Dundalk’s Lisa Smith will be sentenced in July following her conviction at the Special Criminal Court
Lisa Smith had been back in Ireland just a few hours when she was handed a cup of coffee by detectives at Store Street Garda Station. “The coffee is very strong in Syria,” she said, “this tastes very watery.”
It was a mild element of the culture shock she was experiencing. Over the next four days she would recall how her fear of hell-fire prompted her to go to Syria where she first lived in what she described as a women’s prison. She recalled her reluctant marriage and the beatings she received from her husband and the time she saw a dead man hanging from a cross with his eyes gouged out. There were the bombs that started to destroy the Islamic State she had travelled thousands of miles to be part of, forcing her to flee from city to village and town where she would watch as people were gunned down by snipers while she struggled to feed herself and her baby. She would recall saying goodbye to her husband as he returned to fight in a certain-death battle and then there were the long months in a refugee camp where horrific punishments, including burning alive, were inflicted even for minor infractions.
