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. 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.
Crimes
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.