The Documentary Podcast · BBC World Service

Leaving Isis: Is redemption possible?

·26 min·1 clip

Tarina says she prayed, “allow me to make it home,” while knowing “they will kill you” if caught escaping.

The account starts in fear. Bombs are falling more often in Syria, and Tarina Shaquille remembers praying for a second chance as the danger gets closer. Her child sits at the centre of it. She says the thought came too late: a parent is supposed to protect a child, not take him into harm. The route was planned. After online conversations with IS recruits, she booked a flight to Turkey and followed instructions through Istanbul and Gaziantep. Raqqa was the destination. The host describes it as the capital of the so-called Islamic State, held by young men and women committed to its cause. Tarina says belonging pulled at her. She had become fixated on saving herself from hell, and trusted the recruiters more than what she heard in the media. The speed still lands hard. Within five weeks of talking online, she was preparing to travel with her one-year-old son toward a war zone. She does not try to soften that. Asked about taking a baby into danger, she says she had not properly thought about life there. The admission is blunt. She calls the decision selfish and says she failed to put her son first. Then life inside ISIS made the danger impossible to ignore. She was scared, and she understood that staying could mean death for both of them. Leaving becomes less a neat redemption story than a reckoning. The episode keeps the harm in view while tracing recruitment, self-deception, fear, and the moment a terrible mistake can no longer be explained away.

As heard by us

A restrained account of belief curdling into error, carried by plainspoken detail.

Tarina Shaquille's story moves from the English Midlands to Syria, where she says she thought she was answering a call of faith and starting over in the Islamic State.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a firsthand account of radicalisation, motherhood, and regret.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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