If you met Tareena Shakil today, you would never guess that the person before you had served a prison sentence for terrorism offenses, and holds the dubious distinction of being the first British woman convicted of joining Islamic State. Now 36, Shakil is glamorous, with heavy makeup and long, tousled hair. When we meet at a plush hotel in Birmingham, she wears a sharply tailored dress, her waist cinched with a wide leather belt, and carries a Louis Vuitton handbag. She is bubbly and warm, with a disarmingly open demeanor. In short, she isn’t what comes to mind when you hear the words “terrorism conviction.”
What Shakil actually resembles is an influencer—which is fitting, because that’s what she’s trying to become. She has gained the most traction on TikTok, where her profile has about 50,000 followers. She gives relationship advice, often sitting in her car and speaking directly to the camera. Her content mixes humor (“Muslim men who go to the gym while fasting—brother, the world needs more people like you”) with advice about dating (“Men are natural-born hunters… they love the chase” in one video; “When they block you, it’s a punishment because they know it’s going to hurt you” in another). Interspersed are videos hinting at something darker (“If your partner hits you, you must leave, no matter how much they cry or promise never to do it again”). She never directly references her own complicated past, but she tells me, “There’s an element of my own experience in most of the videos I make.”
She admits this turn to content creation is a surprising shift for someone who first gained prominence after running away to Syria in 2014 with her one-year-old son. Shakil was one of an estimated 900 people from the UK—including about 150 women—who made this journey during the five years Islamic State held territory in Syria and Iraq. For years, these women, often called “jihadi brides,” were fixtures in the press, objects of sometimes prurient fascination. The tabloids dubbed Shakil “the Towie jihadi” after her parents described her as a normal girl who loved the reality show The Only Way Is Essex. She quickly realized she had made a terrible mistake and escaped from Syria after less than three months there. Those months have defined the course of her life.
People who traveled to Syria from Europe are often condemned as irredeemably evil, with any attempt to understand their motivations seen as justification. But Shakil’s story raises more complex questions: What makes a group like IS feel like an escape? And what does it look like to try to live an ordinary life after such tumultuous and infamous early experiences? For the past decade, she has been trying to do just that: prison, deradicalization, rebuilding contact with her son, and now, improbably, reinventing herself online. “People don’t expect me to have the life I have now,” she says. “But I believe in second chances. When you’ve nearly died as many times as I have, you get a thirst for life.”
When Shakil was a little girl growing up in the Staffordshire town of Burton upon Trent, she often dreamed of being rescued by a prince. Her own life was chaotic. Her father was in and out of prison (he has more than 25 convictions, including for drug offenses and assault), and, she says carefully, she was “raised around violent relationships.” Shakil is close to her family and says her parents “tried their very best to raise us the right way,” but it was an unstable environment. “That’s probably where my lack of insight for danger comes from,” she tells me. “I don’t have a regard for it; I don’t know what fear is.” As a child, she frequently visited her father in prison and vowed that her ownHer future seemed set. She was a school prefect and went on to study psychology at university. But at 20, she met a man and plunged headfirst into the relationship. They were married within a year, and Shakil dropped out of university. “I wanted to find my happy ever after,” she says. “I had pinned a lot on the idea that the person I marry would save me.” That’s not how it turned out. The relationship was turbulent, and Shakil, once bubbly and sociable, became isolated, finding herself with “literally zero friends.” At one point, she wasn’t allowed to have a phone. She even distanced herself from her parents, afraid to let them know what was happening.
Shakil is mixed-race—her father is Pakistani and her mother is white British—and her upbringing wasn’t particularly religious. Her husband asked her to cover her head after marriage, which she was happy to do. But a few years later, when she became pregnant, she turned to religion. Prayer provided hope, comfort, and a sense of being anchored to something as her life grew more difficult. As the couple broke up and got back together, Shakil spent time with her parents and, at one stage, in a homeless hostel. It was a tough period. “I was just like, ‘Where is my peace? Where do I go?'”
In July 2014, Shakil’s husband left the country for a month while she stayed in the UK. Lost and isolated, she reactivated her Facebook account in his absence. Soon, she was chatting with a young man fighting in Syria. A month earlier, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had declared an Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and called on all Muslims to travel to join the so-called caliphate. There was a deliberate push to recruit people to travel to IS territory. The man told her it was her duty to live under sharia law and that she would go to hell if she died in England. He referred her to hadiths, the words and actions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, which are heavily debated and subject to interpretation. Not having much religious expertise herself, Shakil took the man’s interpretations at face value. He encouraged her to go to Syria and connected her to others already there, including women who said they’d escaped domestic violence. “It was constantly sold as a happy ever after,” says Shakil. She liked the idea of living a simple, spiritual life in a place where everyone shared her faith. An escape hatch was opening up.
“I hated my personal life. Islamic State offered a second chance, safety, a sense of belonging.” When Shakil asked these people about the reported violence of IS, they dismissed it as yet more evidence of the western media hating Islam. “For me, it wasn’t about terrorism, violence, any of that,” she says. “It was about migrating for Islam and escaping the life I had in England. That doesn’t mean I hate England or anything to do with the government. It was my personal life I had come to hate. I never had my safe place. They offered a second chance, they offered safety, they offered a sense of belonging.”
On top of this, she wanted to punish her husband, who had threatened to leave her. “I thought, ‘OK, I’ve got nothing to lose. You go off for another life and I’ll go off for another life, too,'” she tells me, her tone defiant almost 12 years later. In September 2014, just five weeks after her first interaction with the recruiter, she booked flights to Turkey for herself and her son for the following month. It is hard to reconcile the gravity of the decision to take a child to a war zone with the immaturity of, in her words, “wanting to get one up on my ex.” She can see how it sounds. “I get it, it makes no sense now,” she says. “But at the time, I was very vulnerable, I was very weak, I was clearly being very selfish.”
After landing in Turkey, Shakil messaged her parents to say she…She wasn’t coming home. Her family thought it was a joke, only realizing she was serious a few days later when they went to pick her up from the airport and she never arrived. By then, Shakil and her son were already in Syria. On the first day, she saw the huge black ISIS flag flying. It felt like waking from a trance and realizing: this is real. A few days later, her brother sent her a picture of the front page of The Sun, with her photo and the headline “The only way is ISIS.” “I remember thinking, ‘Is what I’ve done really front-page news? Is it that serious?’ That shocked me. I realized I was in a lot of trouble.”
Single women couldn’t live alone in ISIS-controlled territory, so Shakil and her son were placed in a house with about 60 other women and their children. Almost immediately, there was pressure on her to marry—women’s main role there was to produce a new generation of fighters. Since she arrived without a husband, she was considered single. Communication with the outside world was limited. There was hardly any electricity, and it was freezing. Life was claustrophobic, confined to the house and closely watched, doing “absolutely nothing” all day while trying not to let anyone see her upset and arouse suspicion. Shakil realized she had made a terrible mistake but didn’t know how to fix it.
Soon, she and her son were taken to another house for single women, this time in Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State and a war zone. Still mostly confined indoors, Shakil saw little of ISIS’s cruelty, but it was hard to avoid the sound of airstrikes. “Death was very real,” she says. “I knew that if I had led my son to his death, I would never forgive myself for that, ever.” This is what she still struggles with the most. Her eyes fill with tears, and she struggles to get the words out. “You don’t think your mother is going to take you somewhere dangerous, because that’s not what parents do. Children trust their parents to make the right decisions. But I didn’t. All I ever wanted, since he was born, was to keep him safe from violence and criminal activity like I’d seen. So how, in trying to keep him safe, did I take him so close to death?” She resolved to get him out.
The same impulsiveness that had gotten her into Syria helped her escape in January 2015, less than three months after arriving. First, she ran away from the house for single women after bumping into a woman she’d met on the way into Syria who also had doubts. This woman was married and let Shakil and her son stay at her house for a few days. Unaccompanied women and children weren’t allowed to travel around ISIS territory without written permission, but Shakil talked her way onto a bus heading to a village near the Turkish border. When she got off, she bribed a taxi driver with all the cash she had left—$100—to take them closer. As the border came into view, she asked him to stop, threw the money on the back seat, picked up her son, and ran. A small group of ISIS fighters with guns slung over their shoulders stood nearby but didn’t see her. The border was marked with barbed wire and surrounded by thick mud after days of rain. She couldn’t get over it and screamed for help from some nearby Turkish soldiers, waving her British passport. They lifted her son over first, then helped her. They were safe.
Shakil and her son were taken to a detention center in Turkey, where they stayed for six weeks before flying back to the UK. Police boarded the plane as soon as it landed, arresting Shakil on suspicion of terrorism offenses and taking her son into care. Shakil, who thought he would be sent to relatives, was frantic. In her first interview, she lied to police, saying she had been forced to enter Syria.She was taken to Syria by a man she met in Turkey. “I thought if I told them the truth, they’d never give me my son back,” she tells me. “I panicked.” This would later count against her in court.
She was bailed to her parents’ house and occasionally saw her child. “That was hands down the worst thing I’ve ever been through,” she says. “I didn’t want to be alive, to be honest.” Her dad and brother took turns sitting by her bedside through the night in case she harmed herself. After five months, she was charged with two offences: joining IS, and encouraging acts of terror—relating to texts and social media posts sent while she was there. “I can leave, but I don’t want to. I want to die here as a martyr,” she said in one message to her dad; in others, she encouraged her family to visit her.
Shakil was charged and taken into custody. She pleaded not guilty, claiming she had never joined IS or wanted to take part in terrorist acts. At trial, jurors saw photographs and messages from her phone—including an image of her son holding an AK-47. Shakil said she was simply going along with what others were doing, and that she was under intense scrutiny in Syria because her case was so high profile (in part because members of her own family were selling stories to the tabloids). Shakil maintains that to this day. But the judge did not accept her account, telling her: “You told lie after lie to the police and in court. Most alarming is the fact that you took your son and how he was used. The most abhorrent photographs were those taken of your son wearing a balaclava with an IS logo and specifically the photograph of your son, no more than a toddler, standing next to an AK-47 under a title which, translated from the Arabic, means ‘Father of the British jihad.’ You were well aware that the future which you had subjected your son to was very likely to be indoctrination and thereafter life as a terrorist fighter.” Shakil was found guilty of both charges and sentenced to six years in prison.
There’s reluctance to see the people who went to Syria as grooming victims—it’s always, ‘You are a bad person, you are evil.’
Soon after being sentenced, Shakil wrote down on a piece of paper: “This is the start of forever.” It marked a decision to use her time while incarcerated to make sense of the decisions that had led her there. Shakil engaged with every rehabilitative service available: therapy, domestic violence courses, deradicalisation. Faith had helped her to survive the worst times in her life, and she believed, as she still does, that she was only able to escape Syria because of God’s mercy. She spent long hours reading and talking to the prison imam, who helped her to see how the brutality of IS ran counter to Islamic teaching about mercy, and to understand the distortions the recruiters had made. It was a slow, emotional process, redefining her personal relationship to God and to religion, and it’s the thing she is most grateful for. Today, she doesn’t wear a hijab, but prays five times a day. Faith has continued to be an anchor through hard times—and there would be more hard times to come.
In March 2019, the last IS stronghold of Baghouz fell and the group was officially defeated. Around this time, one of the most high-profile foreign recruits resurfaced in a refugee camp. Shamima Begum was 15 when she left the UK with two schoolfriends from east London. Now she was 19 and heavily pregnant, dazed after the death of her two children. “I’m not the same silly little 15-year-old schoolgirl who ran away from Bethnal Green four years ago,” she told the Times journalist Anthony Loyd. “I don’t regret coming here.” The outcry was swift and vicious. The UK government moved quickly, stripping Begum’s British citizenship, closing down the possibility of her returning home and rendering her stateless. The governmentThe government argued this was justified because Begum was eligible for Bangladeshi citizenship through her parents—despite the fact she had never held dual nationality or visited Bangladesh.
Soon afterward, Begum gave birth. The baby died. Begum had been legally a child when she left, and she had been groomed online. Her lawyers have argued, so far unsuccessfully, that she was a victim of trafficking. Begum’s case has failed in UK courts, and her lawyers are now taking it to the European Court of Human Rights.
“What do you know about being evil at 15? Your frontal lobe isn’t fully developed at that age,” says Shakil, who had left Syria the month before Begum and her friends arrived. “I do think she was groomed and I believe in redemption.” But she still bristles at the comparison between their cases. “We did the same thing, but we are not the same,” she says. “I escaped even though they could have killed me; Shamima stayed for a long time and only resurfaced when ISIS had been defeated. Living in such an environment for four-and-a-half years would affect anybody.”
Yet it is hard not to see Shakil’s story as a counterpoint to Begum’s. Shakil, too, would theoretically be eligible for citizenship elsewhere—in her case, Pakistan, through her father. A few months before Begum’s citizenship was revoked, Shakil was released from prison, having served half of her six-year sentence, including time on remand. The terms of her probation were strict. She was not allowed to go to Burton upon Trent, where her family lived. She had spoken to her son regularly from prison, but was now barred from contact with him and with her younger siblings, who were under 18. She wore an ankle tag for almost three years and was subject to an evening curfew. But despite the restrictions, she was home, and she had a second chance.
Shakil took this seriously. She rented a flat in Birmingham and found work as a cleaner, a waitress, and an admin assistant—sometimes juggling all three jobs. You don’t legally have to disclose a criminal record unless you’re directly asked, so her conviction did not usually come up.
Many people would have looked at the way Begum was demonized in the press and decided to keep a low profile, but Shakil did not. While the tabloids continued to intermittently run stories about “the Towie jihadi,” she decided she wanted to tell her own side of the story. The terms of her probation forbade media appearances, but once her license period ended in 2021, Shakil made a documentary with ITV and did TV and radio appearances around it. Over time, she had come to understand what happened to her as a process of grooming and wanted to raise awareness. “There’s a lot of reluctance to see people who ran away to Syria as victims of grooming—it’s always, ‘You are a bad person, you are evil,’” she says. “But you’re only susceptible to grooming when you’re vulnerable.”
“I always want people to have hope. I’ve been through it and I’m proof you can make it out the other side.”
Shakil frequently interrupts herself to say she knows how absurd it sounds, or how unbelievable it is that she could have thought that way. She’s used to being disbelieved. So when she received nasty messages from viewers, telling her she was making pathetic excuses for her crimes, it bounced off her. “I don’t really care what people think,” she tells me. “I get that not everyone is going to understand it.” She tried to set up a charity to run school workshops on online grooming and radicalization, but it never got off the ground. She still wonders if people simply didn’t trust her to deliver the warning.
Behind the scenes, Shakil was still engaged in the slow, painful process of rebuilding her own life. “Pri…Seasons came and went, but the greatest hardship was my son,” she says. Shakil and her ex-partner both remain involved in their son’s life and maintain a civil relationship. After a long period of forced separation, they reconnected a few years ago and slowly began to know one another again. There was a moment in 2024 when Shakil felt she could finally breathe easy. Her relationship with her young son was strong, she was surrounded by friends, and she had a stable administrative job. “I reached a place I never thought I’d get to,” she says. “This is the woman I always wanted to be.”
As her confidence grew, Shakil grew weary of constantly being asked about Syria. Social media offered a way to take control of her own story. On TikTok, she became an advice-giver, teaching self-respect and straightforward rules for dating. “People come to my page thinking, ‘You’re that terrible girl who ran away,'” she says. “But look at what I’m doing now.” Shakil doesn’t dwell much on her past online, believing that simply living well—traveling, enjoying life’s pleasures—speaks for itself. “I always want to give people hope, whether it’s someone just out of prison, someone facing domestic violence, or someone healing from heartbreak,” she says. “I’ve been through it, and I’m proof you can come out the other side.”
She aims to focus on topics like domestic violence, self-help, and self-love, though she keeps the details open. “Nothing will ever make what happened in Syria worth it, and I’ll regret it until the day I die,” she says. “But if I can turn it into something else or actually help people, then maybe that’s why it was meant to happen.”
In her bag, she carries a foldable tripod and a ring light. After a heartfelt three-hour interview revisiting the hardest moments of her life, she excuses herself to freshen her makeup, applying dark lipstick and smoky eye shadow. Returning to the hotel lounge where we spoke, she sets up her camera and takes a few sultry photos, posing with lip gloss. Then she moves to the balcony. It’s a damp, gray afternoon, so she stays under the awning. Setting the self-timer, she slips into a smoldering pose against a tall stool, lips pursed. The photos are for her Instagram, where she has a smaller following. “The more you put yourself out there, the more followers and opportunities you get,” she shrugs.
Shakil’s sentence requires police monitoring for 15 years after her release. She checks in regularly with the same officers and will continue to do so until 2034. But these days, she no longer dreams of being rescued. “I think I’m my own knight in shining armor,” she says. “I don’t need anyone to save me anymore. I saved myself.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs about the story of a former ISIS recruit who became an influencer written in a natural conversational tone
Beginner General Questions
1 Who is this story about
This story is about a young woman who as a teenager was radicalized online traveled to join ISIS and later escaped She now uses social media to share her story and counter extremist propaganda
2 What does the title People see me as the evil girl who ran away mean
It reflects her struggle with public perception Many people define her solely by her past mistake of joining ISIS and judge her for leaving rather than seeing her current work to prevent radicalization
3 How did she get recruited by ISIS
Like many others she was recruited online through social media platforms Propaganda videos and chats with recruiters promised a sense of purpose belonging and a righteous cause which appealed to her as a vulnerable teenager
4 Why did she leave ISIS
She left after witnessing the brutal reality that contradicted the propaganda This likely included violence oppression and the harsh conditions of life under ISIS which shattered the idealized image she had been sold
5 What does she do now as an influencer
She uses platforms like Instagram YouTube or TikTok to share her firsthand experience debunk extremist narratives warn others about the tactics of recruiters and promote critical thinking and resilience against radicalization
Advanced Deeper Questions
6 Whats the difference between a former extremist and an influencer in this context
A former extremist defines her past experience An influencer describes her current method strategically using the same tools that once recruited her to now reach a broad audience with a countermessage
7 What are the biggest challenges she faces now
She faces constant online harassment and death threats legal challenges psychological trauma and the difficulty of rebuilding a life while being publicly labeled by her worst mistake
8 Is her story an effective tool against radicalization
Many experts believe yes Firsthand testimonies from disillusioned former members are powerful because they expose the lies of propaganda from a credible source that recruiters cannot easily dismiss
