DUBLIN: Three judges at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin on Monday found former soldier Lisa Smith guilty of joining the so-called IS group in Syria. Smith, 40, wept in the dock as judge Tony Hunt read the panel’s decision, which was delivered after a nine-week trial.
She pleaded not guilty to membership of an unlawful fighter group between October 28, 2015 and December 1, 2019.
Judge Hunt said the prosecution had established beyond reasonable doubt that she travelled to Syria “with her eyes open” and pledged allegiance to the group, led by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.
She was acquitted of a separate charge of financing terrorism by sending $900 to aid medical treatment for a Syrian man in Turkey.
Hunt said there was reasonable doubt that she intended the money to be used for humanitarian purposes rather than to fund terrorism.
He granted her bail until a sentencing hearing on July 11.
During the trial, which began in January, prosecutors detailed how Smith, who was a member of the Irish Defence Forces from 2001 to 2011, travelled to IS controlled territory in 2015.
The court was told that she bought a one-way ticket from Dublin to Turkey, crossing the border into Syria and living in Raqqa, the capital of the IS’s self-styled caliphate.
At the time, the hardline fighters ruled over vast swathes of Syria and Iraq, attracting thousands of foreign fighters to their cause before the group’s territorial defeat in the region.
After failing to convince her husband to join her, Smith divorced him in 2016 and married a UK national involved in the group’s armed patrols. As IS lost ground to a US-led coalition on the battlefield and towns and cities under its sway fell, Smith was forced to flee Raqqa and then Baghouz, their last remaining stronghold, before returning to Ireland.
She was arrested on arrival at Dublin airport on December 1, 2019 with her young daughter. Defence lawyers argued that Smith’s presence in IS territory did not make her a de facto member of the extremist group. They have said it could only be argued “at a stretch” that she provided some sort of assistance to the group because she had kept a home for her husband. — AFP
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