How one accent stood out in chaos of the Caliphate
SOME of the women flung bottles of water at the reporters.
One of them lifted a shoe and threatened to hit a cameraman with it – hitting someone with the base of the shoe is the ultimate mark of disrespect in the Arab world.
Others lined up and chanted Isis slogans and vowed that the fight would go on.
Among the hundreds of Isis brides being evacuated by troops from the eastern Syrian town of Baghuz, many were defiant – even as they took bottles of water from the Kurdish troops who found them.
As they were loaded up on trucks to be taken from the town, some opened the bottles of water and flung them at TV cameramen, protesting that veiled women should not be filmed by men.
Some of the women at the front of the truck told them to go easy – that they were being hit with the water too.
At night-time, one cameraman roamed around the women, looking for someone who spoke English. He didn’t realise that she was Irish when he sent the tape to ITV. She was not like many of the other women – she was soft-spoken, drifting between Arabic and English and more concerned about the suffering of the town. Speaking of those left behind in Baghuz, the woman said: ‘The people don’t have food. They’re struggling for food and money and everything is expensive, so I don’t know how they’re going to keep living.’
Far from flinging water at the cameraman, she carefully gave the water to her young son.
She told ITV News that the people there were ‘tired’ and that morale was low. ‘It’s like a rollercoaster for the people,’ she said. ‘Some want to leave, some don’t want to leave.
‘Some are hungry, some are not hungry. Some are tired, some are not tired.’
The woman, now known to be Lisa Smith, said she converted to Islam seven years ago and that she had been drawn to Syria by the group’s propaganda. She wanted to live a clean life the Muslim way – but that was not always the way it was in the Caliphate, she said.
‘The people don’t have food’