After a failed attempt and months of waiting for their next opportunity, four women and nine children will tonight land in Sydney and Melbourne, after almost seven years in a Syrian detention camp.
Their journey has been shrouded in secrecy and political debate has swirled around the return of the so-called ‘ISIS brides’, who Labor ministers and the prime minister have repeatedly, publicly condemned for their involvement with ISIS fighters.
Authorities have been preparing for their return for years, with the federal government acutely aware of its limitations in preventing Australian citizens from returning home.
Yesterday, the federal government received official notification that the flights were booked, and federal police swiftly confirmed some of the cohort would face charges once in Australia.
Despite opposition accusations that Labor facilitated the return, the government insists it has not assisted the group, other than to fulfil its legal obligation of supplying passports.
Former Home Affairs boss Mike Pezzullo, who oversaw the repatriation of 23 women and children from Syria under the Morrison and Albanese governments, describes their home journey as an “inevitability”.
So, how did they get out? And what happens next?
Mike Pezzullo says the group’s return to Australia was “inevitable” (ABC News: Nick Haggarty)
A journey to Syria
The women returning to Australia are Kawsar Abbas, Zeinab Ahmed, Zahra Ahmed and Janain Safar.
They are from the same extended family and were escorted out of Al Roj a fortnight ago by two male family members.
They were part of a broader group of 34 women and children living in Al Roj, who made it out of the camp in January after securing Australian passports.
About 2,000 women and children live in Al-Roj. (ABC News: Baderkhan Ahmad)
The meticulous plan to extract them from Syria, led by advocates, was quickly foiled when Kurdish authorities let slip that the group had left the camp, alerting international media.
No sooner than they had made it out of Kurdish-controlled territory, Syrian officials turned them around.
No ‘legal barrier’ blocking ISIS-linked families returning to Australia
The interception fuelled speculation that the Australian government asked Syrian authorities to delay the cohort while it scrambled to impose a Temporary Exclusion Order against one of the women.
In response, advocates, lawyers and family members travelled to Damascus for crisis talks with Syrian officials, where they argued the cohort were Australian citizens, had travel documents, and could not be legally blocked from returning to Australia — regardless of the federal government’s rhetoric that they were “not welcome”.
The Coalition argued the issuing of Australian passports for the group — who are citizens — amounts to a repatriation, while Labor said it performed the legal bare minimum required of any government.
Since the fall of Islamic State in 2019, at least 70 foreign fighters, women and children have returned from Syria.
Once upon a time, there was a repatriation plan
In 2019, the Morrison government repatriated a group of eight orphaned children and grandchildren of convicted ISIS terrorist Khaled Sharrouf.
“They can’t be held responsible for the crimes of their parents,” former prime minister Scott Morrison said at the time.
Scott Morrison raised concerns about the children’s welfare while serving as prime minister. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)
In 2022, upon the election of a Labor government, Australian officials travelled to Al Roj camp to collect DNA and biometric data as part of an official plan to repatriate the entire “ISIS” cohort.
In November that year, a group of four women and 13 children were repatriated by the Albanese government, which sparked outrage in western Sydney where the group was resettled.
Despite a push from senior Labor ministers, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese never wanted the group to return, viewing it as a political net loss, according to a senior departmental source.
His fears were confirmed by community backlash, though Labor remained publicly defiant, pointing to the 2019 Morrison repatriation and the national security advice issued by ASIO.
“One of the things that hasn’t been properly discussed is the risk to Australia if we do nothing,” then Home Affairs minister Clare O’Neil said at the time.
“The truth is we have a relatively large group of Australian children who would otherwise be growing up in a camp where a key influence on their life is violent ideology, and I don’t think that’s good for the country.”
Labor frontbencher Clare O’Neil previously said the children’s return was in Australia’s interest. (ABC News: Luke Stephenson)
It is widely acknowledged within security circles that the November 2022 cohort – made up mostly of children and women who themselves were children when they were married off to IS fighters — was deemed low risk.
The remaining 11 women and their 23 children were deemed a more complex cohort, which goes some way to explaining why they were left behind in the camp in 2022.
ASIO boss Mike Burgess said the cohort’s return would not shift the national terrorism threat level and he was “not concerned immediately by their return, but they will get our attention, as you’d expect”.
Security experts maintain it would be preferable, from a national security perspective, to monitor the cohort from within Australia, echoing the long-standing position of the US government, which last month expressed growing frustration at the Albanese government’s refusal to repatriate its citizens.
The path to passports
Another practical reason for the delay was the lengthy process required to secure passports for the children, which required DNA testing to establish citizenship by descent, given that most of them were born in Syria.
While the Department of Home Affairs would not reveal when passports were issued, the ABC has been told the documents were applied for late last year and issued in January.
Under Australian law, all citizens are entitled to a passport and can authorise any other person, regardless of relationship, to pick up a passport on their behalf, or on behalf of their children.
That is exactly what happened when Sydney doctor and community advocate Jamal Rifi picked up the documents and took them to Damascus in January.
Jamal Rifi helped deliver the group’s Australian passports. (ABC/Docker Media)
Mr Rifi told the ABC he travelled to Syria as a passport “delivery boy”.
“There is a firm of legal practitioners who provided their services pro bono; they made the application to renew some of the passports and obtain a new passport for those children,” he said.
“I paid for the cost for the citizenship by descent [for the children].”
The secret meeting at the centre of a conspiracy
Mr Rifi’s involvement in the extraction has been the subject of intense scrutiny, as the Coalition points to his involvement in a ‘Friends of Tony Burke’ re-election campaign for the Home Affairs minister, and a “secret” meeting between the pair and other advocates last July.
After years of hoping that Labor would follow through on its 2022 commitment to repatriate the entire Al Roj cohort, sources close to the women’s families say that prospect was firmly shot down in the meeting.
Save the Children CEO Mat Tinkler was in the room and said he left bitterly disappointed.
“We were still hoping [the women and children] would eventually be repatriated, but the minister made it very clear that would not be happening,” he said.
Living conditions are harsh inside the Al Roj refugee camp in Syria. (ABC News: Baderkhan Ahmad)
Mr Tinkler has strongly rejected assertions that Save the Children was involved in any effort to facilitate the group’s extraction from Syria.
Another attendee said even though Mr Burke officially refused to help the cohort, he did acknowledge the government could not stop them from applying for passports or returning to Australia, which is their legal right.
That concession planted a seed of hope — and led advocates to lawyer up.
‘We shouldn’t have waited’
Until that point, advocates had believed the only way out for the women and children was through government repatriation, as was the preference of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who govern the Al Roj camp.
But since the toppling of the Assad regime in late 2024, the SDF has lost control of much of Syria’s north-east as the new governing force Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) asserts its power.
The SDF’s loss of territory — and its depleting resources — has recently given way to a policy of allowing those with passports to leave the camp, as governments like Australia refuse to collect their citizens.
Thirdly, HTS’s capture of Damascus means those wishing to leave Syria no longer have to travel via Iraq, making the journey home simpler.
In other words, advocates felt it was time to act.
One of the family members involved in the group’s extraction told ABC that once advocates “figured out the law”, there was no stopping them from getting passports issued for the women and children.
“That’s been the big lesson here,” the source said.
“We shouldn’t have waited so long for the government. We should have done this earlier.
“Labor or Liberal, it didn’t matter who was in Parliament — they couldn’t have stopped us. And if they [the government] tried to block it, they knew we’d take them to court tomorrow and win.”
What to do with the group once they return?
Even as legal experts point out it would be unconstitutional to prevent citizens from returning, there is the question of what happens to the cohort once they set foot on Australian soil.
Despite the government’s tough assertions that the group will “face the full force of the law”, the reality is it won’t be up to politicians to determine whether police agencies press charges, or if courts record convictions.
The Australian Federal Police has confirmed some of the adult women will be charged, referencing terrorism-related offences, and crimes against humanity, including human trafficking.
Some will face continued investigation in Australia.
“Control orders” that allow authorities to impose monitoring conditions like curfews and ankle bracelets are also an option, though police would need to be satisfied that the women pose an imminent security risk.
Of the 29 Australian women and children who have been repatriated or returned on their own accord from Syrian camps, just one woman, Mariam Raad, who was repatriated in 2022, has been arrested.
She pleaded guilty to entering a terrorist-controlled area but did not record a conviction or serve jail time, after a court found she had been coerced by her ISIS-fighter husband.
The nine children in the cohort will undergo community integration programs, therapeutic support and countering violent extremism programs.