SYDNEY – Four women and 13 children were repatriated to Australia today, having languished for years in squalid Syrian detention camps after the downfall of the Islamic State (IS).
It was the first in a series of planned missions to bring back about 20 Australian women and 40 children – the wives, sons, and daughters of vanquished IS fighters – from the notorious al-Hol and Roj camps.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said the government weighed a “range of security, community and welfare factors”.
“The decision to repatriate these women and their children was informed by individual assessments following detailed work by national security agencies,” she said in a statement after the 17 landed in Sydney.
The repatriations are a politically contentious issue in Australia, with the former conservative government declaring the group posed a security threat.
O’Neil said the women could be prosecuted in Australia if counter-terror officers found they were involved in illegal activities while in Syria.
Human Rights Watch researcher Sophie McNeill said it was a “long overdue step”.
“For years, the Australian government has abandoned its nationals to horrific conditions in locked camps in northeast Syria,” McNeill said.
“Australia can play a leadership role on counterterrorism through these orderly repatriations of its nationals, most of them children who never chose to live under ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.”
The Australian women and children have lived in the al-Hol and Roj detention camps in Kurdish-controlled northeastern Syria since the 2019 collapse of the IS “caliphate”. – AFP, October 29, 2022
