An Irish airwoman who became a Jihadi bride is set to return home to Dublin today from a Syrian refugee camp with her two-year-old daughter.
Lisa Smith, 38, a former member of the Irish Defence Forces, is due to land at about 10.30am.
The Irish police are waiting at Dublin airport to take her to a station to interview her about suspected terrorist offences.
Lisa Smith, 38, a former member of the Irish Defence Forces, is due to land at about 10.30am.
Plans have also been put in place to take care of her daughter, who was born in Syria but is an Irish citizen.
According to RTE, Ms Smith is being accompanied by three consular officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs, members of the Army Ranger Wing, and a Turkish security officer.
The Irish police are waiting at Dublin airport to take her to a station to interview her about suspected terrorist offences
Ms Smith has continually denied training young women to fight for ISIS and says she never killed anyone.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4, from the refugee camp in Syria where she lives, Lisa said: ‘I want myself an actual caliphate, as in a Muslim country. Not like a group, or a brutality group’.
Ms Smith is originally from Dundalk in Co Louth, close to the Irish border with Northern Ireland.
She has said the father of her child was a suspected member of IS who died last year.
Ms Smith held a relatively lowly role in the Defence Forces but worked on the official Irish Government jet.
She accompanied former president Mary Robinson and then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern on journeys.
Significant numbers of Europeans left for Syria to fight for and against IS during a bloody war which destroyed the Middle Eastern country and produced millions of refugees.
Ms Smith has denied being involved in violence.
Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said she should have the right of return to Ireland and that removing her citizenship would not be right or compassionate.
Lisa (third from right, circled) also denied training young girls to fight for the terrorist group. Pictured here meeting then taoiseach Bertie Ahern while in the Irish army in 2008
Lisa said that she was never asked to fight, and even if she had wanted to, she wouldn’t have been allowed as she had her daughter (pictured while in the Irish army)
Ms Smith told the BBC that the FBI had been to visit her twice and have taken her finger prints and DNA.
Speaking to the Irish Daily Mail in April, Lisa said: ‘I want to go back to my country.’
‘I wasn’t a mother when I left. I came as a single person and I thought if I died here, I died, but when I had a child I became different, you know,’ she said.
‘There was actually women teach[ing] their husbands like how to have classes, you know, of how to use the gun, how to do this, how to do that.
Friends described Lisa as ‘a party girl who enjoyed a good time’ before she went through a bad breakup, converted to Islam and became radicalised (pictured in the Irish army)
Asked whether she would travel again to such a state, she insisted that she wouldn’t as it was her ‘biggest mistake’ (pictured with her baby, now two)
‘I went to one class just to see how the woman was teaching, you know. Just to see what the woman was teaching, and she reminded me of what I used to know because I forgot everything, you know. But I didn’t fight…
‘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”… I said: “I don’t want, I don’t want.”
‘I don’t want to cause problems for anyone. I don’t want to mix.
‘I’m still me. I’m still like a good neighbour. I’m still a good friend. I’m just still me. I’m not, like, out to kill anyone. I don’t believe in suicide attacks.’
Asked whether she would travel again to such a state, she insisted that she wouldn’t as it was her ‘biggest mistake’.
The Muslim community in Ireland had ‘strongly rejected’ Lisa’s extremism, adding that she would have reported her if she had known the extent of her radicalisation
In Britain, captured British Islamic State fighters will be brought back to the UK to be put on trial if it is the best place for them to face justice, the national security adviser has said.
Shamima Begum, the Bethnal Green schoolgirl who fled to Syria to join IS in 2015, was stripped of her British citizenship by then-home secretary Sajid Javid, prompting her to take legal action against the UK.
Ms Begum claims she married Dutch convert Yago Riedijk 10 days after arriving in IS territory.
She told The Times that she left Raqqa in January 2017 with her husband but her children, a one-year-old girl and a three-month-old boy, had both since died.
Her third child died shortly after he was born.
