Leaving Isis: Is redemption possible?

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The bombs were starting to become more frequent. They never missed the target.

I prayed, or will love please give me a second chance of life.

I remember thinking to myself one day in Syria.

I should've had this thought beforehand, really.

Children look to their parents to protect them, don't they?

And to keep them out of harm's way.

And I remember thinking,

you are responsible for the safety of this child.

But you've brought him here.

I'm living in the middle of ISIS. I'm scared right now.

Heaven forbid he dies or you both die.

Any time now, if I stay, that will happen.

Torina Shaqil took her baby's son and traveled to Syria.

Convinced, she was answering a call of faith.

She left her life in the English Midlands,

in search of what she thought would be a new beginning in the Islamic state.

I think more in terms of the ISIS thing, it was a sense of belonging.

You have to be here not only to save yourself from how,

because only in the Heddi, they speak about only the best of Muslims will go and be there.

This is not talking about ISIS in the Heddi, but that's obviously not told to you.

A 26-year-old British mother who took her toddler son to Syria

has been convicted of supporting the Islamic state.

She was found guilty and Britain of joining the Islamic group

and encouraging terrorism on social media.

But the reality of living life under Sharia law was not what she dreamt of.

She returned home and became the first British woman to be convicted of joining ISIS.

Today, she has had a decade to reflect on the consequences of that decision.

I'm Rajiv Gupta and this is the documentary on the BBC World Service.

For Heart and Soul, I've come to Birmingham where her journey to Racka began.

Should we go in?

Okay, cool.

We are currently in the Jew recorder and we're going to head towards Central Mask,

which is in the high-gate area of Birmingham, which is not too far from here.

The life that I wanted to escape from was in Birmingham.

If I could go back, I would go back in a heartbeat.

I would never run away to Syria.

In life, I try not to have regrets because I don't want to live my life like that and I always

feel like it's a lesson learned. But I can say I do regret Syria.

Definitely, 100 per cent.

Today, Trina says Islam is central to her life.

But what part did her faith play in the decision to leave Britain?

For you at that point, would you say Islam was more of a say a movement or a thing to belong to

rather than a faith?

I think I found the faith as a source of hope and as a source of comfort.

I found a lot of comfort through Islam.

I think the two for me were very separate.

You've got ISIS and then it's my faith, it's my faith with Allah.

But if you are a Muslim, you have to go and live here.

There are two very separate things and there are a lot of grey areas.

But her journey to Syria didn't begin with ideology.

It started with a turbulent relationship and a young woman who felt her life was going in the

wrong direction.

Just before I had travelled to Syria, I was married, kind of like a new mom as well.

So my life at that time was very turbulent, very unsettled, very sad.

Life probably hadn't turned out the way that I had planned for it.

When I first started at university for like the first year,

brilliant time of my life, loved it.

Then I met true friends at university, the man that I got married to.

And that was like the second year.

Start of the second year.

It kind of went downhill from there really.

And I had just lived this like isolated, sad life for many years.

And it was just very lonely time in life as well.

How would you describe your connection, say, with God during that time?

Definitely was not known when he was practicing as I am now.

I started to cover up when I got married, but I wasn't necessarily practicing.

I started to take the religion a lot more seriously when I was pregnant.

I prayed in them times.

I had a great faith in God that didn't think about an Islamic state.

I didn't even probably know what an Islamic state was.

I didn't think about the rules of living under Syria law.

I knew what Syria law was.

But I had never had the burning desire to go and live under that.

But my faith was I found a lot of solace in my faith as well.

Because I had terrible pregnancy.

I was living in a homeless hostel.

I was going to be a new mom.

My hormones were everywhere.

I found a lot of solace in my religion.

Torina describes a woman in crisis, unhappy and searching for meaning.

But others experienced such difficulties.

They do not then travel to join an extremist group.

At her trial, the court heard evidence that she had expressed explicit support for Islamic state.

Something she now says she didn't fully understand.

So the question is, just how did she come to believe in what she eventually did?

We were coming to the end of our relationship anyway.

It was just getting really, really bad.

And I had this new child that I needed to think of.

And he decided that he was going to go to his own country of Yemen.

So at that time, in 2014, there were things happening in the Middle East.

Very similar to what's going on now.

I'm not Syria related.

I started to come across all of these accounts.

So I've like, guys wearing black.

Some of them were holding guns.

And I initially thought that they were in Palestine.

So I probably sent like a few messages like, oh my god, I hope you're okay.

And one of the message back and he was like,

oh no, I'm not in Palestine.

I don't invite in Palestine.

So I was like, well, where do you fight?

And he was like in Syria.

So I was like, what's going on in Syria?

And he was like, what, you don't know?

I said, no, he goes, well, basically we are

we're fighting to liberate the Syrian people from Bashar al-Assad.

But we have also established the Islamic state.

Just started from there.

Would you say that was a period of then radicalization?

Definitely groomed.

He would speak about how it was Haran to live in England.

You have to come and live over here or you'll go to hell

because you live in a country that's not ruled by Syria.

Basically, you have to come and live here.

You don't have a choice.

But at the same time, I'm looking for a way out as well.

And I was very, very vulnerable at the time.

I was very lost at the time.

And I just started speaking to these people online

who were kind of like, we come here.

Were you infatuated with this guy that you were speaking to?

What were you feeling towards him?

I was in awe of his love for Islam.

He was like, I'll marry you when you come here.

I blocked him before I even traveled to be honest with you

because I wasn't going for marriage.

I'm running from marriage.

So it's not that I wanted to pursue anything romantic with him.

I was in awe of his dedication to Islam.

Like, he had left everything behind.

His Catholic family, he loved Islam.

And I had only hoped that I could be the level of Muslim that he was.

In terms of not in terms of being a nicest fighter,

in terms of his love for Islam,

that you would sacrifice everything just for the religion.

They're particularly hideous for passages in the ground

that you used to turn to during those times.

Not that I would turn to,

but there were definitely passages from the Quran

and Hedi that were told to me.

So when I'm speaking to these people online,

I would always question everything.

You know, I'm a born Muslim.

Yeah, I probably haven't been so strong practice

then, but you're telling me new things.

So for example, when they would say like,

you have to come and live here.

You don't have a choice of the way you'll go to hell.

My question then would be,

or surely every Muslim in the world

that doesn't live there is not going to hell.

That can't be the case.

Like that doesn't make sense to me.

I've not heard this before.

Then they would relay a verse from the Quran.

And then there would be Hedi's about

when you see the group that rises under the black flag,

you must go and join them

even if you have to crawl to join them.

That made you think, oh my God, I have to be there.

They're upon truce.

Everyone is against them because they

is the right thing that they're doing.

You know, and then you later come on to found out

that is a very weak Hedi.

Then at the time, I wasn't researching.

I was just taking what they told me and like,

well, it actually just saved that in the Quran.

But I wasn't going into it in that depth.

It wasn't being explained to me like that.

It was like, well, no, the first number

of chapter of Surah, whatever says this.

And yes, it does say that.

But hold on, why does it say that?

But I wasn't taking it further.

Then the guy who I would speak to on the internet,

he was a revert.

And he would often say things like,

oh my God, sister, how do you not know these things?

You're a born Muslim.

And I would often, at times, feel very stupid.

Like, he's right.

How does he know all of these verses from the Quran?

And I don't.

Hearing Torina now, reflective, confident, intelligent,

it's hard to reconcile that with the person she says she was then.

A young mother prepared to take her baby into a war zone.

She says the decision made sense to her at the time,

rooted in the religious idea of hidra, migration for the sake of faith.

So you have jihad, which is to go and fight and wage war.

And then you would have hidra, which is to go and just my great for the sake of Islam,

has nothing to do with jihad, has nothing to do with killing.

And some people, yes, they did go because they wanted to fight

and their violent people and they wanted to inflict pain on the world.

Unfortunately, some people did go because of that.

My journey was never one of jihad.

It was one of my great for the sake of Islam.

I saved myself from the fire of hell.

I give myself as a chance of life.

And I'll be away from the misery that I'm living in England,

not because I hate England, just because of my life here.

Nothing to do with the country, more to do with my personal life here.

Torina says she spoke to women online who appeared to have found clarity and purposes

part of I.S. and she began to imagine herself amongst them.

I was at times in awe.

You know, if these women who have made this decision and like essentially got their happy

ever after, you know, no one is telling you when you speak into them or hold on.

You know, it's very intense as a war zone.

You can't go home.

I didn't even think of them things.

I went there to live there because of making hidra to an Islamic place.

It was always sold in a way that they hate Islam.

Why are you going to take the media's word over us?

This is Huck, truth.

You question it too much.

You need to come and live here.

That's up to you.

And one of the messages I remember if forever was

sister, all you need to do is realise that right now,

you are levitating over the fire of hell, living there.

And if you die there, that's you dropping into it.

Is your duty to save yourself from that?

I think I found a sense of belonging there.

I had just become fixated on way out, new life,

going to go save myself from hell.

Within just five weeks of talking to IS recruits online,

Torina started planning to travel to Syria, to Raka.

I talked to you then about the journey to Syria.

Wasn't that an easy thing to do, per se,

because this was a country where the world's attention

was looking at what was going on there.

And you had your child, your baby son, with you at the time.

I booked a flight to Turkey because that's obviously the neighbouring country to Syria.

And that was the routine that you'd get to Turkey.

Then you'd contact the contact that you were given.

And they told you fly to Istanbul.

Then they would pass you on to another person.

So when you get to Istanbul, you contact them.

They tell you to fly to.

They told me to fly to Ghaziantep, which is very close to the Syrian border.

On their part, very well thought out, very well planned,

just basically followed step by step procedures until

across over the border in Syria.

Did you not think I'm taking my one-year-old child

with me to essentially what as a was it?

Unfortunately no, I didn't.

I think I was very selfish

in the decisions that I made definitely and definitely leading up to Syria.

There was no real thought for what life would be like there.

Definitely obviously I didn't prioritise the needs of my son, unfortunately.

I was very selfish in their moments.

But that was a big part of the reason of why I eventually decided to escape

because I realised, look, this is really real.

I've made a terrible mistake.

You don't bring your children here.

But were you really doing this thinking this is going to be a better way

for me and my child to live?

I remember speaking to people online and being like,

well, if I'm there, I want to go to college,

they're not saying to you, you can't work, there's no college,

they're not saying to you, you know, it's bomb daily,

that's not sold to you because you wouldn't go.

That would be a deterrent.

I was going to pursue a normal life in a war-torn country.

That is crazy as well.

There was a point of me that was doing a tip for tat with my ex-husband.

Because he was like, I'm in Yemen, I'm never coming back.

Because even when I had booked my tickets to Turkey,

yes, I had the idea to go to Syria, it was never a hundred percent.

Hand on heart, had he have said,

I'm coming back in a few days, I would never have gone to Syria.

God on his truth, I would have gone to Turkey for a holiday and come back.

Unfortunately, I'm not proud to say this.

It was to get one over on him as well.

Very child, it's very pathetic.

To read and now reflects on those decisions with regret,

when she returned to Britain, investigators recovered material

that painted a more complicated picture.

Messages, contacts and photographs from Syria,

including images of her posing with an AK-47,

her young child beside her.

Prosecutors argued they suggested not just someone misguided,

but someone who had, for at least some time,

identified with the group's extremist ideology.

When you insert you in the house,

there's pictures of you,

with your son, with a balaclava on yourself as well,

with a gun at nicest fire at an AK-47.

People questioned, was this a girl that was depressed just a few way out,

or was she actually taken in by that violent ideology that ISIS held?

How do you justify pictures?

I mean, you're one-year-old son with a balaclava in a gun.

I'm already sticking out like a sore thumb.

I'm just here because I want to escape.

I've already got eyes on me.

I'm also being told, you know,

threatened to some degree of listen,

what we tell you to say, you say it.

So, did I go along with certain conversations?

Did I have pictures where there was a gun in the picture?

Maybe so, yes.

The picture of my son.

So that picture was not taken by me,

was not taken on my phone.

It was taken by another woman who had later sent the picture to my phone.

That's what they did.

They just took pictures of them,

wearing this balaclava,

and the gun was there,

and all of them things.

With all of the kids that were there.

Yes, it's a terrible picture.

It's definitely not one that I had put together.

It's not a picture I would want my son

to be a part of or anything.

But we were living in this lifestyle,

and I'm just having to go along with it.

Do you feel like you were sold a lie by these fighters

that were talking about Islam?

So for me, it was saving myself from hell.

For a lot of the fighters, it was that as well.

A lot of the men that were there had lived very

on Islamic lifestyles here.

People went there because,

oh my god, I've sold drugs my whole life.

I've been with woman after woman my whole life.

I've drank my whole life.

I want to go to heaven.

We all want to go to heaven regardless of how we live our lives.

That for them was their golden ticket.

Did you feel more connected to your faith being there?

No, less connected to the faith.

Why?

The actions of people there.

Islam is a very kind, loving religion.

And I'm like, this is the Islamic state.

What?

Where's the love?

Where's the, like, this is not what we are as Muslims?

Were you praying when you were there?

Yeah.

And what did you pray for?

To come home.

It's supposed to be impossible to escape from Syria.

If they catch you, they will kill you.

And it's not just a bullet to the head kind of death.

This is ISIS, right?

I knew what I was up against when I wanted to even think about escaping.

So I used to pray and I used to say,

Oh, Allah, forgive me for what I have done.

Please forgive me.

And out of your mercy, allow me to make it home.

Give me a second chance.

Don't let it end here.

Out of your mercy, please.

I know I have to escape.

I don't have a choice.

I'm not staying here to die.

There's a chance that they catch me.

There's a slim chance I'll make it back.

Pray to God.

God is up to you.

Take me back safely.

After just eight weeks,

Torina did manage to leave IS.

She says in a dramatic escape,

child in hand,

where she was helped over the border by Turkish soldiers.

She was put on a plane to the UK and arrested on arrival.

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You're listening to the documentary on the BBC World Service.

I'm Rajeev Gupta and for Heart and Soul,

I'm meeting Torina Shaqil.

She was the first British woman convicted for joining the terror group ISIS.

We just left one road where you had a Sikh temple,

Gurdwara, on now heading to the mosque.

The house I left behind that I ran away from essentially was also in Birmingham.

Yeah.

I sometimes go in park on the road,

just because it's got a massive window in the bedroom

that I used to stand and just stare out of at night time praying.

I think you'd want to compartmentalise it, put it away.

It's more to do with the progress that I've made in,

like respecting where I've come from and that I'm not that girl anymore.

And that version that lived in that house that made the decision to run away to Syria

isn't the girl that's sitting here speaking to you today.

A decade on from her conviction

and we're back on the road with Torina in the city where it all began.

When you're out there and you're meeting all these women,

these girls, I mean, there'd be a stereotype.

Yeah.

When they meet the typical stereotype of people one might expect

an ISIS bride to be.

Some of them were, but not a lot of them.

Most of them were just normal girls from normal backgrounds.

I would say there was a handful of women that were very robotic

that were like churning out the ISIS propaganda

of, you know, agreeing with the evil rhetoric

and wanting to be there to fight.

And it was probably just a handful of them women.

A lot of the girls' reasons to go and live there

was because they had fallen in love with a guy online.

Right.

And they went there to marry him.

I think that as well in itself is proof that if you

if you marry the wrong man or choose the wrong partner,

he can ruin your life.

Yeah.

It really, really can.

I mean, now you give relationship advice and a lot of girls message you

and seek advice from you.

What kind of things are they asking for?

A lot of people are starting their journey in love.

And unfortunately, if you come across the wrong person,

it's a game of life and death without trying to be dramatic.

A lot of people lose themselves in love.

A lot of people that message me have lost themselves in love

and they don't know like how to get back.

Can you go left here at these lights?

Are you allowed to turn left here?

And I get a lot of Muslim girls that message me

that were with guys that they thought they were going to marry,

that were promised marriage

didn't happen.

That wasn't the guys' real intention.

And now they're in a situation where they're broken.

They don't know how to move forward.

They don't know.

They feel like their life is over.

It is mainly to do with heartbreak.

We're just arrived now.

We're at the Birmingham Central Mosque.

One of the biggest mosques in Birmingham,

if not the biggest mosque in thousands of worshipers

would come here on it, especially on a Friday.

Do you enjoy my prayers?

And we're just outside the ladies' entrance.

So when I came out of prison,

I couldn't just go to any mosque, right?

I would have to go to only one mosque

that the police had chosen for me

and they would do a formal proper disclosure

with the head of the mosque.

This was the mosque that they chose for me.

I didn't really come to the mosque a lot

when I was on licence because

I was just doing other things

and I wanted to just practice my faith myself

and I didn't want to be a part of it.

Like, I'll be Muslim by myself.

I don't need to be a part of the mosque.

I don't need to join that.

I can wish you'd pull up by myself.

I'm not ready to join the masses again, as it were.

Do you feel nervous?

Yeah, because I mean, the last time I joined the masses

it ended terribly for me, you know?

What were you nervous about?

I had a lot of questions and I'm not of like, okay.

A lot of grey areas when it came to it.

So I wasn't quite ready to join or go there, really.

I was in my own little journey

with Islam.

Now, I've got a very beautiful relationship with Islam.

And I do, I do come to the mosque often, actually.

So if I'm out and about and I need to pray,

this is the mosque that I'll come to.

What changed?

What made that switch for you?

I think it came with time.

And I think it came with when I started praying five times a day again.

All the areas of my life, you know, were improving.

And I just had a bit more clarity

and I just felt a bit more at ease with myself.

It was one of the Ramadan's, maybe not last year or the year before.

We'll go for the nighttime prayer there.

And I just remember thinking, oh yeah, this is beautiful, this is peaceful.

Since then, I've never looked back.

I've been praying five times a day, I've never missed a single prayer.

And it just felt natural and I'm just at a good place with it.

You still believe in the concept of an Islamic state.

You went there because you bought into the idea of this Islamic country.

It's kind of paradise living under Sharia, what you found.

You say it was completely different, wasn't Islamic at all.

Today, do you still believe in the concept of living in that way?

I do have a strong pool to live in in a Muslim country.

Not because I hate my own country, absolutely not.

I'm, this is home, England is home.

I love this country, I'm half English.

But yeah, I find comfort in Islam, I find, I'm drawn towards that.

Is there anything Islamic about the Islamic state?

There was a lot of things that would happen over there that

are not Islamic, the fighters would fight against each other

and like start shooting against each other.

You don't do that in Islam and then they would steal like, you know,

booty or whatever it is, spoils the war.

Did shoot each other over that?

Non-Muslims are supposed to be safe from Muslims.

Like if there ever was an Islamic state, non-Muslims, Christian Jews, whatever,

you live alongside them in peace, you definitely don't kill them.

Aid workers that have gone to Syria to help Muslims

to kill them, absolutely not.

They've put their life on the line as it is to go and help Muslims,

whether they're Muslim or not.

So there were a lot of things, definitely the level of violence.

Do you feel ashamed that you're now considered somehow part of that?

I feel very, very bad that I have contributed to the negative

perception of Islam to some degree, definitely.

Because Islam is not that, Islam is beautiful, it's

and I feel really bad that hold on.

Well, you did something that contributed really badly to Islam

and that shows Islam in a very bad way.

You know, look, I've had a lot of time to think since coming back and

and I do have loads of shameful moments where I think about,

my god, you actually did that.

I can't quite come to terms with it or like,

I couldn't even answer myself the questions that I had.

You know, we're about to take a new child to such a place.

I often, over the years, I've literally just sat there and been like,

how could you do that?

I can't answer that question to myself.

Very embarrassed, very ashamed about that.

And also, you know, to bring it back to ISIS,

things that they did and like,

killing in the manner that they did and then you sit there and you think to yourself,

yeah, you still went there to live there.

Like, you know that you don't kill people anyway.

Never mind in such a manner.

And I remember when I was found guilty,

I sat and I wrote a letter to myself and I basically said that

how on earth a girl like me has ended up in prison

is extraordinary.

You can ask anyone I want to score with people who I know,

they would have said she's the last person that will end up in prison.

Have you forgiven yourself?

I live with it and I move on because I don't want to live in a negative mind space

and I don't want to be a negative person and I've got a lot of things I want to achieve and do

and be a negative and depressed doesn't get me there.

But I will always have that bitterness towards myself

because of what I have done, definitely,

but now I'll never fully forgive myself for what I've done, never, never, never.

You still talk to God, do you talk to God a lot?

Yeah.

What sort of conversations do you have?

I ask God's love for success and forgiveness always asks for forgiveness

or I don't ever want to say the wrong thing.

There's not an accordance with Islam, so I also have to be like,

I would love please protect me and guide me with regards to that

because I don't ever want to give the wrong message in terms of Islam as well

and I don't want to come across like I'm bashing Islam,

but at the same time I want to speak my truth.

You've been listening to Heart and Soul on the BBC World Service.

The programme was presented by me, Rajeev Gupta,

the producer was Mato Donahue.

Until next time, thanks for listening.