If you met Tareena Shakil today, you would have no idea that the person in front of you had served time in prison for terrorism offences and holds the dubious distinction of being the first British woman convicted of joining Islamic State. Now 36, Shakil is glamorous, heavily made-up with long, tousled hair. When we meet at a plush hotel in Birmingham, she wears a sharply tailored dress, waist cinched in with a wide leather belt, and carries a Louis Vuitton handbag. She is bubbly and warm, with a disarmingly open demeanour. In short, this isn’t what springs to mind when you hear the words “terrorism conviction”.

What Shakil actually looks like is an influencer – which is fitting, because that’s what she is trying to be. She has gained most traction on TikTok, where her profile has about 50,000 followers. She gives relationship advice, usually sitting in her car and talking straight to camera. Her content is a mix of humour (“Muslim men who go to the gym while fasting – brother, the world needs more people like you”) and advice about the dating game (“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). In among this are videos that hint at something darker (“If your partner hits you, you must leave, it doesn’t matter how much they cry or say they’ll never 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.”

This turn to content-creation is, she admits, a surprising segue for someone who first found 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 – to make this journey during the five years that Islamic State held territory in Syria and Iraq. For years, these women, often referred to as “jihadi brides”, were a fixture in the press, the object of sometimes prurient fascination. Shakil was dubbed “the Towie jihadi” by the tabloids, after her parents described her as a normal girl who loved the reality show The Only Way is Essex. She quickly realised 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.

The people who travelled to Syria from Europe are often condemned as irredeemably evil, with any attempt to understand their motivation cast 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 tumultuous and infamous early experiences? For the past decade, she has been trying to do just that: prison, deradicalisation, rebuilding contact with her son, and now, improbably, reinvention 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 dad was in and out of prison (he has more than 25 convictions, including for drug offences and assault) and, she was, she says carefully, “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 kid, she frequently visited her dad in prison, and vowed that her own future would be different. She was a prefect at school and went on to university to study psychology – but when she was 20, she met a man and threw herself head-first into the relationship. Within a year, they were married and Shakil had dropped out of university. “I wanted to find my happy ever after,” she says. “I had pinned a lot on to the idea that the person I marry will save me.” This was not how it worked out. The relationship was turbulent and Shakil, who had always been bubbly and sociable, became isolated, finding herself with “literally zero friends”. At one point, she was not allowed to have a phone. She even pulled back from her parents, afraid to let them know what was going on.

Shakil is mixed-race – her father is Pakistani and her mother white British – and her upbringing was not 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 got pregnant, she turned to religion. Prayer provided hope, comfort and a sense of being anchored to something as her life got more difficult. As the couple broke up and got back together, Shakil spent stints 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 to 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.

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 wasn’t coming home. They assumed it was a joke, only realising she was serious a few days later, when they went to collect her from the airport and she did not arrive. By then, Shakil and her son were in Syria. On the first day, she saw the huge black IS flag flying. It was like waking from a trance and realising: this is real life. A few days later, her brother sent her a picture of the front page of the Sun, with her photograph and the headline “The only way is Isis”. “I remember thinking, ‘Is what I have done worthy of front-page news? Is it that serious?’ That shocked me. I realised I was in a lot of trouble.”

Single women could not live alone in IS-held territory, and 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 get married; women’s primary function there was to produce a new generation of fighters; she had arrived without a husband, so was considered to be 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 supervised, doing “absolutely nothing” all day, trying not to arouse suspicion by letting anyone see her get upset. Shakil realised she had made a terrible mistake, but did not know how to fix it.

Soon, Shakil 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 to the house, Shakil saw little of the cruelty of IS, but it was difficult 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.” It is this aspect that she still struggles with most. Her eyes fill with tears and it is an effort 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 impulsivity that had got Shakil into Syria helped her to escape in January 2015, less than three months after she had arrived. First, she absconded 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 were not permitted to travel around IS-held territory without written permission, but Shakil talked her way on to a bus going to a village near the Turkish border. When she got off the bus, she bribed a taxi driver with all the cash she had left – $100 – to take them closer. As the border came into sight, Shakil asked him to stop the car, threw the dollars on the back seat, picked up her son and ran. A small group of IS fighters, guns slung around their shoulders, stood nearby, but did not see her. The border was demarcated 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, and then helped her. They were safe.

Shakil and her son were taken to a detention centre in Turkey, where they remained for six weeks before flying back to the UK. Police boarded the plane as soon as it landed, arresting Shakil on suspicion of terror offences 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 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 to sit 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.

Soon after being sentenced, Shakil wrote down on a piece of paper: “This is the start of for ever.” 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 government argued this was justified as Begum was, through her parents, eligible for Bangladeshi citizenship – despite the fact that she had never held dual nationality or visited Bangladesh.

Soon afterwards, 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, thus far unsuccessfully, that she was the victim of trafficking. Begum’s case has failed in the 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 still, she 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 IS 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 counterfactual 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 stripped, 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 now was 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 at 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, 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 monstered 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 licence period was over in 2021, Shakil made a documentary with ITV and did TV and radio appearances around it. Over time, she had come to understand what had happened to her as a process of grooming, and wanted to raise awareness of the issue. “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.”

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 radicalisation, 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. “Prison came and went, but the biggest punishment was my son,” she says. Shakil and her ex are both part of their son’s life, and are civil with each other. After a long period of enforced separation, contact resumed a few years ago and gradually, they got to know each other again. There was a moment in 2024 when Shakil thought: “I can exhale now.” Her relationship with her young son was good. She was surrounded by friends. She was in a steady admin job. “I got to a place I never thought I would get to,” she says. “This is the girl I always wanted to be.”

Growing in confidence, Shakil got tired of being asked repeatedly about Syria. Social media offered a way to control the narrative. On TikTok, she became an agony aunt teaching self-respect and no nonsense rules for the dating game. “People come to my page because they think, ‘You’re that evil girl who ran away,’” she says. “But what am I doing now?” Shakil doesn’t talk much about her past on social media, but the way she sees it, simply living a good life – travelling, having nice things – is a statement in itself. “I always want people to have hope, whether that’s someone who just got out of prison or someone who’s going through domestic violence, or who is going through heartbreak,” she says. “I’ve been through it and I’m proof you can make it out the other side.”

She wants to talk about domestic violence, self-help and self-love, although she’s vague about what exactly that might look like. “Nothing will ever make Syria worth it, and I will always regret that till 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 an emotional three-hour interview during which she has talked at length about the worst moments in her life, she pops to the bathroom to refresh her makeup, adding dark lipstick and smoky eyes. When she returns, she sets up the tripod and camera inside the hotel lounge where we’ve been talking, and takes a few smouldering shots, posing with a lip gloss. Then she moves outside to the balcony. It is a drizzly, grey afternoon, so she stays under the awning. She sets the self-timer on the camera and immediately affects a sultry pose, propped against a tall stool, pouting. The shots are for her Instagram account, where she has a more modest following. “The more you get yourself out there, the more followers, the more opportunities,” she shrugs.

Shakil’s sentence means that she will be monitored by police for 15 years after her release. She regularly checks in with the same set of police officers, and will do so until 2034. But in the meantime, she no longer dreams of being rescued. “I think I’m my own knight in shining armour,” she says. “I don’t need anyone to save me any more. I saved myself.”