Woman who took toddler son to join Islamic State jailed in UK

A woman who took her toddler son to Syria to join Islamic State (IS) has been jailed for six years.

Tareena Shakil posed the little boy for pictures wearing an IS-branded balaclava in what a judge described as one of the most “abhorrent” features of the case, after she secretly ran away to the self-declared caliphate in October 2014.

After a two-week Birmingham Crown Court trial which finished on Friday, the British 26-year-old was convicted of membership of Isis, and of encouraging acts of terror in Twitter posts made before she travelled.

Sentencing the bright former college student, Judge Melbourne Inman said: “By October 28 you were sending a message to your brother-in-law that it was part of your faith to kill the murtadeen (apostates) and on December 9 you told your father you wanted to die a martyr.”

The Recorder of Birmingham added: “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.”

However, Shakil found life under IS rules too strict.

In January 2015, after repeatedly looking up “I want to leave ISIS” on the Internet, she and her son travelled by road to the Turkish border.

They ran one kilometre to escape into Turkey, dodging a three-man IS patrol before handing themselves in to the Turkish military, she told the court.

She was arrested when police boarded her flight home at Heathrow last February.