My sadness at Isis bride Lisa Smith, by a former best friend
‘We would have reported her’ ‘She was having a nice life in Tunisia’
BIGOTS have flung rashers at the house of Isis bride Lisa Smith’s former best friend, overturned her bins and sent vile insults to her on Facebook.
Carol or ‘Karimah’ Duffy, a Muslim convert, said the Muslim community in Ms Smith’s native Dundalk are afraid and have two gardaí escorting them to the mosque since Friday’s mass shooting at two mosques in New Zealand.
She said she had tried her best to keep Ms Smith from fanaticism – and eventually fell out due to Ms Smith’s radicalisation – yet bigots have targeted her and her family.
Reports earlier this month revealed Ms Smith, a former member of the Defence Forces here, was discovered in Islamic State’s last hold out in eastern Syria.
Ms Duffy said: ‘I have had vile insults written at me and packets of rashers thrown at my house. You wouldn’t expect this type of abuse in Dundalk. A lot of this seems to be stemming from social media because of the anonymity that it offers people to hide beneath.
‘I had no involvement of the radicalisation of Lisa Smith nor did the mosque in Dundalk. She was not affiliated to our mosque or any mosque in Ireland for that matter.
‘A lot of people in our community in Dundalk are scared this past week in the wake of what happened in New Zealand and through the wrong association of our mosque being linked to Lisa Smith.’
The pair grow up together in Dundalk, Co. Louth, and found their path to Islam separately. They eventually parted ways after Ms Duffy became exasperated with Ms Smith’s increasing radicalisation. ‘Lisa did come to our mosque in 2010 but she was not a member. She came to seek guidance and had questions but I can tell you if there had to be any suspicion at the time that she was radicalised or heading that direction I or anyone in the mosque would have reported her to the gardaí,’ Ms Duffy said.
‘As soon as I saw Lisa, I remembered her. We had grown up together and would have known each other in earlier years.’
She said it was unfair that gardaí now had to escort worshippers into the mosque, which has excellent relations with the local community and does not endorse radical Islam in any way.
The Irish Daily Mail can reveal Ms Smith left Ireland for the Isis hotbed of Bizerte in north Tunisia in Africa before joining Islamic State in Syria.
The city was a major recruitment ground for Isis fighters in Syria, with many fighters going there before travelling to fight for the socalled Islamic State, according to security experts.
Her previously undiscovered Facebook page shows her increasing fanaticism – and also the desperate attempts by her family to make contact.
It also shows that Ms Smith first attended the mosque in her native Dundalk but then started bringing her ten-year-old niece and fiveyear-old nephew to the mosque in Clonskeagh in Dublin before she became radicalised.
She later went on the haj pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia and moved to Tunisia, where she travelled to the great mosque of Kerouan in the Tunisian desert.
There, she posed in veil in front of a mosque wall that was built from Roman remains with an inscription to the Roman emperor – a symbol of Islamic dominance over the Roman world.
She also posted a shadow of a veiled woman on a beach, with her finger lifted to give the Isis symbol.
As she became more radicalised in Tunisia, she became increasingly hostile to Arab nationalism, which she saw as blocking the Muslim caliphate, and railed against feminism. ‘The beauty of a woman is in her silence, rather than her speech,’ she posted.
As late as May 2016 her worried father tried to reach her on Facebook: ‘Can’t seem to get you on chat, all ok with me honey still driving 2 days a week and hope you are well and all ok,talk soon love & miss you Dad,’ he wrote.
Ms Smith, who emerged from the Islamic State’s last enclave in Baghouz, eastern Syria this month, committed no crime by travelling to the terrorist held areas of Syria and Iraq, according to Irish law.
However, according to people who knew the Irish woman before she left Ireland, she moved to Tunisia in late 2013/2014, to build a new life for herself and met her husband.
She had learned the local language, took traditional cooking classes to learn new dishes to cook for her husband.
Ms Duffy said Ms Smith’s radicalisation was strongly rejected by most Muslims in Ireland. Nevertheless, Ms Duffy has been subjected to vile social media abuse and had her home targeted.
She dispels rumours that she helped convert Ms Smith and said that if she had known Lisa has radicalised then she would have reported her to the authorities.
Ms Duffy, who grew up in Co Louth and converted to the Islamic faith a number of years ago and worships as part of the Dundalk Community Mosque, said she has been ‘shocked’ and ‘saddened’, by the public’s reaction to her in the past week.
In 2013/2014, Ms Duffy had heard through friends that Ms Smith had moved to Bizerte, north Tunisia.
She said: ‘I remember asking a friend about Lisa and one person said to me that she had moved to Tunisia and she was getting married. I thought, “Fair play to her she’s happy, she’s met someone”.
‘After a while there was a report
that other people were talking to Lisa on Facebook and that she was really happy over there.
‘She was having a nice life over there from what she had told people and from what people had seen on social media. She was taking traditional cooking classes and getting involved in life in Tunisia.
‘The next thing we were hearing in 2016 was that there was talk that Lisa had gone to Turkey and moved into Syria.’
According to the Soufan Group, which monitors and publishes reports on Islamic extremism, a large number of the fighters in Syria had come through Bizerte, a city to which jihadis had flocked after the Arab Spring.
It wrote in a report on Isis in July 2015: ‘Of the fighters travelling to Syria, as well as the perpetrators of the attacks in Tunis and Sousse, a disproportionate number hail from specific regions, and from two places in particular: the city of Bizerte on the northern coast, and the small city of Ben Gardane on the border with Libya.
‘Since the revolution, a security vacuum and porous borders have made these towns havens for terror groups, including al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Ansar al-Sharia.
‘Within Tunisia, Bizerte and Ben Gardane have become infamous as suppliers of fighters to Syria. In both towns, families speak of sons lost to the Islamic State. The trend in Bizerte is due in large part to a network of former jihadist fighters who settled there following their release from Tunisian prisons after the 2011 revolution.’
Ms Duffy said that, despite Ms Smith’s radicalisation, she could not believe it when she heard Ms Smith had followed the Isis jihadi trail from Bizerte to Syria.
She said: ‘I did not believe a word of it, I thought Turkey [was] OK [as] people go on holidays there but Syria... I was so shocked to hear reports of this. I knew that as far back as 2011 when Lisa was deciding to live the life of a Muslim that she was talking to people online and talking to people on forums.
‘There were things that I did as practising Muslim that she did not agree with. I used to say to her, “Why don’t you agree?”
‘It turns out that she was in communication with a couple online back then who were telling her things. She was asking me why some people wear hijabs and others don’t. You would explain to her the different ideas and she would become argumentative, saying this man told me… such and such.’
Ms Duffy and Ms Smith drifted apart after 2012.
At the time, Ms Smith was starting to wear the Muslim veil, or Niqab, and invited Muslim friends on Facebook to try it. She posted a photo of a line of women wearing the veil and wrote: ‘Sisters this is England, not the middle east lol... I am in Ireland... :)) In sha Allah, I’m taking baby steps to wear the Niqab. It’s not like a scarf it is separate, the come with a sticky back, or you can get ones that tie at the back etc .... ’
For Ms Duffy, her friend’s increasing fanaticism was causing a strain.
Ms Duffy said: ‘Near the end of our friendship, Lisa started to drift away a lot. I was well established in my mosque and faith but Lisa had different friends and wanted to experience different things. It wasn’t that she began to act very different but I remember that she would question different things.
‘She would argue at different things with me. There was things that she was having trouble with but these weren’t connected to religion. There was more of a political slant on things. I can’t even describe it but it would have been to do with people oppressing the Muslim community. France and the ban on veils was a big issue for Lisa and she was really annoyed about it at the time.’
Ms Duffy believes Ms Smith became radicalised via social media and was targeted on Facebook by extremists. She said: ‘My first thought on hearing this communication with this man was was he looking to marry her but no, Lisa had communication with his wife also. I did think it was odd that this man who claimed to be Muslim was contacting Lisa out of the blue.
‘The only time that alarm bells rang for me was when she told me she was talking to this fella online. This would have been fairly early on in 2011 and into 2012.
‘This all started on Facebook, she was obsessed with Facebook. I definitely think that she was radicalised on social media and via Facebook.
‘I spent a lot of time with her those first few months and she was always working, so the only way this happened was through social media as she hadn’t time to meet anyone, so the communication and change all came through social media, I believe.
‘It was during this time that her attitude changed and I know whoever got to her, got to her online.’ Comment – Page 12 sean.dunne@dailymail.ie
‘She was obsessed with Facebook’