LONDON: A woman convicted of terrorist offenses for traveling to Syria to join Daesh has said she “regrets everything” about it.
Tareena Shakil, 32, was jailed in 2016 upon returning to Britain from Syria after spending three months living in Daesh’s so-called caliphate.
Shakil, from Birmingham, has now been released from prison and has completed a de-radicalization program. She said she hopes her story will be a warning to others.
She is “ashamed” of her actions and “lives with the consequences every day,” she said.
A former healthcare worker, Shakil traveled in secret to Syria along with her 1-year-old son in 2014 and lived in a house with other women awaiting marriage to Daesh fighters.
“Conversations were often listened to and you were generally expected to behave in a certain way,” she told the BBC.
“You know, you don’t cause any trouble. There were two girls who didn’t act that way, who would just act up,” she said.
“I can’t even really give an example, they were just unruly and a van came, men came off the van and took them girls away, and we never saw them again.”
After less than three months, Shakil fled to Turkey and returned to the UK, where she was arrested, tried, and jailed for six years.
During her trial, she was found to have encouraged acts of terrorism in her social media posts.
The mother described her de-radicalization journey as “long.”
Looking back, she said she remembers “feeling really sad, really bitter, really taken advantage of and duped” as she was radicalized.
“I remember feeling really ashamed of myself to some degree that I allowed it to happen.”
