Lisa Smith, a former Irish soldier who denies membership of Islamic State, told gardaí she believed that if she didn't travel to join the caliphate she would burn for eternity in hell, the Special Criminal Court has heard.
She said she made a "mistake" in going to Syria in 2015 but believed at the time that "it was just a state" where she would be able to raise a family among other Muslims.
She said that since fleeing Syria in 2019 she has learned that there was no religious obligation on her to go. She said she would not go again if another caliphate were announced.
“I had enough, I did my time. It was a prison. It was four years in prison, that’s the way we look at it now,” Ms Smith told gardaí.
She said she was trapped because women who tried to leave were tortured and raped and those who escaped would be taken by Syrian forces or would be unable to go back to Europe where they were no longer wanted.
Ms Smith said she never owned a weapon while she was in Syria, was never a member of a terrorist organisation and did not give assistance to any terrorist organisation.
“I don’t support terrorism and I don’t support brutality in any way. I want to make it clear, I didn’t join a terrorist organisation and would never join a terrorist organisation,” she said. “I don’t support brutality. What they did in the end; I would never support that in any shape or form.”
Before leaving for Syria she said she was so afraid of burning in hell that if she saw a fire she would start screaming. “I had a lot of fear about the hellfire at the time. That scared me so much I said; I have to go, I have to go.”
Ms Smith (39) from Dundalk, Co Louth has pleaded not guilty to membership of an unlawful terrorist group, Islamic State, between October 28th, 2015 and December 1st, 2019. She has also pleaded not guilty to financing terrorism by sending €800 in assistance, via a Western Union money transfer, to a named man on May 6th, 2015.
Det Garda Ciaran McGeough told prosecution counsel Sean Gillane SC that he interviewed Ms Smith at Kevin Street Garda station 11 times over several days following her arrest on return to Ireland on December 1st, 2019.
‘Nightmare’
He said Ms Smith told him that the people who travelled to Syria and Iraq to join the caliphate thought they were escaping to a place where they would not be insulted in the street, but they became angry and upset at the "nightmare" they found there.
She said she thought she was going to a state, like any other country, where she could have children and they would go to school and learn the Quran.
She said she and the others who went there ran to the caliphate without thinking and without waiting to find out if the new Islamic state would become stable. She also said there was a lot of “propaganda” from Islamic State and she, like many other people, was taken in by it.
She said there are probably still “a lot of kids out there thinking Islamic State is great and I’m saying to myself, if only they knew.”
Ms Smith described in detail her journey into Syria. Once there, a man robbed her of €7,000 she had stashed in her bag and intended to use if she ever decided to leave. She was taken to a camp for unmarried women where she stayed in a house with 50 to 60 other women.
There was little food and they weren’t allowed out. “It was a prison,” she said.
After about five months John Georgelas, an American convert to Islam who Ms Smith considered a religious authority, managed to get her out. She was excited, she said, because she thought he was going to teach her about Islam.
He did not speak to her much, however, was away for long periods and left her with his Syrian family who she didn’t understand. The Syrians, she said, were not educated and were bad mannered.
She decided she needed to marry and Georgelas urged her to marry a Pakistani-British Muslim. She did not want to marry this man but under pressure she agreed. She lived with him in Raqqa where he had worked as a teacher.
But the Islamic authorities closed the school and he became stressed, she said, and beat her quite badly on six occasions.
Sniper course
She became pregnant about three months after the marriage. Her husband, she said, had been sent at one point to the border and she said to him: “Why don’t you do a sniper course?” She said he took the course but “he never actually did it, he just did the course for the sake of doing it.”
By February 2016, Raqqa was being bombed so Ms Smith left and moved to an apartment in Mayadin where her child was born in June 2017.
Then the Assad regime moved in and destroyed Mayadin, she said. “We were running for the hills,” she said, and “this was the end of the Islamic State basically.”
She was warned to get out if possible and was told that Islamic State had “sold out the women and children.” But it costs thousands of dollars to leave and, she said, “if you get out they put you in prison and torture you because you are a spy.”
She described the suffering as she moved from camp to camp where she said people were “cornered”, unable to get out because the Syrian forces would “get you and rape you” if you escaped.
She made it to Baguz where she stayed in the home of a family who had been killed. “Then the bombs came,” she said, and they travelled to another area to live in a shed with 14 women and children. They lived off horse meat and she saw people getting shot by snipers, “just dropping, nothing you can do. You just go thank god that wasn’t me or that wasn’t my child. You care about yourself at that stage, people are going hungry and no-one cares, just looking after yourself.”
Suffering
When people were being taken out on trucks she said she saw some with broken legs and arms standing on top of one another trying to find space on board. “People were suffering badly, that’s the basic life in Islamic State,” she said.
To finally escape she said she walked 15km across the desert with her daughter before being taken to Turkey and then back to Syria where she remained in a camp until returning to Ireland.
When gardaí asked what day-to-day life had been like in the Islamic State she said when she first married, just before the conflict started, she was cleaning and cooking, trying to study Arabic. Sometimes she would go to a friend’s house and have tea and chocolate, or go for a walk or go shopping with her husband.
“Do you think I would go back, no way,” she said. “I had enough, I did my time, it was a prison, it was four years in prison. That’s the way we look at it now.”
She said she knows now that it was never obligatory for her to move to the Islamic State and has found out that many of the leaders of the Islamic State were members of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and therefore “apostates” who could never be part of the leadership of Islam.
“I didn’t know all this information before I went, I think the problem was everyone got excited and just ran, the didn’t wait to see if it would be stable, they just went ‘caliphate, caliphate’, and gone, nobody had a brain, nobody had information. It’s just done, we made our mistakes so what can you do?”
Ms Smith also told gardaí that she was misled by journalist Norma Costello who interviewed her while she was in a camp in Syria. Ms Smith said she thought Ms Costello was from the Irish Government and was going to help her get back home.
She said she would not have spoken to a journalist because in the camp there were people who would punish anyone who did so. “They would burn your tent down with your children in it or cut you up to kill you,” she said.
She said she did not think that what she told Ms Costello would end up on the internet and added: “She made things worse for me.”
The trial continues in front of Mr Justice Tony Hunt, presiding, Judge Gerard Griffin and Judge Cormac Dunne.