British Woman Convicted of Joining Islamic State Mother traveled to Syria with infant son, spent three months living with the militant group By Alexis Flynn
http://www.wsj.com/articles/british-woman-convicted-of-joining-islamic-state-1454097525
A U.K. court on Friday convicted the first British woman of joining Islamic State, 26-year-old Tareena Shakil, who traveled to Syria with her infant son and spent three months living with the militant group.
A jury, who heard that Ms. Shakil had once declared her wish “to be a martyr,” found her guilty of belonging to a terrorist organization and encouraging support for a proscribed group.
Ms. Shakil will be sentenced on Monday.
The case provides a rare account of how a Western woman came to be involved in Islamic State amid what authorities have said is a concerning surge in the number of females traveling from Europe to Syria and Iraq. It also sheds a light on the dilemma for authorities on how to treat such women when they return home: as victim or terrorist.
Ms. Shakil, of Burton-upon-Trent, a town in the English Midlands, was arrested by counterterrorist police shortly after her plane touched down at Heathrow airport last February. She told officers
But investigators weren’t convinced. Prosecutors told the court how a raft of evidence showed Ms. Shakil had self-radicalized even before leaving the country, and that her trip to Syria was the final stage in her plan to become a jihadist bride. In the weeks leading up to her departure, Ms. Shakil had become an ever more vocal online supporter of Islamic State online, said prosecutors. Farewell notes left for her family showed she had no intention of returning home, prosecutors said.
Once she arrived in Syria, Islamic State made sure she was “provided for,” said prosecutors, who pointed to her plethora of positive messages posted on social media praising the group and encouraging others to join as evidence that her presence in the country was the culmination of a long plan.
Photographs on her phone showed Ms. Shakil wearing an Islamic State balaclava and posing with firearms and under an Islamic State flag while in Syria. Searches of her Internet browsing habits before she left the U.K. for her package holiday in Turkey in October 2014 showed a series of social media posts exhorting others to carry out acts of terrorism.
During her two-week trial at Birmingham Crown Court, prosecutors also showed the court messages she had sent to her parents that spoke of her happiness at having joined Islamic State. Ms. Shakil’s lawyer told the court that his client had been forced to send the messages under duress.
In an interview with police shown in court, Ms. Shakil said that she traveled to Gaziantep on Turkey’s southern border with Syria, encouraged by a young man she met in the resort town of Antalya. She claimed he never showed up and instead his cohorts forced her and her son to drive with them to Islamic State-controlled territory in Syria.
It remains unclear what prompted Ms. Shakil to leave Syria, but she was arrested by Turkish soldiers after crossing the border in January last year. She was then detained for six weeks, before being deported back the U.K.
“Our assessment is that she was not naive; she had absolutely clear intentions when she left the U.K., sending tweets encouraging the public to commit acts of terrorism here and then taking her young child to join Daesh in Syria,” said Assistant Chief Constable Marcus Beale of the West Midlands Police.
As authorities in the U.K. and other Western countries try to stem the rising flow of their citizens traveling to Syria and Iraq, they are finding the profile of those going is changing.
Several years ago, nearly all those making the journey were young men seeking to join militant groups fighting in the region. Now, increasingly, they are being joined by women, children and other family members. Some go to join their children or their spouses, and some are Islamists who want to live under strict Shariah law and take their families with them, officials and radicalization experts say.
At least 43 British women are believed to have traveled to Syria since the start of the conflict, said London’s Metropolitan Police.
‘Our assessment is that she was not naive; she had absolutely clear intentions when she left the U.K., sending tweets encouraging the public to commit acts of terrorism here and then taking her young child to join Daesh in Syria.’
According to a 2015 study by the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, 10% of the Westerners to have joined militant groups like Islamic State in Syria are women. Europol, the European Union’s police agency, estimates that some 5,000 Europeans are now foreign fighters. The U.K. Home Secretary Theresa May said this month that more than 800 British citizens have traveled to the war-torn nation since 2011, half of whom are believed to have returned.
“We are deeply concerned about the numbers of girls, young women and families who are taking the decision to go to Syria,” said Detective Superintendent Sue Southern, who heads the West Midlands Counter Terrorism Unit.
As a consequence, British authorities say they are now arresting more women on suspicion of terrorist offenses than ever before. Last year, the number of women arrested for terror-related offenses more than doubled, figures from the U.K. government showed.
That has prompted the government to roll out a public campaign to deter British Muslim women from traveling to Syria. In one video, released Jan. 11, Syrian women are filmed urging Western mothers not to travel to their country.
“Ask your daughter to think about what she has here in the U.K. —a country where she has safety and freedom of choice compared with Syria where, under ISIS control, she would have neither?,” says a women in the video, named only as Zakaa.
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