ISIS BRIDE ‘TRAINED CHILDREN TO SHOOT’
NGO claims ex-soldier became a member of all-female terror squad
ISIS bride Lisa Smith allegedly trained children in weapons while she was in Syria, sources who are investigating the activities of the group have told the Irish Mail on Sunday.
Ms Smith, 38, who once served with the Air Corps on the Government jet, was also linked to notorious British Isis hacker Junaid Hussain, with whom it is believed she communicated while in Ireland.
The Louth woman, who is being held with her two-year-old daughter in Al Hawl camp on the SyriaIraq border, told the MoS she never held a weapon while there, despite 10 years of Irish military training.
However, NGOs investigating Isis activities – in preparation for UN human rights investigations – believe she attended the Zarqawi military and religious training camp in Raqqa as a prerequisite for joining Isis where she would have completed further training.
Ms Smith originally told the MoS that she ‘lost her passport’ after crossing the border from Turkey into Syria in 2015 and spent her time at home drinking coffee with friends and being a housewife.
However, her claims are in stark contrast to documents and reports collected by Syrian human rights group Sound and Picture, who say she worked for several months in Raqqa teaching girls –aged between seven and 12 – how to use light weapons.
Sound and Picture is the same group that identified British Isis bride Shamima Begum as being part of the Hisbah, a religious police force in the Islamic State.
But Ms Smith was fired from that job as her Arabic was poor, which led to her living with the family of a Syrian Isis fighter for some time to improve her language skills.
She told the MoS she did not like living with the family.
‘I stayed for three months and then after this I want to get out of the family because I just can’t stay any more,’ she said. After appealing to authorities, she was moved to a house for Western women.
‘They took me to another madafa [guest house}, which is a madafa for single sisters who are not married or who want to be divorced from their previous husbands or have no kids. It’s a real quiet madafa but, in reality, it was a prison, it was a beautiful prison I called it,’ she told the MoS.
Her time in her ‘beautiful prison’ raises questions. Syrian sources have listed her as a member of a Western-only female military battalion, led by notorious jihadi Sally Jones. The battalion taught suicide tactics and military drills – some of which Ms Smith would have been familiar with due to her time in the Irish defence forces.
After marrying British jihadi Sajid Aslam, who Ms Smith described as ‘famous’, she left the madafa and moved in with her husband.
According to documents held by Sound and Picture, Ms Smith and Jones lived close to each other in 2016, after Jones’s hacker husband Junaid Hussain was killed by a US drone strike in August 2015.
According to the not-for-profit Counter Extremism Project, Jones was given permission by Isis to start the battalion and plan to carry out attacks in the West.
As part of an elite group of foreign recruits, Ms Smith would have received more than €1,000 a month plus food and free housing.
Ms Smith, who was radicalised while living in Ireland, is said by family members to have disappeared for days at a time before she went to Syria.
According to documents held by Sound and Picture, Ms Smith was in contact with hacker Hussain, who was interested in her Air Corps background as he was working on a drone and radar program before his death.
It is unclear if Ms Smith exaggerated her role in the Air Corps to curry favour with the jihadi or if she was part of a group, which included Jones, who were planning to carry out attacks on the west.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, who control the camp housing Smith, are requesting an international tribunal to bring justice to the victims of Isis. Ms Smith’s case raised a red flag with the Kurds, who are currently working to verify claims of innocence made by Isis wives.
A senior Syrian source said: ‘Many are innocent, but Lisa should be tried.’
The de facto government in northeastern Syria hopes to gather a group of lawyers to asses Isis cases and to identify those involved with terrorists. There are currently no plans to bring Ms Smith back to Ireland.
‘In reality, it was a beautiful prison’ Smith case raised a red flag with the Kurds