Irish ISIS bride Lisa Smith has begged to be allowed back into her home country along with her two-year-old daughter, promising she will not try to kill anyone.
Smith, who is currently detained at the Al Hawl refugee camp in northern Syria following the fall of Baghouz, said her daughter is her ‘number one priority’ and she wants to bring the girl back to the West so she can be educated.
Despite her background in the military, where she was a private in the Irish Defence Forces, Smith denied fighting for ISIS and said she hadn’t trained any jihadi fighters.
Smith is believed to have left Ireland in either 2013 or 2014 to join British husband Sajid Aslam, a former supply teacher, in Tunisia before going to Syria.
She claims Aslam was killed in the past three months.
Lisa Smith, 37, a former Irish soldier who left to join ISIS, wants to be allowed back into Ireland along with her daughter after the fall of the terror group’s ‘Caliphate’
The Dundalk native did admit to attending one military training session, which she said prompted her to remember her own military training.
Asked about her home country, she said: ‘For me, I want to go back to my country.’
Explaining why she wanted to do this, she added: ‘Obviously if people are good, you know, and they treat you right and they smile at you, you know.’
Ms Smith also defended any possible criticism of her as a mother for travelling to join up with ISIS.
‘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.
Smith (left before her conversion to Islam) claims British ISIS husband Sajid Aslam (right) was killed in the last three months and denies she poses a terror threat
‘You have to take your child and look after your child, you know. She’s my No.1 priority now; that’s why I want to leave and take her home with me and get her educated. People here are not educated.’
She strongly denied that she had fought with Isis, claiming she never even owned a gun despite her husband offering to buy her one for self-defence.
‘I think anyone that knows me, you know, in the Army or outside the Army or anywhere in my life, will know that they know me, that I wouldn’t pick up the weapon and fight and stuff like that,’ she said.
‘I didn’t do it. I didn’t own a rifle. I didn’t teach them anything.
‘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.
‘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.”’
In a filmed interview, Ms Smith said she now wants to go home and raise her daughter in Ireland. She said: ‘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’.
Smith (circled) was a former private in the Irish Defence Force and met Bertie Ahern while he was Taoiseach (far left)
Smith has ended up in the Al Hawl refugee camp in northern Syria after Kurdish forces recaptured the town of Baghouz, which was the terror group’s last stronghold in Syria
Ms Smith, who previously worked on the Government jet when she was in the Defence Forces, said: ‘I just ran, ran with the crowd like I always do. Ask my mum. I run with the crowd all the time. And that’s what I did.
‘I didn’t listen to anyone. I didn’t take any advice. I just ran. And I wish I didn’t. I wish I had just took my time.’
Asked if she should face investigation in Ireland, Ms Smith told the IMoS: ‘I don’t think I should be tried.
‘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.’
Leo Varadkar has already indicated that Ms Smith would be permitted to return here if she wished.
However, the Taoiseach has said a security assessment would have to be carried to make sure she is not a threat to anyone in Ireland.
Speaking when the presence of an Irish citizen in the Syrian camp was first confirmed, he told the IMoS: ‘There are a couple of things that need to be examined now: a) Does she want to come home? Maybe she doesn’t. b) Do the Syrians want to put her on trial? c) We have to perform a security assessment as to whether she is a threat to us.
‘And finally we have to determine it is actually her.’
From supply teacher to ISIS fighter, the life of British jihadi Sajid Aslam
Sajid Aslam worked as an English supply teacher in Walsall, West Midlands, before hatching a plan to join ISIS in Syria.
He and three other men are said to have left the town in August 2014 in an attempt to join the terror group in Syria.
At the time Aslam was married to Northern Irish woman Lorna Moore after the pair met at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Aslam tried to convince her to travel to the Middle East with her three children to join him, but she was caught and jailed for two and a half years.
Meanwhile Aslam tried to convince authorities he was working as a supply teacher in Turkey by posting a series of pictures of himself online posing with western objects.
He also professed his love for fish and chips and a desire to return to ‘inane little Walsall’ one day.
Around the same time he is thought to have met Lisa Smith, who had been living in Walsall and began attending mosque after converting to Islam following a bad breakup.
Friends described how she became more conservative in her views, started wearing a headdress and then described western culture as ‘dirty’ online.
Aslam also persuaded Smith to join him in Syria, and she is thought to have left the country in either 2013 or 2014 and gone to Tunisia to join him.
From there the couple made their way into Syria, and in 2016 pictures began appearing on her Facebook page of the pair in the country.
At some point Smith fell pregnant with Aslam’s child, a girl, who is now two years old.
According to Smith, Aslam died some time in the last three months, likely in fighting near Baghouz.