A group of Australian women and children with links to Islamic State has returned to Sydney and Melbourne after being stranded for years in a Syrian camp. A plane carrying two women and their children landed in Melbourne just after 16:30 local time on Tuesday, and a second plane carrying four women and their children landed in Sydney about an hour later.
The six women and nine children are understood to be the last Australians in the al-Roj camp in north-east Syria, where families of IS fighters have been held since 2019. The group reportedly left the camp on Thursday and boarded planes to Australia on Monday in Damascus, completing a return that authorities had been preparing for since 2014.
The landing brought back into Australia a group that now faces a difficult legal and political reckoning. Some of the women may face charges over their decision to travel to Syria about a decade ago, and one woman has been banned from returning to Australia for two years on national security grounds. Earlier in May, three of four Australian women who came home with nine children were arrested and charged with offences including crimes against humanity and joining IS.
Australian media have reported that the women who arrived on Tuesday include Kirsty Rosse-Emile, Nesrine Zahab, Sumaya Zahab and Aminah Zahab. One of them, Rosse-Emile, has previously said she was not given a choice, while Zahab has said she was tricked into travelling to Syria by her cousin, IS recruiter Muhammad Zahab. Their accounts sit uneasily beside the government’s position, which has made clear it did not help bring them back and will not do so again for others in the same position.
That hard line was underscored by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, who said the government “has not and will not provide any assistance to this group”. He also said they were people who made the horrific choice to join a dangerous terrorist organisation and place their children in an unspeakable situation, while warning that any members of the cohort who committed crimes can expect to face the full force of the law. The return of the women and children follows the 7 May arrival of four women and nine children from the same camp, a trip that ended with three of the women being arrested and charged with offences including crimes against humanity and entering and remaining in a declared conflict zone.
The latest arrivals leave one woman still in Syria, understood to have decided to keep her child with her. The child is an Australian citizen with a passport and is not barred from coming home, a detail that leaves open the question of whether that family separation will hold. For now, the return of the last Australians from al-Roj closes a chapter that began with travel to Syria about a decade ago and now shifts the story to courtrooms, police interviews and the government’s next decisions about who is charged, who is monitored and who remains free.
