THE DEFENCE FORCES have started an operation to bring back Lisa Smith and her child from the Middle East.

Members of the force were dispatched to the border area between Syria and Turkey in recent days.

The Department of Foreign Affairs is believed to have issued Smith and her child with emergency documents so they can travel home, according to reports in the Sunday World.

Sources have confirmed to TheJournal.ie that plans are in place to bring Smith home from the warzone.

The 38-year-old Dundalk woman was captured by Kurdish forces in northeast Syria and was being held with her two-year old daughter in the Al-Hawl displacement camp for the wives and children of Islamic State (IS) fighters.

Smith left Ireland in late 2013 and went to Tunisia where she met and married a Muslim man from Britain. It is reported that she became radicalised and by 2015 had travelled to Syria.

Gardaí have been tasked with generating a risk assessment report on Smith and are in the process of gathering information from those who served with her and who were her commanders at the time.

Smith has repeatedly claimed that she never once held a firearm or instructed ISIS fighters on how to assemble, maintain or fire weapons. This is something which gardaí are investigating.

In an interview with the Mail on Sunday published earlier this year, she said: “I didn’t even own a gun.

“My husband many times said to me, ‘you want me to buy you one?’ I said no.

“He said ‘it’s just for self-defence’ or, I said: ‘I don’t want, I don’t want’.”

Comments have been closed due to the extremely high number of flagged posts.