A British woman who the police said had traveled to Syria to become a “jihadi bride” was on Friday convicted of joining the Islamic State, as authorities continued to push back against a small, but steady stream of women who seek to join in extremism by going to the militants’ self-declared caliphate.
The woman, Tareena Shakil, 26, went to Syria in October 2014 and returned about three months later to the UK, where she was arrested at Heathrow Airport in London. She was charged with being a member of a terrorist group.
Authorities said Shakil was the first woman in the UK convicted of joining the Islamic State, although dozens of British women are suspected of having joined up in Syria and Iraq over the past 12 months.
Shakil told police that she and her son had been kidnapped while on vacation in Turkey and taken to Syria. In a police video of her questioning, which was released to the media on Friday, she tells investigators: “It was never my intention to enter into Syria.”
However, investigators said they had found evidence, including Twitter posts and pictures, that demonstrated her support for the Islamic State.
One picture shows Shakil posing beneath an Islamic State flag in Syria, the police said, and another shows her wearing a black balaclava with the group’s logo on it.
The authorities also found a picture of her posing with her young son as he wore an Islamic State-branded hat. Another image of the boy had a nickname in the style of a militant nom de guerre written on it and shows him standing on a couch next to a gun.
An official who leads counterterrorism investigations in the West Midlands, Assistant Chief Constable Marcus Beale, said in a statement that Shakil had been “self-radicalized by viewing extremist material on the Internet.”
“Our assessment is that she was not naive,” Beale said in the statement.
“She had absolutely clear intentions when she left the UK, sending tweets encouraging the public to commit acts of terrorism here and then taking her young child to join Daesh in Syria,” Beale said, referring to the Islamic State by its Arabic acronym.
Shakil was convicted in Birmingham Crown Court and is to be sentenced tomorrow, the West Midlands Police said.
They said that she had traveled to Syria to become a “jihadi bride,” but that it was unclear why she left Islamic State-controlled territory in January last year and returned to Britain.
During the two-week trial, she told the court that she had returned to the UK because she regretted going to Syria.
“I came back of my own free will,” she said, according to the BBC. “I came back, because I realized I had made a mistake.”
At least 56 British women and girls are suspected of having traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State last year, police said.
Authorities have started an online campaign that aims to stem the tide of young people, both men and women, who have traveled to Syria to take part in the conflict there.
The police used the announcement of Shakil’s conviction to draw attention to a video posted online by the campaign on Jan. 11 titled A Message From Syrian Mothers, in which Syrian refugee women in the UK urge British women not to travel to their war-ravaged homeland and, especially, not to take their children.
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