Lisa Smith and other western women of Islamic State
Friday, 28 July, 2023
Julia Cañas Martinez (pictured) is a PhD student at UCD school of Politics and International Relations. The Irish Research Council has funded her project, “Who are the Western Women of Islamic State?” Julia is our UCD Discovery Rising Star for July 2022.
Julia Cañas Martinez has, understandably, kept close tabs on one of the most controversial cases to come before Ireland’s Central Criminal Court in recent years.
Former Irish soldier Lisa Smith, 40, was found guilty in May of being a member of the unlawful terrorist group, Islamic State, from 2015 to 2019. Acquitted of a second charge of financing terrorism by sending money to a man in May 2015 for the benefit of ISIS, Smith, a mother of one, will be sentenced on July 11.
“I think the Lisa Smith case has been very interesting because journalists have been able to speak with her and with her friends and family, so we've been able to get a pretty good idea of what her life was like in the lead-up to her travelling to Syria.”
Smith’s case has also highlighted fascinating gender roles within Islamic State.
“A big source of debate around her was the fact that she did have this military background. But then when she was actually in Syria, she claimed to only have been a housewife. And so you get a lot of these dynamics being discussed around her that I thought were very interesting.”
Julia’s research seeks to gather as much biographical data on Western women in Islamic State as possible. An estimated 1200 to 1500 women - from Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Western Europe - are believed to have travelled to Syria after Abu Bakr al Baghdadi's declaration of a caliphate there in July 2014. So far Julia has amassed data on some 250 women, between 20% to 25% of whom, like Smith, were converts to Islam.
Some media reports have suggested Smith’s romantic relationships with Muslim men, including four marriages in quick succession, precipitated her journey into Islam and Syria. Julia disagrees.
“I think her motivations were based more on idealised notions of what the Islamic State itself was, rather than romantic ties to men who were members of it. In fact, she did divorce several men for not being as radical as she was. So I think she was the one driving a lot of this more radical narrative in her relationships.”
Smith had “this very romantic vision of what the Islamic State was - this place where she would be following her religion down to the letter of the law, which she thought was an obligation”.
Islamic State recruited Western women less with violent propaganda and more with promises of domestic and cultural bliss.
“They would have been more targeted with this propaganda of, ‘You're going to get a home and you're going to have a family that's going to be worth raising because you're going to be teaching your children these very important values. And you're going to be caring for somebody who is fighting to keep you safe and to keep all of our society safe.’ It was much more about having a caregiving role.”
But many women were also drawn in by the violence.
“I think just because the Islamic State targeted this more domestic propaganda towards them doesn't mean that they weren't attracted by the violent side of it as well. There have been a lot of women within the Islamic State who were calling for violence in the West.”
Her research has found “two very contrasting narratives” about Western women who joined Islamic State.
“We think that either she's this very innocent person who has been forced into this, who has been recruited and should be considered another victim of the group. Or this completely opposite idea, that there must be something horrifically wrong with her and that she must be the world's biggest monster.”
In this way, a Western woman of ISIS is seen as “either an extreme victim or an extreme perpetrator, but not somebody who could maybe be somewhere in the grey areas in between”.
Following the collapse of the caliphate in 2018, the men were sent to prisons and the women to Kurdish camps where “the vast majority of them” languish still.
“I think one thing that does make Lisa Smith stand out among many others is the fact that she has been repatriated, she has now gone to court and that does make her pretty unique. There have been very few women who have had that happen to them.”
Julia’s research looks at the disparities in how the women’s fates are decided. While countries like the UK, France and Germany have begun repatriating more women, “it has been very contentious because some of the women are facing trials, some of them are not. There have been rumours of women who have returned to their home countries and are just living free on the streets and it's not entirely clear what's going to happen to them”.
Some children are being repatriated - with or without their mothers, and following DNA tests to prove maternity - and are often taken into State care or cared for by relatives.
Meanwhile, some women’s cases are more high profile than others. Julia speaks about how the British public turned against London teenager Shamima Begum, who lost her citizenship following a TV interview from a Kurdish camp in which she was
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This article was originally published on 5 July 2022.