A BRITISH WOMEN REGRETS JOINING EXTREMISTS IN SYRIA
British Women Regrets joining so-called Islamic State Syria's Extremist groups
By: Hassan Zubair
A British women who went to Syria and joined the so-called Islamic state terrorist organization says she deeply regrets what she did. Tarina Shakeel, originally from Birmingham was jailed in 2016 after returning to the UK three months after living with Islamic states.
Now 32 years old Tarina says she is ashamed of her actions and is living with the consequences every day.Tarina who was recently released from prison has completed a training program on counter-extremism and hopes her story will serve as a warning to others.
Tarina Shakeel was associated with the health department. In 2014, she secretly went to Syria with her one-year-old son and lived in a house with other women waiting to marry foreign fighters.
“Our conversations were often heard and you were usually expected to behave in a certain way”, she told iPak Officials. “We didn’t want to make a fuss, but there were two girls who had slightly different attitudes. I can’t give an example of that, they were just irrelevant. One day a car came, some men got out of the car and took the girls and we never saw them again”.
During her trail, Tarina was found encouraging acts of terrorism through posts on social media. Less than three months later, Tarina Shakeel escaped Via Turkey and returned to Britain, where she was arrested. She was tried and sentenced to six years in prison.
She says abandoning extremist’s views was a long journey and now hopes her case will be seen as a warning about the dangers of extremism.
“I remember I was really sad and I was really taken advantage of and I was cheated”.
Tarina shakeel was a convicted in 2016. During her trial, she said that she had gone to Syria in Oct-2014 because she was unhappy with her domestic life, but she was not happy when she arrived in the civil war-torn country. Then she decided to go back because she along with other women ,who shared her views, had made a huge mistake.
She said she took a bus from the city of Raqqa and then bribed a taxi driver to take her to the Turkish border. In January 2015, she and her son arrived at a location about a kilometer from the Turkish border.
After a temporary asylum in Turkey, she returned to Britain, where she was arrested. About 60 British women are thought to have fled to Syria and joined the Islamic State. The government has stated this number many times but it has not been changed for a long time so it is possible that this number has now increased.
Tarina Shakeel is a reflection of the girls on this journey and her case has uncovered why and how these ‘jihadi brides’ go to Syria.They were in a difficult relationship and the way someone is radicalized, this technique was very likely to have an effect on them. Then maybe there were the frequent bombings or the queues of candidates for marriage, they did not like the ‘most dangerous place in the World’.
Her trial judge said her sentence might prevent people from doing so, but her story of living in Syria may be more effective.