely, smiley child.

She loved to watch the children's programme Rosie And Jim, was full of energy and always had a smile on her face.
‘I can only imagine that she was looking for happiness. Before she went to Syria, she was very unhappy because her marriage was a disaster.
She thought she could find peace under sharia law - but when she got to Raqqa it was absolutely horrible. She hated it, but they refused to let her leave.
Mandy revealed how she believed her daughter, raised in a liberal home, did not act of her own free will.

These photos were shown to the jury showing Shakil posing in an ISIS balaclava and with a Kalashnikov rifle
'They kept her in "safe" houses crammed with women and children.
‘She said it was dismally bleak - there was no electricity or hot water.
There were women there from all over the world being offered up as jihadi brides to the male fighters. She was horrified and told them that she was already married.
‘I think she thought she was going to a place where woman are treated very well, but she felt she had been tricked.
‘Yes, it was wrong for her to take my grandson to such a dangerous place, but I still can't believe she's truly a terrorist.

She was naive and gullible.'
Counter-terror detectives, however, though admitting they have no idea why Tareena fled Syria, insisted she presented a ‘real threat' after returning to the UK. Before going to the Middle East she had changed her Facebook and Twitter profile photos to images of the IS flag.
In one of two notes she left behind, found by police, Tareena wrote: ‘If you are reading this then I am long gone and you are clearing out the house.

I love you all, never forget that... I won't say goodbye because this is not the end.'
You may wonder how a mother could possibly have missed the warning signs that suggested her daughter was about to go abroad to join a terror group - a mission paid for from her student loan.
And now, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, she still displayed a faith in her daughter that may seem naive but is perhaps an unwillingness to accept the truth.
She wept for her daughter as she described Tareena's Western upbringing with her younger two brothers and sister, learning dance routines to Spice Girls songs in her bedroom, watching The Only Way Is Essex on television and taking a Saturday job at Morrisons to earn money for clothes and make-up.
Sitting on a leather sofa in the living room of her tidy three-bedroom semi-detached home in a well-tended road in Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, Mandy explained that although her husband of 26 years, Mohammed (known as Shak) was from a Pakistani background, they had never been especially religious and certainly had no ties to radical Islam.
She said: ‘We're not even political.

Shak and I met in a local nightclub. After our marriage we decided our children would be brought up in the Western culture and be able to choose what they want out of life.
‘I converted to Islam five years ago, but it was my own choice.
My husband doesn't practice the faith.' Given their relaxed attitude, it came as a surprise when Tareena, aged five, asked if she could learn the Koran and fast during Ramadan.
‘I think her fascination with the religion came from her paternal grandparents,' Mandy says.

‘Her dad was very proud of her desire to learn the Koran and bought her a gold necklace as a reward. We both wanted her to enjoy the best of both cultures - to be Western and know her own mind and get a good education, yet to also observe the moral values of a well brought up Muslim girl.
Her father promised that she would never be forced into an arranged marriage.'
Shakil's Facebook page under the name Tameena al Amirah, where she started posting extremist messages
These handwritten goodbye messages were discovered by police in Shakil's home after she left the UK
Tareena attended a mosque until she was ten, when a passion for the Spice Girls and an ambition to become an actress led her to spend more time with her non-religious classmates.
‘She won a talent competition with some of her friends.

They performed as a tribute to the Spice Girls - she was Sporty Spice,' recalled Mandy.
‘She could go out with her girlfriends and stay out late. All we wanted was for her to know right and wrong and to have a good heart.
We gave her the freedom to enjoy her childhood and she did us proud. She was a good girl. She never gave us any trouble.'
Academic and popular, Tareena became a prefect and took up after-school interests such as karate and drama.

Later, she won a place at Birmingham University to study psychology and moved into the student halls of residence.
It was also about this time that she began to wear a headscarf. ‘It was her choice,' says Mandy, quietly.

‘She told me it was because she wanted to be a good Muslim.' But unknown to her parents, Tareena was being drawn to the conflict unfolding in Syria.
Shakil, pictured at East Midlands Airport with her toddler before they boarded a flight to Turkey en route to Syria
She started attending debates about the Syrian crisis and, says Mandy, it was at a demonstration during the second year of her studies that Tareena met the man she was to marry - a hairdresser whose Yemeni parents had emigrated to Britain.
While Tareena's parents had their reservations, Mandy says they didn't want to stand in her way and gave her their blessing.
‘She told me that she had fallen in love.

I wanted her to continue with her degree, but she left because she said she wanted to be a good wife.She got pregnant very quickly after marrying and I looked forward to being a grandmother,' says Mandy.
But the newlyweds began to row and the marriage faltered.
At first Tareena kept it to herself.
‘It's as if she felt she had made her bed and had to lie in it,' says Mandy, whose suspicions were confirmed with a distressing phone call at five one morning.

Tareena had called from a police station to say she had had a row with her husband and that the police had been called.
It was clear, at least to Mandy, that her daughter's turbulent home life left her vulnerable to the promise of a better life with a terror group masquerading as an Islamic utopia.
Trying to piece together what came next, Mandy realised that her daughter, then living back at home with her parents and with a demanding toddler to care for, must have felt isolated and looked online for a route to happiness.
By then it was 2014 and Tareena's estranged husband had returned to his native Yemen. He called to tell her that he had taken another wife.

‘She was really upset,' says Mandy. ‘Sometimes I wonder if I should have done more to comfort her.'
When Tareena told the family she was going to Turkey for a week's beach holiday with her son, her parents thought it might do her the world of good.
She Skyped daily as promised but on the third day she made a cryptic call home.
Shakil sent photographs of her son in Syria, including one image showing him sitting next to an AK-47 machinegun. The caption of the picture describes him as 'Abu Jihad al-Britani'
Her father said he became suspicious when, during their conversation, he saw the shadowy figure of a man in the background.

‘I just knew that something was not right.'
He contacted a friend who was a police officer but was advised to wait to see if she would return. But when her mother went to collect her from the airport, she was left waiting for hours with a growing feeling of dread.
Mandy and her husband called the police and reported their daughter as missing, little knowing that she had travelled to Syria.

Weeks later, Tareena sent messages home saying she was settled and happy. In one, she said: ‘This is my jihad,' and urged people to take up arms for IS.
In a WhatsApp conversation with her father, who pleaded for her to return home, she wrote: ‘I can leave, but I don't want to.

I want to die here as a martyr.'
But in January 2015, an unhappy Tareena claims she decided to escape Syria in a taxi, which took her to the turkish citizenship immigration lawyer border. She and her son then made a desperate dash towards Turkish guards, who locked her up in a detention centre where she languished for six weeks.
She was only released after her father made two trips to Turkey and paid a £5,000 bribe.
When she arrived at Heathrow in February 2015, she was arrested.

Tareena has not always been truthful.

After her arrest on returning to England, she told police she had been kidnapped, but in court she admitted this had been a lie. Tareena also told police that she went to Syria after developing a relationship with a man she met in Turkey, but during a raid on the home she shared with her husband in Britain, police found farewell notes she had left.
Ultimately, Tareena has paid an extremely high price for what her parents insist was a naive act.

She has lost her liberty - and, for the present, her son.

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