‘I HAVE GOT NOTHING TO HIDE’: READ OUR FULL INTERVIEW WITH ISIS BRIDE LISA SMITH
Lisa Smith says she went to Syria to fulf ill her dream of living in a caliphate under Sharia law
‘BACK! Move! Now!’ Guards with rifles bang on the gate that marks out a small section of Al Hawl, a sprawling city of tents on the border between Syria and Iraq.
Behind the gate are the Muhajirin, Isis foreign recruits from over 50 countries. They are radical, they are violent, and they are women.
Somewhere in their midst is a woman from Co. Louth, a veteran of the Irish Defence Forces, Lisa Smith.
‘I guess you’re looking for me,’ a familiar accent emerges as eyes from every race stare out through dusty niqabs.
Her daughter, born in Isis territory to a British father, sits calmly on her lap, as one of the most talked about women in Ireland speaks at length for the first time.
‘We were told we would be in the camps for two months and after that we would have somewhere to go, to Turkey, or back to our countries,’ she explains.
Her native Louth accent is still distinct but her speech is interwoven with the inflections of a non-native English speaker and is peppered with Arabic phrases and quotes from the Koran. She explains the circumstances that brought a woman who once worked on the Government jet to live amongst one fo the most barbaric and reviled organisations in the world.
‘When I signed up to the Irish Defence Forces, it was just a job, just a career. I was looking for answers, reading books, why are we here? I was very depressed in my life and I didn’t want to live any more. I guess I was suicidal. If you don’t get answers, you end up killing yourself.
‘Then I came across Islam, I learned about it through Facebook. I watched debates and I read the Koran and then, for me, that was it. I knew this was the truth in life. This is the path I want to take.’
After converting, Lisa felt disconnected from the Defence Forces. Former colleagues describe her as an ‘ordinary, non-descript member’ whose only stand-out characteristic was a sometimes zealous overenthusiasm.
‘Usually, if something happens to a former soldier stories start emerging, the gossip goes around,’ a Defence Force colleague explained.
‘In Lisa’s case that didn’t happen. It was a little strange, she was known to be very enthusiastic about certain things but nothing remarkable.’
As a Kurdish camp worker looks on, Lisa explains how she came to swap her Irish Army uniform for a burqa and niqab.
‘I applied in the Defence Forces to wear a hijab but they said no. So I couldn’t stay.
‘I thought, I can’t work with men. I can’t dress in all these clothes with men. I can’t be associated with any army against Muslims.’
Impetuously, Lisa quit her job and started to prepare for life as a Muslim woman. ‘I rush into everything. I didn’t take my time. I left my job, I did everything so fast. My family thought I was going through a phase. They said, “She’s going to regret this,” But I didn’t regret it.’ Like many foreign Isis members housed in Al Hawl, Lisa’s journey to the caliphate began with a holiday to Turkey. She met her first husband, a Tunisian, through a friend in Istanbul. She then travelled to Tunisia to settle into the humdrum of life as a housewife. During this time she says she watched Isis propaganda, including the announcement from the Grand al-Nuri Mosque of Mosul by Isis ‘Caliph’ Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi where the Mujahideen were ‘granted victory and conquest and years of patience and holy struggle’.
Lisa says: ‘I told my husband “we must go, there has been an announcement of a caliphate”. He said, “No! These people are bad people, you’re not going.” He was so angry.’
The fights with her husband continued and Lisa travelled to Ireland where she spoke to extremists online who encouraged her awe for Isis despite the violent videos emerging. An American extremist advised her to travel to avoid being punished by Allah and sent to the ‘hellfire’.
Further radicalised online during her time at home in Ireland, Lisa was told she could be useful to Isis given her 10 years’ experience in the Defence Forces.
‘I didn’t know what they meant, I could barely remember my TOETs [test of elementary training], or [how to use] my gun or anything,’ she says insisting that the persistent fear of being sent to hellfire strengthened her decision to leave.
Pictures of men and women eating pistachio ice-cream in Raqqa reassured her and assuaged any doubts she had over joining the group in their terror capital.
Another trip to Turkey led Lisa to meet contacts in Gaziantep near the Syrian border and from there she crossed into Isis territory where she was sent to a ‘Madafa’ house for women.
‘They put us in a bus and they took me to Raqqa. There must have been
‘I was suicidal... Islam is the path I want to take’ ‘There must have been 300 women on the bus’
about 300 women, like a big bunch of chickens, and I don’t know how many kids. Then they moved me to another Madafa for single sisters who are not married or who want to divorce their previous husbands. It was much quieter. They called it a Madafa but in reality it was a prison, a beautiful prison.’
When she arrived, Isis authorities were suspicious of the Defence Forces veteran and her name was underlined as she was processed into the Islamic State.
‘They didn’t do anything to me in the end, maybe they trusted me, they didn’t see anything from me.’
After pleading with her Tunisian husband to join her to no avail, she decided to divorce him and was sent to live with a Syrian family. She clashed with them and eventually ended up marrying a British Jihadist, with whom she later had a daughter.
Despite spending a year and a half in Raqqa, Lisa says that she witnessed none of the brutality Isis was becoming infamous for in the West.
During her time there public meetings were banned, apart from public beheadings where Sharia law was implemented against those who disobeyed religious rules set out by Isis.
Homosexuals were killed and Yazidi sex slaves were sold in markets to wealthy emirs (highranking officials).
After pausing for thought, Lisa remembers witnessing a brutal example of Isis rule in Raqqa.
‘I witnessed one thing. We were in the taxi, he [her new husband] said, “When you go up here at the roundabout, close your eyes. There’s a man like this on the cross on the roundabout and his eyes are gouged out and he’s wearing a red suit and you don’t want to see it.”
‘My husband knows how weak I am. But when we came up to it I peeked, I just wanted to look. I looked once, then I looked away. I think I was traumatised for a month after.’
While Isis enforced Sharia on the residents of Raqqa and the Hisbah (religious police) patrolled the city, Lisa says her life went on in a ‘normal’ way under the black flag.
‘Life was like back home. Just like back home. You get up in the morning, go shopping, get your stuff, come home, cook your dinner, clean your house. It’s just like my everyday life. Go visit a friend, drink some coffee.
‘This is what we came for, you know. We came for, like, no alcohol… no prostitution, no gays, no anything... And, for me, I really liked to live in the Islamic State because I never got to see any of this. I just had to experience a lot of bombing and this, that and the other, and hearing someone died and hearing this and hearing that but I didn’t have to see any of that.’ Many Isis members and their families moved to Baghouz on the banks of the Euphrates River as the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led militia closed in, supported by US airstrikes.
Asked if she had fought in the conflict, Lisa replies: ‘No, I didn’t do anything, I never even owned a rifle when I was in Dowlah [Islamic State],’ she laughs.
‘I didn’t even own a gun... I, my husband many times said to me “you want me to buy you one?” I said no. He said “it’s just for self defence or..” I said “I don’t want, I don’t want”.
‘You walked around the street every day and all you heard was Boom! Boom! Sniper fire, bombs.
‘A few days before I decided to leave, I was cooking and a bullet came in the door and stopped right on the cooker, on the steel, like a magnet, and I just watched the fuse and bam! The bullet exploded. Hamdullah [thank god] it didn’t scar but it burned me.
‘My daughter was at the door it just missed her.’
It was the final straw, she claims, and she left shortly afterwards.
She says she is still surprised that many chose to take advantage of an agreement with the Syrian Democratic Forces and left Isis.
In the muddy dirt of Baghouz Lisa’s time in the caliphate ended. Now she sits among 76,000 other men, women and children in a Syrian camp in the shadow of Sinjar. It was in Sinjar that a genocidal massacre was perpetrated against the Yazidi people.
Thousands of Yazidi men were captured, executed here and then buried in mass graves and the women and girls sold into sexual slavery at the hands of Lisa’s Isis comrades.
Now, she plans to move home to Ireland, taking her young daughter to a strange and foreign land where she says they will continue to live under Sharia law.
‘When I left Ireland I wanted to go to a country that had Islam. They promised us Islam.
‘There is no country with Islam. Saudi, Tunisia, they might be Muslims there but they’re not ruling under the Sharia. So it doesn’t matter.’
As Kurds begin to move us on, warning me of the dangers of the Isis foreign women, Lisa considers her future while cradling her daughter.
Under Irish law it is not an offence to move to Isis territory, a fact that Lisa seems to be acutely aware of.
‘I don’t think I should be tried,’ she says.
‘If they want to put an investigation on me, I have nothing to hide.
‘The only thing I did was come here and if that’s my crime, like a lot of other people’s, for coming here and realising I made a mistake.’
‘I don’t think I should be tried’