'Victim, terrorist, Irish citizen, persona non grata': Lisa Smith - the Irish soldier being held in Syria
Engaging and kind, vulnerable and gullible, extreme and dangerous - the varied descriptions are given by people who knew, or thought they knew, Lisa Smith.
It turns that they may not even know her name for she gave an Islamic one to an ITV film crew in recent weeks. The fact that she gave a TV interview, largely hidden by a hijab and niqab, but with her western eyes and Irish accent unconcealed, is not even the most bizarre aspect of her story.
Lisa Smith is 37 years old and from Saltown, Dundalk, Co Louth where she was part of an ordinary family and lived an ordinary life up to around eight years ago.
She joined the Defence Forces at 19, which might be a little out of the ordinary except that Dundalk is a garrison town and joining the army is more natural career option when there are hundreds of uniforms stationed in your midst.
She served in the 27th Infantry Battalion for five years before transferring to the Air Corps, where she worked on the government jet. Bertie Ahern, taoiseach at the time, when asked for his memories of her said she was a "lovely girl", "great fun", "engaging and kind".
But she left the post after a couple of years and moved to the army transport corps and she was employed there when she gave a newspaper interview in 2011.
it was for an article on women who convert to Islam and Lisa, who had only recently begun adopting Islamic dress spoke quite matter of factly about the transformation in her life and belief system.
She described herself as having been a party girl - not to extreme but she drank and smoked, did a little hash, and enjoyed clubbing like many of her peers.
A local newspaper social column had caught up with her and her friends two years earlier as they celebrated one of their birthdays. Lisa thanked the birthday girl for doing all the groups' hair for the night out.
In the 2011 interview, with her hair covered by a scarf, Lisa explained how that life felt empty to her and how she explored spirituality in different guises before feeling drawn to Islam as she saw it lived by some friends of friends in the locality.
She read the Koran and felt connected to its teachings. Over a matter of months, she made the decision to convert, and to begin preparing to leave the army for life as a housewife ultimately but in childcare or some other female-dominated field in the interim.
Not long after that, she seems to have disappeared from Dundalk, moving to Britain and loosening her ties with her family, before making her way to Syria where she apparently married, set up home in the last ISIS stronghold of Baghuz, had a child, now aged two, and became a widow, all in quick succession.
With Baghuz on the verge of collapse, she, like thousands of other women and children, fled. Now in a refugee camp, she faces a new set of descriptions - victim, terrorist, Irish citizen, persona non grata. Which one sticks will determine the rest of her life from here on.
