In the wake of three Australian women linked to the Islamic State (IS) group being arrested upon arriving home last week, the initial reaction from inside the Syrian refugee camp where they had lived for years has been one of anger and frustration.<\/p>\n
After IS’s so-called caliphate was defeated in 2019 by a US-led coalition, many foreign-born wives and their children were taken to Syrian camps and have remained there ever since.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One woman who is still at Al Roj, in the north-eastern tip of Kurdish-controlled Syria, said it was “not good” that Australia arrested the women, whom she called “our sisters”.<\/p>\n
“What do they want with women and kids?” Um Shamel asked.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“These little kids need [their] mama.”<\/p>\n
Four women and nine children arrived in Melbourne and Sydney last week, after boarding flights from the Middle East. Three of the women were arrested soon after landing.<\/p>\n
Kawsar Ahmad and Zeinab Ahmad have both been charged with offences relating to the use of a slave. Ms Ahmad was also charged with possessing a slave and with slave trading.<\/p>\n
Another woman, Janai Safar, was charged with travelling to a declared terrorist area and being a member of a terrorist organisation.<\/p>\n
Camp administrators at Al Roj have described how the views of some of the Australians still in the camp have hardened over time.<\/p>\n
Thousands of people, many of them foreigners, live in squalid conditions.<\/p>\n
“We live very hard ways,” Ms Shamel said.<\/p>\n
But she believed the remaining Australians in Syria would delay or reconsider trying to travel home after watching news of the arrests on television.<\/p>\n
“They won’t go,” she said.<\/p>\n
Ms Shamel, who said she was from Germany and hoped to return home someday after seven years in Syria, argued that just because the women were Muslim, it did not mean they were radicalised members of the failed Islamic State.<\/p>\n
She also said it was “not normal’ for children to be separated from their mothers, given many of their fathers were either dead or in jail, potentially facing execution.<\/p>\n
Read more on this story:Twenty-one Australians remain in camp\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of the remaining Australian women in the camp said she did not have any information about when or if the others might try to leave Al Roj.<\/p>\n
In the past, some of the Australian women have said they had legal advice saying it would not be wise to detail how they arrived in Syria or their experiences in camps such as Al Roj.<\/p>\n
Camp administrator Hakmiyeh Ibrahim said most of the Australian families seemed quite “open-minded”, but added there were “one or two families that are different from the others”.<\/p>\n
“Some really are closed, they are extremists \u2014 it shows, we can notice their ideology,” she told the ABC.<\/p>\n
Ms Ibrahim said those families had isolated themselves\u00a0from the camp community, rarely interacting with other families or camp officials.<\/p>\n
She said there were seven Australian women and 14 children remaining in Al Roj, and noted some had been trying to contact their families after the first group left last week.<\/p>\n
“We have no idea when the Australians will leave the camp,” she said.<\/p>\n
“Most families have passports, and no-one is barred from travelling \u2014 since it all started, all families have their passports.”<\/p>\n
Citizens of several European countries remain in camps such as Al Roj, with fierce political debates erupting across the continent about their repatriation.<\/p>\n
In March 2021, the European Parliament voted in favour of bringing children home from Syria.<\/p>\n
‘The camp is staying open’<\/p>\n
Camp officials said there were roughly 2,300 people remaining in Al Roj camp, or around 780 families.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Australians who departed in April are the only residents to have left so far in 2026.<\/p>\n
The future of Al Roj continues to be called into question, given frequent criticism of the state of the facility and the recent closure of another camp for families and associates of IS fighters in recent months.<\/p>\n
Al Hol camp, south of Al Roj, had been managed by Kurdish authorities for the best part of a decade before Syrian government forces swept through the area earlier this year and seized control.<\/p>\n
Some Australian families had previously lived in Al Hol, as far back as 2019, when they spoke to the ABC’s Four Corners from there.<\/p>\n
The Syrian government has since closed Al Hol, wanting to transfer people living there to a new camp near Aleppo in Syria’s north-west.<\/p>\n
“We don’t know whether families will be moved to another camp. For now, the camp is staying open,” Ms Ibrahim said.<\/p>\n
Loading…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the wake of three Australian women linked to the Islamic State (IS) group being arrested upon arriving…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112915,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[1646,3538,1648,2219,786,81,95,39138],"class_list":{"0":"post-112914","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-syria","8":"tag-al-roj","9":"tag-arrest","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-german","12":"tag-isis-brides","13":"tag-politics","14":"tag-syria","15":"tag-syrian-camp"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116571112903368382","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}