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A group of 19 Australian women and children with links to ISIS have returned home from Syria after spending years in a detention camp.
Getting into it: The group, made up of seven women and 12 children, landed in Sydney and Melbourne on Tuesday after traveling from the Roj detention camp in northeastern Syria via Qatar. Australian Federal Police did not charge anyone on arrival but said they’d gone through the group’s bags and phones “for investigative purposes,” adding that the wider look into citizens who went to Syria still isn’t wrapped up. Notably, none of those who arrived were in police custody, and they were free to leave after inspections.
The returnees are among the so-called “ISIS brides.” These are the wives and widows of Islamic State fighters and their children, with the men themselves either dead or behind bars. They’d been held at Roj since ISIS lost its territory in 2019. Australian women started heading to Syria to wed ISIS fighters back in 2012, part of a wave of tens of thousands of foreigners who flocked to the group at its peak (some of the women say they were dragged there against their will). The Roj camp, one of two massive facilities that once held around 60,000 people, is now being emptied as Syria’s new government moves to shut the camps down, leaving few, if any, Australians behind.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke made it clear the government didn’t lift a finger to help and warned that anyone who committed crimes would “face the full force of the law.” He added, “These are people who have made the horrific choice to join a dangerous terrorist organization and to place their children in an unspeakable situation.”
The returns have really pissed off a lot of Australians, with a large police presence deployed at Melbourne airport, where a fight reportedly broke out as the group was escorted through a side entrance.
Australia is among several Western nations that have been reluctant to repatriate ISIS-linked citizens over concerns that they are still radicalized terrorists. Despite this, Australia’s Human Rights Commission has urged the government to help repatriate those still in Syria. Critics, though, argue the women turned their backs on the country and should face the consequences and be barred from returning.
The arrivals come less than three weeks after an earlier group of four women and nine children flew home to a far harsher reception. Three of those women were arrested and charged on arrival, including a mother and daughter, Kawsar Ahmed and Zeinab Ahmed, accused of having kept a Yazidi woman as a slave, and Janai Safar, charged with being a member of a terrorist organization and entering a declared terrorist area. All three remain in custody.
