Repatriation of Islamic State bride: Contentious, but right thing to do

The decision by the Government to make efforts to repatriate the Irish Islamic State bride Lisa Smith is bound to be contentious and one that will not sit comfortably with many of her fellow citizens.

Yet, it is the right one, the honourable one, and the humane one, for a number of reasons, among them the fact that she has a two-year-old child who is an Irish citizen and who deserves whatever protection the state can give. She and her daughter are in a camp in an area in northern Syria controlled by Kurdish forces.

As the Taoiseach told the Dáil: “I am very conscious of the fact that while nobody can condone the choice that she has made and the actions that she took in aligning herself with Isis, a terrorist regime that is hell-bent on the destruction of the West and Christendom, she does have a two-year-old child that is an Irish citizen and that child is an innocent child.”

Other countries think differently. In the United States, the president, Donald Trump, has personally intervened to prevent an American-born woman who went to Syria from returning to the US. In Britain, home secretary Sajid Javid’s decision to strip Shamima Begum of her British nationality renders stateless the 19-year-old woman, who became an IS bride at the age of 15.

In the meantime, an international response is needed to deal with the estimated 2,000 foreign women and children being held in Syrian camps who remain trapped in a legal and political limbo. The absence of any plan to deal with those detained by Kurdish forces is part of the wider disorder in the lands liberated from the jihadists.

It is understandable that many of their home countries, in the West, do not want them back, fearing they could spread radical Islamist ideology. As a report by the UN Security Council warns, the tendency to ascribe rational motivations to men and emotional motivations to women persists, even though there is no evidence that the drivers of radicalisation differ by gender.

While being prepared to allow Ms Smith to return to Ireland with her child, we should make no assumptions about her role with US in Syria. Neither should we be blinded by the stereotype of naive jihadi brides who travelled to conflict zones for romance and adventure.

The UN Security Council has warned that the role of women in IS might have been underestimated and says UN member states should recognise the “many different roles, including as supporters, facilitators or perpetrators of terrorist acts,” that women play.

Unlike Shamima Begum, Lisa Smith was no wide-eyed teenage bride. She was a member of the Defence Forces and had undergone military training in Ireland. She went to Syria at the age of 32, after quitting the Air Corps, where she served on the Government jet with the rank of corporal.

It is, therefore, prudent and sensible that she should be subject to a security assessment, when she eventually arrives back in Ireland, and prosecuted here if it can be proven that she provided active or financial support to IS.