Lawyers plead for ‘vulnerable’ Smith to be spared prison
Defence claims she has already served four years
LAWYERS for former soldier Lisa Smith, who travelled to Syria to join Isis in 2014, asked the court to consider her young child and the ‘appalling’ conditions they suffered in Syria before passing sentence.
Michael O’Higgins SC, for Smith, asked the court not to send his client to prison.
Counsel referred to four psychological reports that found her to be ‘damaged’ and ‘vulnerable’.
Mr O’Higgins said she became attracted to the Islamic State due to her ‘very limited resources and significant burdens that other people from her peer group would not have had’.
He said a report by Dr Anne Speckhard of the International Centre for the Study of Violent
Extremism found Smith is not in danger of further offending.
Dr Speckhard interviewed Smith on several occasions and found her to be ‘honest and straightforward’ and said she sincerely denounced Isis.
Dr Speckhard spoke of Smith’s ‘extreme vulnerability’ that caused her to fall under the influence of others.
Mr O’Higgins said Smith served a custodial sentence in Syria when she was held in the Al-Hawl and Ain Issa camps while she waited to be sent home to Ireland. He referred to evidence that members of Isis staying in camps would impose cruel punishments including murdering people by setting their tents on fire.
He said: ‘The conditions in that camp were absolutely appalling and must have been extremely frightening for anybody, particularly a mother with a child.’
He also asked the court to consider that Smith has lived with a 13-hour daily curfew as part of her bail conditions since 2019.
Combining the time she spent in Syrian camps and under curfew, counsel said she has already served about four years.
Smith, 40, from Dundalk, Co. Louth, had pleaded not guilty to membership of an unlawful terrorist group, Islamic State, between October 28, 2015 and December 1, 2019. The mum-of-one was convicted of Isis membership following a trial at the three-judge, nonjury Special Criminal Court earlier this year.
The court rejected her claim she had gone to the Islamic State out of a sense of religious obligation.
In several Garda interviews Smith claimed she believed she had a religious obligation to travel to Isis territory when terrorist leader Abu-Bakr al-Baghdadi called on all Muslims to join his caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
In the judgment delivered in May, Mr Justice Hunt noted that religion is ‘irrelevant to membership of Isis’ as criminal activity cannot be justified by religious obligation.
He said that a person would not gain immunity for arson, assault or murder because he believed he had a religious obligation to persecute witches.
Mr Justice Hunt said the prosecution had established beyond reasonable doubt that Smith’s ‘eyes were wide open’ when she travelled to Syria and pledged allegiance to the organisation led by al-Baghdadi.
He said her reasons for going to Syria were ‘grounded in allegiance to or agreement with the views espoused by al-Baghdadi’.
He said there was no ‘benign’ explanation for her travel and no alternative Islamic State that she could have been travelling to. He rejected claims she was naive or was unaware of what Isis was doing and said she ‘knew full well she was not simply adhering to life under Sharia law’.
The court heard that before travelling Smith watched videos of Isis atrocities including the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot, and footage of men in cages being drowned or fired at with rockets.
Her communications with other jihadis about those videos showed her ‘eyes were wide open to the situation in the land to which she fervently wished to return’, Mr Justice Hunt said. The court found Smith not guilty of a second charge of funding terrorism, saying it is reasonably possible she sent €800 to Isis fighter and propagandist John Georgelas in May 2015 for his personal use or for ‘humanitarian reasons’, after he had been injured during fighting.
At yesterday’s sentence hearing Mr O’Higgins relied on psychological reports by ‘eminent’ psychologists who had interviewed Smith in recent years.
He said that she has been living under significant restrictions since she arrived back in Ireland in December 2019 and suffers from paranoia arising out of a sense that people are staring at her and she is being judged for being a Muslim. She only leaves her home to purchase groceries.
As she entered adulthood Smith was in the ‘midst of a mental health crisis’, he said, due to the ‘intensity of her home life’. She had witnessed ‘destructive behaviour’ growing up and had lost her faith in religion.
Aged 19, she joined the Army where she found a sense of security after initially finding the induction overwhelming.
Mr O’Higgins said the psychological profiles showed Smith to be ‘an extremely vulnerable person but accompanying that is a great level of stoicism in dealing with whatever hand she is dealt’. She is attracted to bad relationships, something that Mr O’Higgins said has been attributed to her upbringing. In 2008, aged 26, she suffered a ‘psychological crisis’ and became distressed, tearful and expressed suicidal ideations.
She spoke to a priest who told her to rekindle her relationship with God.
She was first introduced to Islam during a trip to Tunisia. She got involved in online debates about Christianity and Islam and linked up with a mosque in Dundalk where she claims to have learned about conspiracy theories regarding Islam and the West.
During the trial, the court heard she first visited Syria in 2013 and married a Tunisian member of a group linked to Al Qaeda. She returned to Syria in 2014 and divorced her husband when he refused to come to Syria and swear an oath of allegiance to alBaghdadi. She then married a
‘Conditions in camp were appalling’ ‘Eyes wide open to the situation there’
Pakistani British Muslim who repeatedly beat and abused her. She suffered psychological abuse, coercion and threats at his hands, Mr O’Higgins said.
Counsel said it is a ‘testament to her nature’ that Smith is still able to have some ‘lingering affection’ for her husband. She said that at times he was ‘the best in the world’ in how he treated her and their daughter.
Mr O’Higgins said: ‘She is always capable of seeing good in people, even in those who treat her with the level of brutality that this person treated her with.’
Smith now displays ‘many features of post traumatic stress disorder’ while her ‘bright moments are with her daughter and through prayer’.
Mr Justice Hunt asked if Dr Speckhard had been shown the social media messages between Smith and other jihadis in which she discussed Isis atrocities before travelling to Syria.
Mr O’Higgins said she had been given a ‘voluminous brief’ of the background to the case.