1 of 3 | Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he will not allow Australians who moved to Syria to join an ISIS caliphate repatriate to Australia, even though they are mostly women and children and didn’t choose to travel there. File Photo by Bianca De Marchi/EPA
A group of Australian women and children who moved to Syria in support of the Islamic State and are now stuck in refugee camps is trying to return, and the Australian government has said no.
There are 34 women and children in the Al-Roj detention camp that houses ISIS militants and their families with the goal of returning to Australia via Damascus. But Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told Australian broadcaster ABC that the government won’t allow them back.
“If you make your bed, you lie in it,” Albanese said.
Albanese was asked if the people had Australian passports, but he said he couldn’t confirm anything about them.
“What I can say is that we’re providing absolutely no support and we are not repatriating people,” Albanese told ABC Radio. “We have no sympathy, frankly, for people who travelled overseas in order to participate in what was an attempt to establish a caliphate to undermine, destroy our way of life.”
Most of the women were married to ISIS fighters who were captured or killed, ABC reported.
Some of them have told ABC they were forced to travel to Syria and that many of the children in the camps were born there.
The 34 were sent to Damascus to return home, but Syrian authorities turned them back.
Rashid Omar, a camp official, told CNN that two male relatives of the families had asked that their relatives be sent home. The men said they had coordinated with Syrian authorities to transport the families. Omar said he saw the temporary Australian passports which the men said were issued to the families.
“Based on this, we agreed and transported them by bus. However, shortly after leaving, Damascus informed us that there are no coordination made so they had to turn back to the camp,” Omar said. Camp officials “don’t understand why they were sent back despite already holding temporary Australian passports,” he said.
Thousands of citizens of the United States, Australia and Britain have been trapped in detention camps since the fall of Syria five years ago. NGOs like Amnesty International have warned that the camps are experiencing human rights abuses. They say many of the detainees were trafficked to ISIS or born in the caliphate. They have faced torture, gender-based violence, forced disappearance and other atrocities, CNN reported.
“The autonomous authorities have committed the war crimes of torture and cruel treatment, and likely committed the war crime of murder,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International secretary general, in a statement. “Children, women and men held in these detention camps and facilities suffer shocking cruelty and violence. The U.S. government has played a central role in the creation and maintenance of this system in which hundreds have died preventable deaths, and must play a role in changing it.”
In 2019 and 2022, Australia repatriated groups of women and children with links to ISIS from Syrian refugee camps. Last year, two Australian women and four children escaped Syria on their own and returned home without support from Australian authorities, ABC reported. But in a statement, an Australian government spokesperson said it “is not and will not repatriate people from Syria,” CNN reported.
“Our security agencies have been monitoring — and continue to monitor — the situation in Syria to ensure they are prepared for any Australians seeking to return to Australia,” the spokesperson said. “People in this cohort need to know that if they have committed a crime and if they return to Australia they will be met with the full force of the law.”
Save the Children has worked to try to bring the families home in the past but are not involved in the current effort.
“These innocent children have already lost years of their childhood and deserve the chance to rebuild their lives in safety at home and to reintegrate into the Australian way of life,” Save the Children Australia CEO Mat Tinkler said in a statement to CNN.
The organization sued the Australian government to force it to accept the detainees, but lost the suit.
Hakmiyeh Ibrahim, director of the Al-Roj camp, has urged all foreign governments to repatriate their citizens. She told ABC that the children are growing up hearing about “dangerous ideologies” in the camp.
“If they are taken away from this community, perhaps [they can enter] rehabilitation programs and specialized centers, especially for children,” she said.
Albanese said it was “unfortunate” that children were in the camps, but still said the families won’t get support from Australia.
