Tareena Shakil in 2016: It was never my intention to enter Syria

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Speaking in her first interview since being released from prison in the UK, Tareena Shakil said: “If I could go back I would have come back. I would have gone to Turkey on holiday and I would have come back.

“That’s what should have happened – gone on holiday for a week and come back”, she told ITV.

The 31-year-old mother, who has been dubbed the “Towie Jihadi” after it emerged that she was a fan of The Only is Essex, left the UK in 2014.

At just 24 years old, the Staffordshire woman used her student loan to fund the trip, telling her family she was going to Turkey for a beach holiday with her son.

Once she arrived in Syria, she headed for Raqqa, an Islamic State stronghold.

When she was there, photographs emerged of the young mother wearing a balaclava and posing with an AK-47 machine gun.

Speaking about one of the pictures to ITV’s exposure programme, she said: “That’s someone who’s just lost her way in life, found a very wrong path.”

“I was aware of violence that had taken place at the hands of Isis.

“I can’t lie and say that I didn’t because it was everywhere.

“Being aware of horrific things that were happening in that place and still deciding to run away, not just on your own, with your child – I understand that is hard for people to understand. And to just say you didn’t pay much attention to it, but that’s what it was – I just, I didn’t.

“It’s not something that I’m happy about now looking back, but at the time the only thing I can say is that I was far from the best version of myself.”

While she was there, she also posted on social media, urging others to join her.

In one post, she wrote: “If people don’t like the current events in Sham [Syria] take to arms and not the keyboard.”

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After returning to Britain the following year, she was arrested when she landed at Heathrow and sentenced to six years in jail and forced to undergo a deradicalisation programme.

She was released in 2018, just under halfway through her sentence, but remains the only woman in Britain to have been jailed for joining IS.

When asked by ITV about fellow IS volunteer, 22-year-old Shamima Begum – who left the UK aged 15 – Ms Shakil expressed reservations about whether she should be allowed to return, noting that Ms Begum only tried to come home after the terror group collapsed.

Speaking about Ms Begum – who is currently being held in a detention centre in northeast Syria but is appealing to return to the UK- Ms Shakil said: “I can’t sit here and say – no don’t bring them back – because that makes me a hypocrite, because I’ve been in a very similar situation.”

But she added: “It’s not the same situation because I escaped, chose to leave when ISIS were at their peak, as opposed to waiting for the fall of ISIS and then saying: I want to come home.”

“Having said that, there may be reasons that these people didn’t escape from there.

“I know that. It takes strength, it takes courage like it’s life and death, not everybody has it in them to go for that.”

Ms Shakil, originally from Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire, now lives in Birmingham.

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