British Woman Who Went to Raqqa With Son Intending to Embrace ISIS Sent to Jail For Six Years

ISIS Terror
A video released in February showed the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians in Libya by ISIS militants. YouTube

The British woman who took her young son with her to the ISIS stronghold and escaped after changing her mind is now jailed. She is going to serve a sentence of six years.

The Guardian UK reported that Tareena Shakil, 26 is now sentenced to jail for embracing ISIS and for letting his young child become a fighter of the terrorist group. 

Even if she was already sentenced for said crimes, the judge, Melbourne Inman, claimed he does not believe everything that Shakil shared with regards to what happened to her.  "You told lie after lie to the police and in court," he said.

The judge also cannot believe that Shakil even thought of letting his son used by the terrorist group like that. 

"Most alarming is the fact that you took your son and how he was used," he said. "The most abhorrent photographs were those taken of your son wearing a balaclava with an Isis logo and specifically the photograph of your son, no more than a toddler, standing next to an AK47 under a title which, translated from the Arabic, means 'Father of the British jihad,'" he added.

The judge criticized the mother's actions, for she subjected her son to something with long-lasting implications. "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," he said. 

The judge added that Shakil's actions cannot be overlooked because before her change of heart, she engaged in several activities that helped the terrorists, such as embracing the group, trying to convince other women to join her, and making threats using her social media accounts the moment she arrived in Syria. The judge claimed that messages to her family detailing her plans have been retrieved.

Her six years sentence is made up four years sentence for her ISIS membership and two years for spreading terror messages through her social media accounts. After three years, she might be released on license, depending on the circumstances then.

Her father was distraught of her conviction and set forth plans to appeal this. Mohammed Shakil claimed her daughter just made a mistake but was not a bad person to deserve being jailed. He told ITV News: "It was a mistake ... [She is] the perfect daughter, the daughter who never went out nightclubbing and never went out doing this or going there, who kept herself busy in studies, and who wanted to be somebody in life and have an important role. That's who she wanted to be: a somebody, not a nobody."

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